51 High-Tech Practical Jokes for the Evil Genius

This is an awesome starting point for some great practical jokes.

1. Well first let's move it to The Cafe and leave the other fora for the technical stuff.

2. I'd advise folks to use caution & common sense when posting here or the thread will be short lived.

3. The reason I jumped in here...we've seen similar threads in the past & they didn't "age well" because folks didn't comply with #2.

I heard a story of a guy who's friend always gave him crap about driving a SUV instead of a hybrid like everyone "should" drive. Finally after taking harrassment for months, he started driving to his buddy's house every night for and siphoning a gallon of gas out of his hybrid for 3 weeks.

His friend with the hybrid was going nuts at work....complaining about the terrible gas millage his car was now getting. He took his car to the dealership twice...but they could not find anything wrong with the car.

After 3 weeks, he drove to the hybrid owners house every night and put a gallon of gas in his tank, unless it was all ready full, then he would do it the next night.

The hybrid owner just could not figure it out. He was happy the car was not getting poor gas millage any more...but thought over 100mpg city was not normal either. About a month later...the car's gas millage stabelized, but he never gave his buddy static about not drivig a hybrid again

Gee, i heard about this kinda' prank 45 years ago !


Course, it wasn't with a Hybrid vehicle.



I read it in Science & Mechanics magazine

(remember that ?)

when i was 8 or 9 years old. (i'm now 54)


Still a "classic" idea, eh ?

:devil:
_

I once did the "Turn computer screen upside down" trick to one of my co-workers, he was going crazy and I was LMAO.

AlexGT

Oh yeah !


I remember a software program you could run on yer' unsuspecting friend's PC.


Would make everything appear upside-down !


Could also be set to "backwards", as if you are behind a blackboard.



Oh, the memories . . . .

:devil:
_

Windows has it by pressing ctrl+alt+arrow keys on some WinXp systems if the video card supports it.

This one is a classic

Cracked LCD screen prank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HU7I7lJS-4

Prank in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsfKVayuD5Q

Sigman was right. These practical joke threads don't usually survive long. It seems like one of them was closed due to suggestions of tampering with other people's computers. The thread will likely last a little longer if you drop the topic of messing with other's computers.

Unfortunately, computer pranks are easy to do and lots of fun. They can be very safe.

If an admin were to ask I'd recount the tale of cross wiring my keyboard and monitor with the one in the cube next to me, and the ensuing fun as every thing my buddy typed was SOOOO slow to show up on his screen.

Other fun practical jokes....

To fill a friends locker with popcorn: Fill plastic bag with popcorn. Put bag in locker with the BOTTOM of the bag sticking out under the door. Pull bag gently till it's free. The locker is now 100% full. Packing peanuts, newspaper wads and other things work just as well.

Daniel

gadget_lover said:

Unfortunately, computer pranks are easy to do and lots of fun. They can be very safe.

If an admin were to ask I'd recount the tale of cross wiring my keyboard and monitor with the one in the cube next to me, and the ensuing fun as every thing my buddy typed was SOOOO slow to show up on his screen.



Daniel

Click to expand...

i did that in computer class in high school
swapped my keyboard with the person opposite me
this person typed a conversation with their "computer" for about 5 mins before they figured out what had happened

AlexGT said:

Windows has it by pressing ctrl+alt+arrow keys on some WinXp systems if the video card supports it.

Click to expand...

Yeah, back when I worked in the local public library, some kids figured that out and of course they did it to every public access computer in the library. And not just once. Took me a few minutes to find out how to reset it.

How about practical jokes with your own computer? A former IT person wouldnt give me the administrator password for my desktop Linux machine. I didnt feel like arguing about it, I would have eventually won, but decide to have some fun to prove my point. First, I was aware that I would not get in trouble for this upfront.

I bought a Linux system administrator book and started reading about how and where Linux stores password files. Then I put a system disk in, rebooted and brought it up in single user mode, which automatically put me in superuser mode. Then I changed the administrator password, shut it down and rebooted normally and called the guy in IT and asked him to install some software. He arrived, got out his password book (so much for security anyway) and tried to log in. I watched him getting increasingly agitated at not being able to log in. After about 20 minutes I asked him if there was a problem. He told me that the password wasnt working. I slapped my forehead and said, oh crap, sorry, I had to change that, I forgot to mention that. Lets change it back to something we both know in the future.

I like practical jokes....


My neighbor (a friend) puts a wire frame deer in his front yard every year. It's covered with those little clear Christmas lights, giving it a more 3 dimensional effect. Well, every year, a bulb would blow and one of the 5 strings if lights would go out. It takes forever to find the bad bulb. This year he just said to heck with it and left one of the strings dead.

I bugged him about the dead string every day for a week. Then, late at night I snuck over to his house with my handy-dandy bulb reviver. I hooked it up in place of one of the dead bulbs and gave a few squeezes of the trigger. The faulty light made contact and all the rest came on. I replaced the bad bulb and left, the Deer shining at full strength.

My buddy was puzzled, but happy the next evening when he noticed the change. So that night I went over and replaced one of the bulbs in the head with the dead bulb.

You can see where this is going, Right? I cycled through the string, killing a different one each night. First one leg, then the other would go dark. Some days he'd actually find the bad bulb, so I simply unseated another.

He was laughing too hard to be mad at me when I explained what I'd done.

Daniel

Another prank is to play with the autocorrect feature in MS Word to write things it's not supposed to.

I also remember a few years back playing with the email where you could create a message in a way that when the target moved the cursor thru the message it would send out another email with a previously written text. Well It was decided that the boss was going to invite us all for a drink one friday, guess what? He did! After his boss and all the employees sent a RSVP confirmation by mail, I bet he still is wondering how that happened.

did a high tech test prank on my neighbor.
he has a saturn that he keeps very detailed service records on.
he left it here so i could replace the cts which is a common issue on satuns.
he asked if the cts could also be causing oil burning.
no.
these engines get coked up rings which cause oil burning.
oil had just been changed and records showed me it was burning 1 qt in 500 miles.
ahhh the perfect test for auto-rx
sucked out 12 ox of oil through the dipstick tube and added a bottle of auto rx.
3 weeks later he swore the cts replacement helped the oil burning as it was only burning a qt in 1500 miles.this car gets 100 miles a day as a commuter.
i again laughed and explained what the cts does.it tells the computer the coolant temp for mixture adjustment.
well after 3000 miles the oil got changed.
the next time we talked it was burning 1 qt in 2000 miles.
he could not understand how it was running so much better and had nearly stopped burning oil.
i finally let him in on the prank/test.
i looked over his records and told him he just did an auto rx treatment with out knowing it.
turns out he had read about it and thought it was snake oil.
he ordered 12 bottles that night.
a real test.no placebo effect since subject did not know anything till i told him.
i knew the stuff worked well but i got hard data from an unbiased source.

I like the practical joke from the movie Grumpy Old Men where Walter Matthau had a remote control that would work on his next door neighbor's(Jack Lemmon) tv. Right when Jack was watching the lottery drawing, Walter pointed the remote towards Jacks window and changed the channel. He did this a couple times, really frustrating Jack. Hilarious!

Light related:

My mom's neighbor called to say that she saw a blinking red light on the dashoard of my car. She could see it through her window from the house across the street. She was worried that it might mean something was wrong.

As I started clicking the remote in my pocket, I deadpanned "It's only a problem if the tail-lights are blinking too". Mom repeated this to her friend, and then her eyes got real big.

"They're blinking!" she whispered urgently.

My wife and I both cracked up as I held up the remote. Mom quickly figured out what was going on and had a hard time refraining from laughing herself as she explained it to her friend.

Did I mention that I like practical jokes?

Daniel

gadget_lover said:

Light related:

My mom's neighbor called to say that she saw a blinking red light on the dashoard of my car. She could see it through her window from the house across the street. She was worried that it might mean something was wrong.

As I started clicking the remote in my pocket, I deadpanned "It's only a problem if the tail-lights are blinking too". Mom repeated this to her friend, and then her eyes got real big.

"They're blinking!" she whispered urgently.

My wife and I both cracked up as I held up the remote. Mom quickly figured out what was going on and had a hard time refraining from laughing herself as she explained it to her friend.

Did I mention that I like practical jokes?

Daniel

Click to expand...

Thats hilarious! I couldn't do it though, I would have to laugh.

Not a high tech joke really but a true story. Back in the late 70s when I was a teenager, a buddy and I would camp overnight in a field off from a dirt road in the boonies. Often times in the wee hours of the morning we would see a pickup truck drive to the base of the field, drive around in a little circle and then leave. We figured they were pretty much out scouting for deer to jack. So onetime we took two small white reflectors and nailed them to a tree about deer eye height. When we visited the scene later on that summer, sure enough there was buckshot in the tree.