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Filed under: Fun, Web, Humor

Where to find Konami Code easter eggs on the web

Old-school gamers remember the Konami Code, a famous sequence of buttons on the original Nintendo controller that unlocked powerups or extra lives in practically every game Konami made. The code seems to have come back into fashion on the web recently, with a lot of sites hiding odd surprises for folks who think to type it in via keyboard. For a while, you could even add some very unsportsmanlike sparkly unicorns to ESPN.com with the code.

Now there's a site just for tracking these online Konami Code easter eggs: KonamiCodeSites.com. Go check out their list and test out the ones they've found. If you're ambitious, test the code out on some of your favorite sites, and submit any secrets you find to the KonamiCodeSites list. Some of the biggest sites that have easter eggs include Facebook and Google Reader. Hooray for nostalgic fun!

Oh, one more thing: fittingly enough, you're going to need to know that code to access the list at KonamiCodeSites. For the uninitiated, it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and enter.

Filed under: Macintosh, Apple, Troubleshooting, Browsers

Tap into Safari 4's hidden preferences

Safari 4
Safari 4 marks a dramatic shift in UI design for Apple's browser. In the Mac version, the big news is the Chrome-like "tabs on top" layout, and the equally Chrome-like Top Sites feature, but some smaller things have changed too. A new autocomplete feature has been added to the URL bar, and Google Suggest has been added to the search bar. Worst of all, in my admittedly-finicky opinion, That blue bar tracking page load progress in the URL bar is gone.

If this is all too much for you to take at once, and you want the faster rendering and improved standards-compliance without all of the UI upheaval, you might want to have a look at this list of hidden preferences compiled by Caius Durling. Using the Terminal, you can change everything I mentioned above back to the way it was in Safari 3. Want tabs on the bottom again? You got it. And long live the load bar!

[via Daring Fireball]

Filed under: Fun, Google, iPhone

Find the hidden menu in Google Mobile for iPhone

Google's iPhone app, Google Mobile, was already pretty handy with the addition of voice search, but it turns out that it's got more features than anybody realized. The Google Mobile team just blogged about an easter egg, a hidden menu in the app that enables some extra goodies. To find it, go to the settings tab in Google Mobile, and keep trying to scroll down below the "About" option at the bottom. Eventually, a menu called Bells and Whistles will appear.

So, what are these bells and whistles? Some of them are actually sounds: you can replace the default sounds with chicken or monkey noises. You can also change the color of the Google Mobile theme and see a live waveform when you talk. This is all kind of fun, but not that useful. Oh, but wait: the reason you really want to find this easter egg is the "open links in app" option. Some commentators argue that it should have been there in the first place, and I'm inclined to agree with them.

[via VentureBeat]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Unhider reveals hidden windows

Unhider
How often has this happened to you? You're minding you own business, going about your day with your Windows PC, and suddenly Windows Explorer crashes, your screen goes momentarily blank, and when it comes back certain windows don't show up in your taskbar anymore. Those applications and services might not have actually been shut down, but for all intents and purposes, they're inaccessible. Or are they?

Unhider is a free utility that will let you show any program currently running on your Windows system. It works whether you've just recovered from an Explorer crash or not. In fact, it's almost more interesting to run Unhider when your system is working perfectly, since it presents an easy way to see all the programs you're running in the background and eating up RAM if not CPU cycles.

You can also use Unhider in reverse and hide any application that's running on your desktop in case you want to replicate that just-crashed feeling.

[via Freeware Genius]

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

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, ...

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