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Geeky April Fools' Day Prank Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "April 1st is the ultimate holiday for a geek — a little hands-on DIY, a little hacking and a lot of sub-par humor. Popular Mechanics and Instructables have teamed up for five pranks you can build in the office (including a stripped-down version of Gizmodo's CES TV blackout), while Wired has its top 10 practical jokes for nerds, Lifehacker is toning it down with 10 harmless geek pranks, and Slate gets you ready for the receiving end with an April Fools' defense kit. What's your best prank?" Be safe, head for the bunker on 4/1 and just assume everything you hear is a lie. Everything.
Be safe, head for the bunker on 4/1 and just assume everything you hear is a lie. Everything.
Does that mean there *won't* be cake?
Dammit.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
*Significant other rolls over and looks deeply into your eyes*
"I love you."
*Thinks for a moment* "just assume everything you hear is a lie. Everything."
"I KNEW IT! LIAR!".
(speakers on, detach mouse for best effect).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Feh.
I'm looking for "10 spectacularly fatal geek pranks".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I once announced to our department that because black toner was so expensive, we were switching our printers to black paper and white toner. I put a sign next to the printer saying to only put black paper in the printer. Someone actually bit, and asked me in all seriousness where in the store cupboard the black paper was.
On another occasion I sent an email to a stats software mailing list saying I'd written a package to implement not the Normal distribution, but the Paranormal distribution. Its mean value was the number you were just thinking of.
This was way back in high school, but I'm fairly certain it will work well in any large, densely-populated building.
1) choose the victim building
2) get 3 pigs
3) paint very prominent digits -- '1', '2', and '4' -- on the pigs
4) release pigs in building selected in step 1
Watching folks round up the 3 pigs is fun enough. But it's hilarious to watch the long, futile search for pig #3.
I like basketball!!1!
I sneak in at night and paint my neighbor's cubicle pink, decorate with construction paper hearts, and tie a real pony to his desk. He always comes in the next morning and say "OMG PONIES!"
Never gets old.
What's your best prank?
Tricking the editors into posting really crappy april-fools stories each year on the 1st. I've been doing it for almost 10 years straight and they still haven't caught on.
Please help metamoderate.
Showed up for work on time, clean-shaven and in nice clothes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I heard that April Fools Day was cancelled this year.
For people who have more electronics knowledge than I have:
Make a circuit that beeps every 30 seconds or so. Add a photoresistor that turns on and off the beeping, so it beeps when it's dark. Put in victim's bedroom.
Laugh at the though that when they go to bed, it will start beeping, frequently and quietly enough to be annoying, but infrequently enough that it's hard to find. But when they turn the lights back on... the beeping stops!
Replacing a co-worker's desktop wallpaper with a screenshot of the red and white "Windows has shut down your Active Desktop... did you recently add a new program?" error message is always good for some juvenile yucks - especially if it's the computer of a real "power user".
No matter how old we get, guys are always suckers for sophomoric humor - I think it's genetic.
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
Once when I was still a newbie to slashdot, back in 1998 if I'm not mistaken. I read a story of bill gates adopting gifted kids, and wiring probes directly to there brain in the hopes of finding a successor. I believed it hook line and sinker and forwarded it to every co-worker. Suffice it to say I still get mocked to this day about 'Cris's Cranial Clicker' I think they even made me one out of a bowl and some silly string. So thank you slashdot, I will nto be here tomorrow
This one is especially good if you have a roommate:
Pop the M and N keys off of their keyboard and switch them around. Then, download a keyboard remapper and remap the M and N keys so that they correspond with the new arrangement (ie, the M key gives you an M, and the N key gives you an N, but their positions are switched). Pop the M and N keys off of your keyboard and switch them as well, but don't remap them.
After repeatedly mistyping (nistypimg?) things, they'll take a good long look at their own keyboard and then have a look at yours, just to compare (and of course, you've anticipated this and switched your own keys around too). With any luck, they'll be convinced they're going crazy.
That implies that it's worth coming to the other 364 days.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Moral of the story:
1) Get it in as early as possible: chances are by the end of the day they probably are more suspicious.
2) Know your victim: my father knew how much I hate getting up early in the morning, he would find it really hard to believe I would wake up before I had to.
3) Make it plausable: We all have at some point screwed up in setting our alarms, the scenario I created could have very well actually happened. Be mindful of details.
4) Don't be cruel: Let them in on it after it is apparent they fell for it before they start really acting on what you fooled them with. Don't make them afraid for their life or anything crazy like that.
My father is a smart man that isn't easily deceived, I have spent many years refining my technique.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
April, 2003. I was living in a large tent, on the Persian Gulf coast, in northern Kuwait. I returned to my cot after a hard days work, where I was greeted by a fake plastic snake. I was not surprised, due to the fact I noticed Spc Harris fighting laughter while keeping a watchful eye on me as I entered the tent.
I am one for vengence, so my mind immediately began cooking up a scheme. The roof of the tent was made of a double layer of thick canvas material. It was sloped, at about a 45 degree angle. Harris slept with his head pointed towards the side wall, and feet pointing towards the center of the tent.
I took my trusty knife one afternoon, and cut a slit in the bottom layer of canvas, above Harris' head, on the roof of the tent. I left the slit there, in plain sight, for two weeks thinking he would be suspicious of it at first. After the two weeks were up, I constructed a fairly large fake spider out of electrical tape, pipe cleaners and black paint. I used fishing line for it's silk. I put the spider in the roof of the tent, slightly past the slit I had cut. I then ran the fishing line over the slit, out and down the side of the tent, and finally back into the tent near my cot.>/p>
That night after lights out, as Harris layed on his cot, watching a movie on his portable DVD player, I put my plan into action. I pulled slightly on the fishing line, causing the spider to move over and fall through the slit. I then slowly let out slack, causing my home-made monster to descend on it's web. The alignment couldn't have been more perfect, because the spider descended into the space between the portable movie screen, and Harris' face. Harris' reaction was priceless, too. Too scared to scream, he jumped from his cot, flung the DVD player across the room, knocked over a bunch of his crap, and wound up sprawled across the floor babbling "holy shit holy shit". The lights in the tent then went back on, and there was much laughter.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I once worked at a manufacturing company, and one of the products they made was called the 5100. They needed to replace it, and there was a big debate over whether to make a software package that could run on a standard laptop, or to make another standalone device (the 5200). In the end they decided to make the standalone 5200. One of my coworkers, we'll just call him B, was strongly in favor of doing the standalone 5200; he was guy who would do the software development for the 5200, it was his baby.
Well, I brought my laptop to work (it was a TRS-80 Model 102 if you care). In the text editor, I made a banner that spelled out "5200" in asterisks or something. I went into the lab, and pushed B's 5200 prototype to the back of his work area, and set up my laptop in its spot, turned on and showing the "5200" banner. Then I went and found B and innocently asked if he would show me the 5200 prototype. Actually, I think he was amused by the gag as well.
Right after I was hired there, another of my co-workers tried to convince me that they had this really cool super-ELIZA program that was actually intelligent. He sat me down in front of a dumb terminal to try it out. I figured right away, correctly, that they had just set up two terminals and that somewhere else in the building, some human was impersonating ELIZA, so I tried to ask questions that would be easy for a computer to answer but hard for a human ("What's the square root of 12345?"). If only he'd had the foresight to keep a scientific calculator close at hand.
Neither of these were on April 1. Why limit this sort of fun to one day per year?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I once deleted my roommate's MBR on his hard drive. It was pretty funny, until he started punching me. In hindsight, it's funny from a geek standpoint and not a College Jock standpoint.
One year I sent an email to everyone telling them that because of continuing complaints about the line quality of the phones, a company was coming in to clean the phone lines. I advised everyone that they should place a tissue over the mouthpiece and earpiece of the phones, as they would be blowing compressed air through the phones lines, and dust could be ejected through the handsets. It was fun walking around at the end of the day to count up the number of people with the handsets covered with tissues.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
We simply popped off the "m" and the "n" keys and switched them, without remapping. He was not the most tech-savvy, and typed using his two index fingers.
Turns out he has a web demo to perform, and trying to log in with credentials "techmology"... The long and the short of it, the joke never got old, and we frequently spoke in his presence as "Good day, gentlenem. Lumch plams?"
He also got mad at his keyboard, figured what's what, and used a pencil to pop the keys off. Jammed it in there real good. Broke the laptop keyboard. Blamed it on us. Then a couple of weeks later we all go out for lunch to meet another of his friends. He (the sales guy) gets so animated in describing the funny prank that he forgets we're right beside him, and says how he just jammed the pencil in there and broke the keyboard. Then with a dumb grin on his face, stops at 3/4 of the sentence and looks at us. It was priceless!
Needless to say, we were all good friends and had a good laugh about it.
I like the fridge door and the fake "filled your cube/office with packing peanuts", but the others didn't really appeal to me much.
The two that I've done for which I am most proud:
As the webmaster of a small dotcom a few years ago, I mocked up a fake This site has been closed by the federal government on suspicion of aiding and abeding terrorism. I then changed the INTERNAL DNS entries so that although the outside customers got our normal site, our employees got the "shutdown" one. There was a good 5 minutes of confusion and near bowel movements before someone realized the date (04/01)
However, the best and most geeky prank I ever played involved one of those Staples "Easy Button"s. I had a co-worker who had one at his desk. Every now and then (couple times a week) someone would get the urge to press it. I bought an Easy Button at the local Staples, and a small "record 20 seconds of digital audio" circuit boards at Radio Shack. I then dremmeled the hell out of the inside of the Easy button till I could make the Radio Shack board fit in and replace the original, and drilled a small hole for a paperclip so I could hit the record button. I also disconnected the small crappy speaker from the Radio Shack board and wired it into the one already in the Easy Button. It was a really tight fit, and it took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually had a "Please do not press this button again" Button.
I swapped out the button for his, and just waited till someone hit it. I really got a priceless reaction, though the fact that I had used my own voice precluded any attempt to feign innocense. Still, the button became the hit of the office... I showed them how to record other stuff and they kept changing it and waiting for others to come hit it. Finally, it settled down on "Hurry UP!!!" That co-worker has since left the company, but he has the button with him to this day.
The Digital Sorceress
What keeps the fiddler on the roof. TRADITION!
Personally, I look forward to April 1st.
Rather than ignore the user input, have the prompt after the user selects "N" say:
You chose Now.
Starting countdown: NOW!
10...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
My boss has just today returned from five weeks of holiday, so we've figured he's not really back into "work mode" yet. So we've decided that all 15 or so of us are going to hand in our resignations tomorrow, and see how many he has to read before he realises he's been had.
If this plan backfires, I promise I'll log on from the unemployment office and let you all know...
We rewired the computer lab so that all the computers were wired through one of two clappers, which were on extension cords, hidden up inside the lowered ceiling beside a vent. We left one clapper turned on and one turned off and both of them on the most sensitive setting. So any time there was much of a noise, half the computers in the lab would suddenly shut off, and the other half would simultaneously turn on, but there was no way to have more than half of them on at a time, and which half was on kept changing based on random noises in the lab. Teachers who taught computer classes gave up early, but half the lab was for kids on study hall, etc, and no one really warned them, so a hellacious amount of work was lost that day when people's computers suddenly turned off. They'd swear for a while, try to turn it back on, give up, and move to one of the other computers that was now on... repeat process. Of course, that wouldn't work these days, because most computers don't start themselves up when the power comes back on, but these had hard power switches, so simultaneously half the computers would go dark and the others would emit a chorus of Mac startup sounds.
We also put some annoyance programs on them, like a program called "boing" that made your mouse pointer behave, in relationship to how it should behave, as if it were attached to the actual mouse location by a spring. We also installed a background program that would make computers randomly, at various times, start singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall." Except that we used "99,999 bottles of beer on the wall." In a really painful early 1990's Macintosh voice.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I know, but February 29th was great!
Man, 366 day years, no wonder you're having problems.
I heard that he even had a February 29 this year. It must be part of some government energy savings plan.