[Paco500]

My brother and I work at the same company, and tomorrow is his last day in the office (he is relocating to another city). As it turns out- I have the password to his laptop, and I want to send him off in style. Immediate ideas are:

1. Changing his home page, desktop picture and screen saver to something along the lines of boy-band fan stuff.
2. Sending emails from his account gently poking fun of him.
3. Installing the Mega-Man hack spoken of a few days ago (i'll have to look that up).

These pranks need to be non-destructive and HR friendly (no barnyard porn).

Anyone have any other thoughts?

[SSharon]

turn on ssh, turn up the volume on his computer, log in to his computer during the day, and use the say command to speak to him. try it on your own computer so you can find a nice voice to use, just open terminal and type: say hello

[cjrivera]

Here's a good one I did recently...

Send him Buick literature... oh wait.. you wanted OS X pranks.

Never mind.

[Ganesha]

Turn the default language to icelandic.

[CharlesS]

If the user has auto-login turned on so you can get into his user account:

1. Turn the Dock magnification on.

2. Change the magnification size in the Dock preferences so that a key gets made in the preference file.

3. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist with either TextEdit or your favorite plist editor.

4. Find the key labeled "largesize" and change its value to 512.

5. In the Terminal, type "killall dock".

6. Lay low and wait for your victim to arrive...

[macaddict0001]

the ssh suggestion is good, you could also make dialog boxes pop up on his screen with an applescript.

[chabig]

Take a screenshot of his desktop. Then make that the desktop picture. Put all of the items on his desktop into a folder for safekeeping. Also, hide the dock. He'll click and click but nothing will work.

[rickey939]

Originally Posted by chabig

Take a screenshot of his desktop. Then make that the desktop picture. Put all of the items on his desktop into a folder for safekeeping. Also, hide the dock. He'll click and click but nothing will work.

Beat me to it!

(remember to not show the HD's on the Desktop as well...)

[MacMan4000]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

If the user has auto-login turned on so you can get into his user account:

1. Turn the Dock magnification on.

2. Change the magnification size in the Dock preferences so that a key gets made in the preference file.

3. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist with either TextEdit or your favorite plist editor.

4. Find the key labeled "largesize" and change its value to 512.

5. In the Terminal, type "killall dock".

6. Lay low and wait for your victim to arrive...

screenshot (dual monitor, big image warning. 590kb)

[besson3c]

I've yet to try the MegaMan thing on somebody, but I'd bet that with making it a LoginHook, making it faceless, hide the app, you could really have a lot of fun!

[chris v]

If you can log into it remotely, you can launch apps at random using 'open' from the Terminal. You could also make some docs with pertinent messages, like "hello, Larry" or "Get Back to Work!" st in 100 point type, and use open to launch them.

[Ghoser777]

open /Applications/*

That's always a good one =D

[ort888]

Originally Posted by rickey939

Beat me to it!

(remember to not show the HD's on the Desktop as well...)

Or you can remove all the regular stuff and put just one folder on his desktop. Name it something funny like "nude pics of Eric Estrada" and then snap a desktop pic. Now place the new desktop pic in place of the old one and he will have a folder that won't respond to anything. This trick will sometimes drive the most savvy computer user absolutely batty. It's great.

[tavilach]

Originally Posted by chabig

Take a screenshot of his desktop. Then make that the desktop picture. Put all of the items on his desktop into a folder for safekeeping. Also, hide the dock. He'll click and click but nothing will work.

What about the menubar?

[itistoday]

Originally Posted by tavilach

What about the menubar?

Use Apple+Shift+4 and select everything but the menu to fix that.

[tavilach]

Originally Posted by itistoday

Use Apple+Shift+4 and select everything but the menu to fix that.

What I mean is, if the menubar could be disabled, the prank would last a lot longer.

[CIA]

Is there a good Windows-esque GUI mod for the finder you could install?

[chris v]

Originally Posted by CIA

Is there a good Windows-esque GUI mod for the finder you could install?

No reason to get nasty!

[rickey939]

Originally Posted by tavilach

What about the menubar?

What about it? It doesn't show when placed as the Desktop picture (it's hidden under the "real" menubar).

[mdc]

he means, that the menubar will be clickable.

[- - e r i k - -]

As will the dock if he gets close enough to the edge when it's hidden. What we need is an app that can show the screenshot full-screen and not deactivate it without a key-combination.

[demograph68]

Click an icon in the dock until a thing pops up and then put the mouse over "hide". Now keep hitting the expose button a million times or so. Once you click off the dock, expose will go nuts.

[tae667]

cmd+option+control+8

[wataru]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I've yet to try the MegaMan thing on somebody, but I'd bet that with making it a LoginHook, making it faceless, hide the app, you could really have a lot of fun!

I just did that to my brother. Now I'm just waiting for him to reboot so it doesn't look like I did it.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

As will the dock if he gets close enough to the edge when it's hidden. What we need is an app that can show the screenshot full-screen and not deactivate it without a key-combination.

Just hide the Dock for the screenshot and unhide it after setting the desktop picture. That way it only seems like the desktop is frozen and you don't ruin the illusion by having two Docks.

[CharlesS]

Alternatively, you could leave the Dock in the screenshot, then move the Dock to a different edge of the screen and hide it. Mwa ha ha ha ha.....

[buffalolee]

Originally Posted by SSharon

turn on ssh, turn up the volume on his computer, log in to his computer during the day, and use the say command to speak to him. try it on your own computer so you can find a nice voice to use, just open terminal and type: say hello

How do you do the SSH thing? The rest I can do, but I have never used SSH before.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by buffalolee

How do you do the SSH thing? The rest I can do, but I have never used SSH before.

You have to turn on Remote Login on the victim's computer. Then, on your computer, type this command in the Terminal:

ssh <username>@<ip address of victim's computer>

Then, enter the password. Once you're in, type this:

say -v Fred "Dave, this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

or something similar.

[honz]

I was going to suggest this: Use Preview's full screen mode for a simple prank, but I can't see 'full screen mode' in Preview on Tiger

[macaddict0001]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

You have to turn on Remote Login on the victim's computer. Then, on your computer, type this command in the Terminal:

ssh <username>@<ip address of victim's computer>

Then, enter the password. Once you're in, type this:

say -v Fred "Dave, this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

or something similar.

that's awesome

[siMac]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

say -v Fred "Dave, this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

Genius. Also good is swapping the top and bottom rows of the numeric keypad. Few people figure that one out straight away.

[mishap]

In Universal Access, change the Black on White to White on Black

Works best if someone uses a plain color background like blue, then you can change the background to orange (so it will appear blue).

[Nai no Kami]

Using the desktop picture thing, you could make a background with a window or some stupid error message on it, which will not close, move or go away. And will be present again after restart.