Pingdom Home

US + international: +1-212-796-6890

SE + international: +46-21-480-0920

Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).

Pingdom Blog

Royal Pingdom

Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

RSS Feed

5 geeky Easter eggs for Easter

In time for Easter we thought that we should list a few funny and geeky Easter eggs. Easter eggs in software don’t do anything good besides being funny which we of course like. So here we present a few selected ones that we think are funny.

Mac OS X Leopard, Blue Screen of Death

Start by connecting to a networked PC and then open finder. In the sidebar to the left an icon will be shown under Devices. The icon looks like an old CRT monitor with the well known Blue Screen of Death, if you would like a closer look use Cover Flow.

Leopard, BSOD

GNOME cow attack

Press Alt+F2 to open the run dialog box and then type “gegls from outer space” without the quotes. You will get a Space Invaders type of game but with cows.

Should work in all GNOME distributions.

Gnome Cows

GIMP, Pushing your Pixels since 1995

Hold down the Alt-key and the open Help > About to show a alternative about image. In some cases it’s the Ctrl-key instead of Alt.

GIMP pixel pusher

GNOME fish

Press Alt+F2 to open the run dialog box and then type “free the fish” without the quotes. You’ll get a small fish on your desktop.

Should work in all GNOME distributions.

Wanda

Package manager cows

Apt-get has some art if you type “apt-get moo” in the terminal. You will get a ASCII cow.

A similar easter egg is available in Gentoo if you type “emerge moo” in the terminal.

And finally in Debian and aptitude where they stretched the joke a bit. Type “aptitude moo” and you will get the text “There are no Easter Eggs in this program”. If you then type “aptitude –v moo” you get the message “There really are no Easter Eggs in this program”. Keep on adding –v’s to get several messages until you get to “aptitude –vvvvv moo” where the text reads “All right, you win” together with a ASCII drawing.

apt-get

Do you know any good Easter Eggs? Please share them with us in the comments.

Want to test your site every minute?








You will get an email with your login information.

Post comment as twitter logo facebook logo
Sort: Newest | Oldest

lame egg, but in smart, type "smart moo" you get.... "I'm way smarter than a cow!" lame, but it is one

The Gimp easter egg does not work on Gimp 2.4.5 running under PCLinuxOS 2007 Gnome Edition. Thanks

Running Ubuntu Gutsy, but the Alt+F2 doesn't work (also tried Ctrl+F2 as well). :(

@Jim Thompson: How the fuck could anyone fail in noticing that? The 'Redundancy Award' is waiting at the post-office for you.

And notice that the BSOD is displayed on what appears to be an old CRT -- a tube monitor.

Just a heads-up to the reader - if you do "free the fish" in Gnome, there's no supplied way to get rid of the fish. You have to killall gnome-panel, or the fish will keep swimming in and bothering you for your whole session.

Awesome post! Try a search for "virus" at www.apple.com for another sweet easter egg ;)

Trackbacks

  1. [...] The MacBook Air. Now you may be wondering “How the hell is this Easter related?”. Let me explain to you how I come to this conclusion. As pointed out in number 5, Easter Eggs are one of the highlights of Easter. Easter egg is also a term given to hidden features or messages in objects. Most of us know a trick for our favourite app or gadget that reveals an Easter egg. Well, thanks to Royal Pingdom, I now have a reason why the MacBook Air is the number one thing you should have for Easter. [...]

  2. fsdaily.com says:

    Story added…

    This story has been submitted to fsdaily.com! If you think this story should be read by the free software community, come vote it up and discuss it here:

    http://www.fsdaily.com/EndUser/5_geeky_Easter_eggs_for_Easter

The 10 most iPad-friendly countries in the world

iPadDo you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

Read more

vector graphics

Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

Read more

Top 10 Facebook winners and losers (countries)

Facebook likeThe juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

Read more

UbuntuDevelopers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

Read more

A day in the life of Pingdom – join us May 15

A day in the life of Pingdom

“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Read more