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.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
