Stupid PC tricks
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
When I was in High School I had acquired a computer case, which we filled with non-functional parts and broken monitor almost exactly like the ones used in the labs. We snuck into the lab and hid one of the brand new computers, and layed out our "sacrifice" on a table. We then waited for the ever cool and collected lab manager to round the corner to the lab. On our lookouts signal we started beating on the computer with hammers, and cutting wires at randome. The lab manager immediatly though we had destroyed a perfectly good computer and started screaming "What are you doing?!?!". The designated camera guy took a Polaroid picture, handed it to her and we all left. Last I heard the picture still hangs in her office.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I used to work for Compaq tech support. In training one day, we were instructed to mess up the machine somehow, then move to another machine and try to find and fix what somebody else did. Me and the guy on the opposite side of the table swapped monitor cables. It was hilarious because the two people working on those machines were basically trying the same things, so it took them forever to figure it out. They were so confused. I've dumped shortcuts to every file in the Windows directory in startup... I've set a screen shot of the desktop as a wallpaper and then removed all icons but My Computer... I've changed all the major file associations to other apps... I've move peoples email storage directories... I've changed the DOS prompt to strange messages... I've changed the 95/98 syslogo to things like a blue screen screen shots... I've edited wallpapers to have a wierd error message box... I've done lots of mean stuff. The computer is a great way to mess with people. But never anything that couldn't be un-done, that's just evil.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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I once found a description and an example for how to change HP laser printer's status text over the network. It uses some proprietary set of special commands which let you interact with the printer if you send them over the network. There was a C# example, so I edited it and compiled a small console application which could send random status messages (from an array, I think) or accept a message as a program argument and send it over to our team's laser printer - we had a HP LaserJet, don't remember which model exactly, they have a LED screen. Imagine how confused people were when they saw the printer complaining about "RADIATION LEAK" or "WATER IN FEEDER". :laugh: Radiation leak is my personal favorite. My manager even called a few fellow programmers to take a look at it - I was one of them. Of course I played dumb and was as much confused as the rest of my team.
Kind regards, Pawel Krakowiak
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
We once had a really uptight prudish manager. We all worked in a big one room open office. So we decided it would be neat to pepper her sound theme with fart WAVs. That was a fun day. :laugh: Not too long ago, there was a blonde that worked in accounting that would come up to visit on occation. She was trying to quit smoking. So I wrote a little dummy app that would show progress and then display some chemical stats, and we rigged up a breathalizer looking thing to one of our machines and told her that it could detect cigarette breath so she couldn't lie to us about smoking. To this day she still thinks it was real, I think she actually quit smoking too.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Back in the 80's we got a couple of cards that generated a rather robotic sounding voice from text input. I installed one in a coworker's computer and had it say something like "Help me, I'm stuck in here" when he booted. Of course no one else was ever around when it happened and he couldn't make it happen again. Just like a sitcom.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I wrote a program that hook the keyboard input and would play a specific sound whenever a certain key or key combinations were entered. That has served me more than once...
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
At one of my previous jobs one of my co-workers brought in his spiffy Apple Laptop. Coincidentally, we had just received wireless mice with the tiny usb transmitters. The rear of his machine was facing me and easily accessible, so when we was away from his machine for a moment I plugged it into one of his USB ports. When he returned he was none the wiser. Then when he got back to work I inconspicuously would hang out behind is his chair and randomly whenever he moved his cursor over a button, I would swipe the wireless mouse I was holding a little causing his cursor to drift a bit just off of the button causing him to click in a blank space. This had him going for several minutes since I didn't do it every time. It was a great hoot when he finally got wise that something was up and turned around to see me grinning widely. :D
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Once, back in the MS-DOS days (I am dating myself now), I changed a co-workers command prompt using the Prompt command. Basically, I made it so that his command prompt was: General Failure reading drive C: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nore I forget the exact text now, but I made it look exactly like the old error message. I even put in the $N character combination where the drive letter went, so that no matter what drive he switched to, it would look like it had an error reading it. What was funny was when he typed, R, and it came back with: "Bad command or filename" and he still did not catch on.:laugh: Eventually he rebooted the machine (I was not cruel enough to actually change his Autoexec.bat file), and of course, it went back to normal.
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
Tom Delany wrote:
WE ARE DYSLEXIC OF BORG. Refutance is systile. Your a$$ will be laminated.
Awesome :cool:.
Software Zen:
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
These were on X-windows terminals, but in the same spirit. Once you know the display ID they tend to be pretty open, so I got the ID for someone down the hall... 1) Turn screen black after 1 second of inactivity. 2) (later same day) Turn key-click volume from zero to full. As soon as I hit return the office was filled with CLACK CLACK CLACK (pause) CLACK CLACK (longer pause)... Although it's untraceable the victim immediately showed up at my door for some reason. :)
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
When I got caught doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing at work, (I was 17 and very stupid) I sabotaged the Wang VS100a generation (boot) file. I replaced the login procedure with a procedure that called up a screen with 'the finger' on it. When people went to turn on their termianls the next day? No login screens, just the finger. I heard it took three days to fix it and they lost $70,000 in income. I don't do that anymore. ____________________________________________________________________________ "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams --
Shohom67
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When I got caught doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing at work, (I was 17 and very stupid) I sabotaged the Wang VS100a generation (boot) file. I replaced the login procedure with a procedure that called up a screen with 'the finger' on it. When people went to turn on their termianls the next day? No login screens, just the finger. I heard it took three days to fix it and they lost $70,000 in income. I don't do that anymore. ____________________________________________________________________________ "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams --
Shohom67
You're really lucky they didn't sue you for $70k. Now days they probably would.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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You're really lucky they didn't sue you for $70k. Now days they probably would.
Try code model generation tools at BoneSoft.com.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I actually play pranks like that all the time. I took a screenshot of a coworkers desktop, turned it upside down then set it as his desktop background. The finishing touch was to then hide his icons and taskbar. I changed another coworkers graphics driver settings to turn his screen a nice shade of purple. Then after he had finally figured it out, I played with his monitor cord till I got the same shade of purple. He was sure I had done the same thing, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't fix it the same way. I also wrote a simple program that creates an image of a smiley whenever you click anywhere on the screen. The smiley then bounces around the screen. It is impossible to close without a ctrl-alt-del, so less computer literate users soon end up with a screen full of bouncing smileys. I then took the liberty of putting the exe in everyones startup. Much fun was had by all. When Cthulhu Calls, he calls 1-800-Collect.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I once discovered a registry hack in WinNT which allows you to re-map keyboard keys. For April Fools day, I swapped a colleague's "N" & "M" keys in the registry, then popped out the physical keys on his keyboard and swapped them round. Being a touch-typer, he kept typing the wrong keys, but when he looked at the keyboard it looked like the keys were correct. He thought he was going dyslexic.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Maybe 10 years ago now (showing my age) - I was evaluating MS Systems Management Server for the company I worked for. I discovered the remote desktop assistance feature. ;) Cut a long story short - I installed the client on a machine in the office next door while everyone was at lunch. When they came back from lunch I sat in my office randomly taking control of the mouse and opening/closing applications on the desktop. I could hear lots of discussion about a possible virus until I opened Notepad and type "No virus - it's me!". I just about escaped with my life that day.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Back when DOS 2.0 was released I worked in a ComputerLand store to support the sales team (technically). I learned how to use the DOS debug editor to modify error messages in COMMAND.COM. So instead of displaying "Invalid DOS command" at the C prompt, DOS would display my replacement strings, like "Try again stupid". Since sales people rarely typed DOS commands correctly, I could count on a good laugh. One day I (ok I was young at the time) used replacement strings that included a bit of profanity, which were discovered by a sales person giving a demo to a customer. I found other ways to amuse myself after that.
John Ward
I never make the same mistake twice...I'm too busy making new ones!
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
We did this desktop trick too, only with an error message on it. Swapping cables between 2 colleagues' monitors can be fun too. My favourite though is when I changed a boot.ini to require a selection between some funny/non-existing OSes.
--------------- don't P A N I C
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A somewhat related hack, I piped a random file into the sound card device on my friends linux box, nice modem dialup ish sound for a couple minutes.
Once upon a job, I changed the script we used to check in source code changes so that it executed a sound file that was a toilet flushing. Needless to say at certain points in our development lifecycle you could hear the sound of frequently flushing toilets from various cubicles. :-D