@PastTense’s Windows-related query in FQ reminded me of something I heard about in the early 2000s. I even posted about it here a ways back but haven’t tried doing it until now.
It’s a prank to pull on a coworker. When they’re away from their computer, you take a screenshot of their desktop, save the file and open it with the “full screen” viewing option. The joke is that the computer will appear to be running normally but, of course, will be unresponsive until the Esc key is pressed.
So, the FQ post reminded me to try this, and I’m posting here to say that it works like a charm.
I haven’t heard or read any references to the prank in the last 20 years. Is it old news to most of you?
Back in the days of old Classic Mac OS and SE/30s, a buddy of mine made a picture that looked like a dialog box saying something like “ROM Erasure will commence. Press OK or Cancel.” And the Cancel button was greyed out. Then he surreptitiously replace the background of our mutual friend’s Mac SE/30 with this picture. Big Laffs!
Right-click on the desktop to bring up the context menu, screenshot, make that the wallpaper. Everything works normally, but that menu will not go away.
One guy took an old, dead floppy disc, put a sticky note on it that said “I found this, it is yours?” then attached it via a magnet on the fridge door.
OK, I’ve long known about this trick, and the trick about swapping keyboard/mouse plugs for two different computers, but I don’t think I’ve seen monitor-swapping, and @AHunter3 's combination of the two, there, is pure gold.
Many many eons ago (1090s?) there was an option to change the option for your on-screen mouse tracker - so that you could set the cursor to move sideways if the mouse moved up, or make it move diagonally. I found it one day just while mucking around.
Totally useless probably in 99% of the areas where a mouse was used, and probably specific to a particular industry (CAD perhaps?). But lots of fun to set your co-workers cursor to wander seemingly randomly over the screen until he (metaphorically) put his fist through the monitor.
I don’t remember the combinations and if they still work, but there used to be keyboard shortcuts to rotate the display orientation in 90 degree steps in Windows. I had a lot of fun with that.
I forget which brand it was, but one of the video card manufacturers had hotkeys built into their driver where you could press ctrl-alt-[arrow] to change the orientation of the display. Upright, upside down, portrait left, portrait right. So you could literally flip someone’s screen with only a moment’s access.
ETA: That’s what I get for not reading the whole thread before posting.
Back in high school (94-98), someone got me with that. He logged in (as himself) to the computer he knew I’d use and ran a program that displayed the Novell Networks login page and logged the keyboard input. I sat down, logged in, the computer “froze”, and since that happened constantly on those old 386s, I reset it without giving it a second thought. A few seconds later, he told me what my password was.
In fact, because that happened in high school, it prevented me from falling for one on myspace. Someone posted a link to someone else’s myspace page. I clicked on it and was confused because it was asking me to log in (to ‘myspace’) again. I eventually noticed the incorrect URL, but remembering that prank is what put all the pieces together for me.
Years ago, I had a boss who was an immature idiot, & didn’t understand tech, either. I was a systems manager; I could literally watch his eyes glaze over when I went to him with just about any issue. Remember the Win 95 splash screen? It would come on while the computer was booting & remain there for some double-digit # of seconds while booting finished. I somehow learned about it’s path & changed his to something somewhat NSFW that he couldn’t do anything but sit there & shit himself hoping that his boss or HR didn’t walk in until it was finished booting.
This is why Windows moved to using control-alt-delete to log in, because that key combination was always intercepted by the OS at a low level, and so if you used it, you knew you weren’t typing into a keylogger.
Although, come to think of it, they don’t do that any more. I’m not sure why, nor why that trick hasn’t taken off again…
