Easter Eggs for the Deviant Mind!

No i'm not talking about this:



Recently while googling and wiki-ing (which happen to be my favourite pastimes), I stumbled upon the wiki site for easter eggs, the virtual one that is. To define it for the sake of my less aware audience:

"A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program or video game. The term draws a parallel with the custom of the easter egg hunt observed in many western nations. In computer programming, the underlying motivation is often to put an individual, almost artistic touch on an intellectual product which is by its nature standardised and functional"

The site goes on to give examples of many famous easter eggs, such as the flight simulator in MS excel 97 and pinball in MS Word 97. Apparently Microsoft ends up with more than its fair share of smart ass developers. Easter eggs are apparently found in hardware as well such as entire circuits etched on the circuit board that only serve to fulfill the designer's sense of personalization. My favourites are:

• Debian GNU/Linux package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on "apt-get moo" are typed into the shell.

• In The Mathwork's MATLAB the why command provides succinct random answers to almost any question.

 % why
 % because the not very smart system engineer insisted on it

(something I'll definitely try if I manage to move my lazy ass and turn on my desktop which has two different versions of MATLAB installed on it)

• Perhaps the most famous example of a hardware Easter egg is in the HP ScanJet 5P, where the device will play the Ode to Joy or Fur Elise by varying the stepper motor speed if users power the device up with the scan button depressed. (I mean el oh el! some funky techie man, making your stepper motors literally SING! I remember when i spent some three weeks in my 5th semester trying to make two stupid stone age stepper motors turn so i could run a robotic mouse!)

Obviously many of us remember playing with the mIRC "about" icon that smiled and said 'what?' when you right clicked on it and the *pichkoui* sound when you clicked on Khaled Merdem Bey's nose in the about box and oh of course the stuffed alligator picture that appeared in place of Merdem Bey's when you typed 'arnobie' while the about box was open .... BUT armed with the knowledge above, I absolutely had to embark on a search for easter eggs in modern software. Microsoft apparently has removed almost all easter eggs in its software as it is not a very encouraged practice anymore. Anyway after going through quite a number of sites these are my top picks:

Head Banging Llama's in Winamp 5+ (modern skin only):

"Winamp really whips the llama's ass" .... it makes them head bang too! This is how to do it:

Run Winamp 5 or higher in modern skin and then expand the main window till you see the beat visualizer.

Keeping Shift+Alt+Ctrl pressed click over the dot in the dead center of the beat visualizer. See the red dot in the image below:

And there you go you have your llama's ... headbanging with the beat! Brilliant!



Tetris in uTorrent

All you leechers out there, here's something to do while you sit and stare at your torrents download:

Go to help -> about uTorrent. This is what an 'innocent' help box looks like:

*pssst* clicking on the uTorrent logo in the about box plays the snazzy THX sound.

Now press Ctrl+T to transform this useless appendage to one of the most addictive games ever invented. Play on! (press P to pause). Oh and it even remembers your highest score!




Obviously all proprietary material mentioned in this post is copyright of its respective owners. (I think thats the appropriate disclaimer).

Here's the link to the wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(virtual)

Happy easter egg hunting y'all! Drop me a comment/leave a message on GoogleTalk if you come across something interesting! :)