IN time for Easter, the Hungarian artist Gergely Dudas this month challenged Internet users to find an egg hidden among a row of bunnies—a reprise of his popular spot-the-panda-among-snowmen visual puzzle.
With time on my hands over the long weekend, I decided to do a bit of easter egg hunting of my own—for the kind that hides inside computers, programs and websites and that can only be discovered if you know where to look and what undocumented commands to issue or keystroke combinations to execute.
One of the earliest easter eggs in software came from Warren Robinett, who put his name in a secret room in his 1979 Atari game Adventure. Robinett said he did this because Atari did not credit its developers at the time. “They had the power to keep my name off the box, but I had the power to put my name on the screen,” he said.
Since then, easter eggs have come and gone. Apple’s Mac used to have a lot of these hidden treasures, including Steve Jobs’ entire Harvard speech—but many of them are now gone, removed from newer versions of Mac OS X.
Still, there are quite a lot places to find easter eggs. Here are some you can try out even today:
Google Easter Eggs
1) Search for “Do a barrel roll” and watch the contents of your browser window spin like the Red Baron.
2) Search for “askew” and the contents of your browser window tilts.
3) Go to Google Images and search for “Atari Breakout” to play a version of this once-popular video game.
4) See what Google looked like when it was launched in 1998 by typing “Google in 1998” in the search box.
5) Get an example of an anagram by using “anagram” as the search term. Google will helpfully suggest: “Did you mean: nag a ram”
6) Learn random trivia by typing “I’m feeling curious” in the search box.
Command Line Tricks
I’ve tested these on my Linux PC, but they ought to work on a Mac Terminal too.
1) Get a cow by typing “apt-get moo” at the terminal prompt.
2) Get a Lord of the Rings calendar by typing this into terminal:
calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr -A 365
3) Get famous dates in history by typing this into terminal:
cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history
This will give you noteworthy events in all 365 days of the year, including April 27, the day Magellan was killed in the Philippines.
4) Keep your eye on the mouse. Type “xeyes” in terminal to get a pair of eyes that will follow your cursor around. Unlike other easter eggs, this one is almost useful.
5) Play a text-based adventure game ala Zork by typing “emacs -batch -l dunnet” into a terminal. The game’s parser will understand commands like “look,” “inventory,” and “take” and the usual direction keys N, S, W and E.
6) Watch Star Wars – an ASCII version – by typing “telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl” in Terminal.
Firefox Tricks
1) Learn about robots by typing “about:robots” into the address line.
2) Get a reading from the Book of Mozilla by typing “about:mozilla” in the address line.
Mac easter eggs
1) The vinyl record icon in System Preferences > Users & Groups will reveal on closer examination (blow up the icon) the song titles “magic,” “revolution,” “boom,” and “unbelievable.” These were Steve Jobs’ most frequently used words during Apple keynote addresses.
2) The Sosumi sound effect in System Preferences > Sound is a reference to Apple’s legal battle with Apple Records, the Beatles record label, which started in 1978. Apple settled out of court in 2007, but not before it created a sound effect that dared Apple Records to “so, sue me.”
3) Discover the recipe for Mrs. Field’s Cookies by typing this in Terminal:
open /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/COOKIES
4) Play Tetris, Snake and Pong on Terminal by typing “emacs” followed by Esc then X, then type Tetris, Snake or Pong. This also works on Linux if you have emacs installed. To install in Linux, type “sudo apt-get install emacs” in Terminal.
Android
On your Lollipop Android phone, go to Settings and About Phone. Tap the version number many times. A lollipop will appear. Long press on it to play a version of Flappy Bird that uses a little green android and giant lollipops.
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