h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The German computer magazine c't is famous for their april fool's jokes. Back in 1989 (I think) they came up with my all time favourite.

At that time a swedish standard for maximum monitor radiation was new and nobody knew whether their monitor was satisfying that standard. Now c't claimed to have found a method to measure monitor radiaton with simple means at home. You had to stick a formatted 5 1/4" floppy disk on your monitor, *exactly* centered of course, and run a program which generated random images for a minute or so. Then the floppy had to be inserted in the disk drive and a second program had to be run, which supposedly counted the number of faulty sectors (destroyed by the monitor radiation) on the disk and with this computed the radiation level of the monitor. You could even tell the programm whether you had a 360K or rather a 1.2M floppy. Of course, all the second program did was displaying 'April, April' on the monitor.

Very funny.

Indeed, the major joke were the letters to the editor in the next issue of c't. Someone claimed the second program was defective since it displayed only the aforementiond message and otherwise did nothing. Another reader said the whole method wasn't applicable to his computer since he only had a 3.5" floppy drive and asked if he could adapt the programs so that the whole procedure worked on his computer as well. He even got a reply from yet another reader who said that it wouldn't probably work at all with 3.5" floppies because, unlike the older 5 1/4" floppies, the shutter and other parts of the envelope are made of metal and that would surely spoil the measurement.

One of the easiest (and arguably most effective) computer tricks to set up is this. It will only work if you are in an office (or similar) where the computers are set up so that one is opposite another on the same desk - ie if the computers weren't there, you'd be looking straight at the person opposite you.
All you do is swap either the keyboards or monitors between two computers that are back-to-back - but you *don't* unplug them. So if you swap keyboards, the keyboard you have is now plugged into the computer on the other side of the desk, and vice versa. When the person opposite you types something, nothing comes up. Until you start typing...

That's evil... I like it!

Changing the keyboard settings to use the "Dvorak" layout is also a good prank. Most people don't know that the keyboard layouts can be switched at all, and the only keys that are common between the Dvorak and standard "Qwerty" layout are "a" and "m," so people spend a lot of time typing gibberish and running virus-checks.

Heh heh heh heh...

Same gag as the keyboard one - change the mouses / mice / meeses over!

BBS

Windows has a setting to set the mouse up for left-handed users, swapping the buttons over. That's evil to do to someone who's right-handed.

In Linux (and any other UN*X system running XFree86 as the windowing system), you could (if you have root access to the system) edit XF86Config to remap all the mouse buttons - thus if it's a wheelmouse, you could remap button 4 (scroll up) to be button 1 (primary click) and so forth.

Super evil!

Years ago we were using a certain ISP that has a distinctive "Welcome" and "Goodbye" greeting. On April Fools Day, I set the "Goodbye" to a .wav that had a man's ominous voice warning of complete failure and the computer's imminent
destruction. I couldn't keep a straight face when my daughter signed off the service and jumped away from the machine in horror. Okay...so I am a mean mom. But it was fair turnaround for putting an elastic around the water sprayer on the kitchen sink. I turn the water on that morming and got soaked! Besides, she claims she doesn't even remember me doing it.

I really like that one... you're right, it was just revenge!

Hehehe I like that one! I think I'll pull it on my brother. I don't think I'll wait 'till April Fool's Day though!

there's also the old classic:

1. take a screenshot of the desktop when nothing is running(you can do this by clicking on the desktop and pressing ctrl+alt+print screen)
2. paste it into Paintbrush or some other graphics program(preferably one that uses bitmaps, so you can easily edit it) and save.
3. set as wallpaper centered(in Paint, this is an option under File)
4. right-click on desktop and go to properties. go to the "effects" tab and check "hide icons when desktop is veiwed as web page" then go to the "web" tab and check "veiw my active desktop as a web page"
5. right click on the taskbar(thats the one with the start menu) and go to properties. check "autohide". then resize the taskbar to the absolute minimum size.
6. now click on the desktop.
the effect? when they try to open anything, nothing happens. for an added touch, you can edit the screenshot in Paint so that there is an error message in the center of the screen. be creative.

another one is that with some computers, the mouse options have something where you can choose the orientation, so that if you are more comfortable holding the mouse at, say, 32 degrees, you can. i'm sure i don't need to describe what you can do with that. or you can set the curser icon to look like the "busy" one. just play around with the mouse settings. there's endles stuff you can do with it.

That "old classic" is wonderfully devious. Love it. I don't know anyone I can pull it on, but I love it

This one isn't quite that good, but...

try changing most of the Control Panel settings (Ex: Printer, Scanner, Background, Screensaver*...)


*Note that the Background n' Screensaver will espically shock them if it's a.... dirty image...

A nice variation would be, if you have access to a suitable compiler, to write a program that runs full-screen and traps all keys apart from one hideously complex combination only you know. This full-screen program displays the aforementioned screenshot of the desktop (without the error message), and every time the user presses a button it says "ow".

Now obviously, that makes it a tad obvious someone's fooling about, but it'd still be fun

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One I've seen just moves the icon under the pointer in a random direction on the first click of a double click. So the victim starts the day chasing icons around their desktop

Now that _is_ mean!

Many, many years ago I set my daughters ZX81 so that when any key? was touched it displayed a sad androids face & the legend 'I've got a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side'. Like I said, many, many years ago!!

I can't believe such programming technology would have been possible on a ZX81 Did you have the wobbly 16K ram pack?

Some might suggest that the most heart-sinking moment on April 1st is the moment you boot up your PC and see the dreaded Microsoft logo instead of a nice cuddly Penguin.