Silliness
As well as being the bane of our lives, computers do also offer us plenty of opportunities for fun and games. And larking about.
The company probably most associated with computer silliness is Apple, of course. For example, the hardware specific file for the kernel in olden days – the System Enabler – was internally called a gibbly
:
(The idea was for it to sound funny when used in all seriousness by executives and upper management
and it worked ;)
The late Jef Raskin clearly also had a sense of humour, evident in the about dialog box of The Humane Editor:
One of Apple’s little oddities was to put a different animal as the last character in each size of the Geneva font:
Apart from the caption, this picture is 100% real. I am not sure what is funnier: Apple’s character set humour, or that this was my entire screen space a few years ago!
mp3DirectCut was pwning my CPU (and not responding) due to screen writes into a maximised window during playback, and I tried switching res to speed things up, to no avail. What I did find is that in Windows’s lagged state, windows took so long to activate that I could switch windows quickly and leave them all flashing in the taskbar from thinking they wanted to be fronstmost:
The following error comes from my own HTTP Werkzeug application: one of those errors you never really expected to see. At least it was polite :)
In the process of creating a font, it is possible to convince Mac OS to preview the font even with half the letters missing. In the second picture, the addition of a space to the font helps; the text is meant to say Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen
but you would never tell.
It is possible in Mac OS classic to programmatically move and rename the hidden Desktop Folder. In the picture, I did give it its name back, but the folder no longer wants to be the desktop any more. The desktop itself – as far as icons are concerned anyhow – is completely gone.
It was fun trying to get my desktop back after that ;)
In the next picture, I think I had been playing with the clock on the PC and committed the changes instead of cancelling them. The certificate expired in 2006? But it’s only 2005 now. What on earth?
For once, Firefox had more clue than I, with a markedly helpful suggestion! I also had to write a program to put the timestamps and filenames of all my recent chat logs back to the correct year! (As my clock had been wrong for days) Tsk tsk. Must stop fiddling with stuff.
Finally, baiting MS Paint with a carefully-named file:
