USINGMAC.com

USINGMAC.com

FUN WITH USING A MAC

FUN WITH USING A MAC

NOV
24

It is the most boring day ever that you have nothing to do. You should go to nearest Apple Store and do these cool pranks.

Warning

Some of the pranks have not been tested yet. We cannot guarantee you will be successful in doing these inside Apple Store. However, these pranks will work well for your friends' Mac.

Kernel Panic


Pry for Mac farthest from staffs. Firstly, print the whole screen of the Mac, but you should hide all of their opened applications first.

Hide everything from their Desktop, all their files, which is cluttered everywhere on the Desktop, including the Dock. Trash can will be a good place.

Now, you change their Desktop background with the snapshot that you've just taken. Don't forget to attach kernel panic image and make the snapshot a little bit dimmer to make them really believe that their Mac crashes. Unplug their mouse and add a small image of Spinning Beachball of Death for better result.

Ultra Magnification Dock


Open Terminal which is located inside Macintosh HD ▸ Applications ▸ Utilities ▸ Terminal. And then..

defaults write com.apple.Dock largesize -int 512
killall Dock

Perform command lines above. This will give them ultra magnification for their Dock icon. Now let's see who can laugh till the end.

Blown Up Display


Hit keyboard shortcuts 8 and you will see their display color is inverted.

Go to System Preferences ▸ Universal Access and click on the Seeing tab. You will see the header Display. Nearby, there are checkbox labelled Use grayscale, which you should enable it, and a Enhance contrast slider, that should be adjusted to Maximum. By this time, their display should have been successfully blown up.

It seems their staffs are smart enough to realize what's wrong with the Mac. Therefore, change their modifier keys function: Command, Option, and Control to Caps Lock. Their function can be changed inside System Preferences ▸ Keyboard & Mouse, under Keyboard tab and click on the Modifier Keys button.

Music Script


Open the CDs & DVDs Preference Pane, which can be navigated through System Preferences ▸ CDs & DVDs.

Inside, you will see an option box labelled When you insert a music CD. Don't be hesitate, quickly assign annoying script, such as DownloadWeatherMap.scpt to turn the Mac into weather mania. Scripts can be found inside Macintosh HD ▸ Library ▸ Scripts.

So, whenever music CD is inserted, a weather map will be downloaded. Cool, eh?

Voice of Terror


If you find out that the Apple Store is way too quiet, give them a little noisy prank. Go to System Preferences ▸ Universal Access.

Dig inside Seeing tab. You will see really big header called VoiceOver, turn it on. Keyboard shortcuts F5 also can be used to perform this mission.

The initial voice is still not satisfying. Click on Open VoiceOver Utility button. Inside, select Speech sidebar and change the Default Voice to Deranged, Rate:5, Pitch:10, and Volume:100 to get a low pitch trembling voice.

However, if their staffs are smart enough, the VoiceOver will be easily turned off with keystrokes F5. Don't let that happens, go to System Preferences ▸ Keyboard & Mouse. Click the Modifier Keys button under the Keyboard, change the function of Command key to Caps Lock. With this, you have been successfully block their backdoor for at least three minutes. For better result, turn off the lights (haunted Mac?).

Space Clicker


Double-buttoned mouse Mac will become the prey for this one.

Open Space Preferences Pane that can be found inside System Preferences. Look for it in System Preferences ▸ Expose & Spaces. Then click on the Spaces tab. Now, see the column at the bottom of the pane. You should see the first row and the right column is not activated at the moment (-). Click on it and choose Secondary Mouse Button. Now, whenever the mouse is being right-clicked, Spaces will appear.

HOwever, right click is rarely used in Mac. Don't worry about this. Go to System Preferences ▸ Keyboard & Mouse. Change the Primary mouse button to Right. The mouse secondary button will become left-click! Here you go, every left-click on mouse brings it to space.

Still inside Mouse Preference Pane, adjust the tracking speed to its maximum. Congratulation, you've produced a wild mouse. It's very challenging to revert it back, maybe you should try this one sometimes.

Faulty Keyboard


This time, we will modify the keyboard behavior. Firstly, you should go under Input Menu tab which is located under System Preferences ▸ International.

If the Mac is currently using U.S. keyboard, change it to Dvorak and the other way around. Don't forget to disable the checkbox labelled Show input menu in menu bar. This will make the staffs scratch their itch to find out what's wrong with the Mac keyboard.

Sleeping Mac


Go to System Preferences ▸ Desktop & Screen Saver and then click on the Screen Saver tab.

On the lower corner of the pane, you can see a slider labelled Start screen saver, adjust it to minimum so that every 3 minutes of idle, the Mac will start screen saver.

It's not done yet, go to their Security Preference Pane, which is under System Preference ▸ Security, and click on the General tab. Tick the first check box Require password to wake up.... All set and hope that the staffs forget the Mac login password.

If three minutes is too long of a wait, go to System Preferences ▸ Energy Saver. Move both of the sliders to the minimum of 1 minute. Every 1 minute of idle, the Mac will fall asleep. Proud of you, you've successfully created Mac the Sleeping Beauty.

Sticky Keys


The fact is that, there isn't any single staff know about Sticky Keys out of a hundred of them. So, we can make use of it.

Go to System Preferences ▸ Universal Access and under Keyboard tab.

Turn on the Sticky Keys function. Remember to turn off the Toggle Sticky Keys, which is the shift 5 times keyboard shortcut. Now, whenever the modifier keys are pressed, the Mac will give a beep and a large modifier key icon will appear on the desktop. I hope the staffs can successfully adopt to their new beeping Mac.

Ugly Font


This time, we will make their font becomes very ugly. First of all, go inside System Preferences ▸ Appearance.

Look at the bottom of the pane, you will be given option box for font size. Change it to 12, which will affect all the fonts that are smaller or equal to 12. Even though you cannot apply this for larger size, it's still worth it because you make them busy enough to find out the way to revert back. This all thanks to Appearance Preferences.

Blank Spotlight


This prank will be a very powerful weapon against Spotlight addict.

For the beginning, you should go inside Spotlight Preference Pane. This can be achieved by following path : System Preferences ▸ Spotlight. Then inside this pane, disable all categories that will appear in Spotlight search results. Finally, the Spotlight will only return word definition for every search performed. Sweet.

Filed in categories: Tip and Tricks

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COMMENTS

Wouter

November 25th, 2007 at 06:47 PM

Evert tried pressing ctrl-alt-cmd-8 ? I've seen many white faces in the apple store...and that after 1 second of keyboard effort :-D

Wendy

November 25th, 2007 at 07:07 PM

Yeah, that's correct. Many staffs there don't know this kind of trick. It inverts the display color *evil grin*.

Silly Games

November 25th, 2007 at 11:54 PM

Last I checked the "Terminal" program is not installed on demo macs for the very reason that it can be used to alter all sorts of things. To make changes to most the system preferences you will have to enter the computer password to unlock the preferences before you can make any changes. I doubt usingmac.com has tried most if any of these pranks at an actual Apple Store. Also, all Apple Store Macs have "Deep Freeze" software installed on them. A simple reboot will restore the Mac to it's pristine state no matter what you do to it. Staff won't spend a minute "troubleshooting" the problems they will simply restart the computer.

Wendy

November 26th, 2007 at 02:45 AM


We haven't checked all of these on Apple Store. Actually, our only hope that after reading this article, people will know how to solve these kinds of problem on their Mac. But some of us have an evil intention to tweak the victim to Apple Store (not to mention who is he) :P
By the way, in the comment above, there is a software called "Deep Freeze". This software can be downloaded at Apple Downloads : Deep Freeze Mac 4.0.1. Hope this info will be useful.