Good morning! I wanted to be playful and play a trick on my blog but in the end, I decided to play a trick on my suspecting husband. I say suspecting because my trick was computer oriented and for Mac OS X but when I walked by his laptop this morning, I saw he was booted into Windows which messed up my plans. I was unable to hide my reaction so when I got home from school drop-off, he had kindly rebooted into Mac for me. Ha! What a good sport!
If you want to play this trick on someone on a Mac, this is a really good one. My husband is a web developer/software engineer and he was impressed by my trick! It is a classic screensaver prank but I took it one level deeper than simply replacing his desktop wallpaper. I will do it to myself to show you how to do it.
Step 1. Take a screen shot using apple-shift-3. I named the file "april fool."
Step 2. Open Preferences and make the screen shot the desktop wallpaper.
Step 3. Open the Terminal utility.
Step 4. Hide the real desktop icons
Type the following two lines in your Terminal window: "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false" and hit enter. Then type "killall Finder" and hit enter again.
This is the key component of this prank. Quit Terminal and what you should have is a desktop that looks just as your victim remembers it, but when they go to click on their folders and icons, nothing will happen! This is the part that impressed my husband.
Of course, this impressed him because I am not an engineer and he was surprised I could find Terminal, let alone enter some code that would do anything tricky. Also he didn't know this particular code to hide his desktop icons so I got a double score. I have two pieces of advice for this prank to succeed: 1) know thyself and know thy victim; 2) don't let a lot of time lapse between your prank and the discovery if at all possible because the time stamp will give it away.
Step 5. When the laughs are done, restore the icons.
Open Terminal again and type "defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true" and enter. Then type "killall Finder" again and hit enter. Don't forget to reset their original desktop image to be polite. I got the instructions for this trick
via OSXDaily.
If you're really feeling tricky, maybe just maybe you mess around in the system prefs right after you restore their desktop image. Just sayin' maybe their trackpad is moving at a different speed now?
Happy April Fool's Day!
