Filed under: Fun, Windows, Linux, Freeware, Open Source, Windows x64
7 desktop pranks for April Fools Day shenanigans
by Lee Mathews Apr 1st 2009
Don't forget to swap the M and N keys on someone's keyboard. It's subtle, annoying, and timeless.
With so many people sharing so many links on Twitter, the most obvious prank (and easiest to pull off) is a Rickroll or some variation. Tweet something intellectual sounding - heck, post it as an RT of something else and insert a short URL that points to something immensely annoying like any one of the YTMND Hobo Cruise videos (pictured above).
Set a coworker's wallpaper to an animated GIF
Again, YTMND clips are an excellent choice. Set an obnoxious animated GIF as your pal's wallpaper - tiled, of course. It's not only an assault on the eyes, but on the CPU as well - you may well bring their system to its knees, or at least make it painfully sluggish to change their wallpaper back to something more business-like.
Schedule all manner of mayhem with nircmd
Nir Sofer makes a ton of really, really useful applications. Seriously. He probably never intended them to be used as juvenile pranks, but nircmd just lends itself so well to harmless hooliganism. Schedule a task to open and close the CD tray, randomly turn the system volume all the way down and then crank it up full blast moments later, kill all IE process, display the start button on the system tray - the list goes on and on.
This one is pure gold, and it's actually quite handy the other 364 days of the year as well.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
