So several of the applications I have written these last two weeks have involved monitoring the keyboard for key presses in one way or another.  There are a couple of ways to go about this sort of thing, one easy way and one hard (but less resource intense).  The first way is to loop (using a timer) checking the state of the keyboard every so often.  The second way is to use a global keyboard hook, which is a little bit difficult to implement since you have to have an outside dll do some of the work. 

So obviously I am going to show you the lazy easy way since that is what I have been using.  The easy way is the only way to really do it when you are knocking out code quickly for small amusing apps. 

Lets look at the code Read more

Welcome back today, so if you have been reading for a little while you may remember the Shortcut Switch up! article.  Well this program, loving named Boo goes along well with that one.  Basically boo is a super annoying little version of boo the ghost from the Mario series of games.  You run him and he pops up on your screen and begins to chase the cursor.  Not so anoying in and of itself but if he catches you he makes more Boos.  I have however limited him to 10 Boos at a time since otherwise it could seriously chew up your system resources quickly. 

One more thing, the trick to getting rid of Boo is to turn caps lock on.  Then instead of making more Boos, any Boos that catch you will just die.

Download Here

This one comes to you courtesy of the tip line, and I have to say, some of you out there in interwebz land are more evil than I am. 

This is a simple physical attack.  You go to the water cooler, take those cups that hang on the side and dip the rims of them in Tabasco sauce.  Then it is as easy as letting them dry and putting them back.  Later on some thirsty people will find that the water we have here has a kick.  Enjoy!

Welcome back, today I bring you another toy to annoy your friends and co-workers.  This program requires a little background though.  Have you ever been typing on a laptop and accidentally touched the touch-pad with your wrist?  When you do it often registers as a click and clicks where ever the mouse is.  This can be really aggravating because your cursor is jumping all over the place and you just want to type.  So I decided (thanks to a tip from a friend) to emulate this for regular computers.  This program RandomClicks randomly clicks the mouse when you are typing.  This one is designed to be fairly rare so it might take a little while.  This one is vista x64 compatible though.  Have fun with it.

Download Here

So nothing to learn today, it has been one of those days.  But I do have for you a hilarious short video from the College Humor Folks.  This video is titled Phone Fight and is part of their Hardly Working series.  Enjoy.

Just a warning, College Humor is not generally safe for work.  This particular video is but you might not want to browse around.

Ahh Saturday, best day of the week, no work today, no work tomorrow.  But you have to have a hobby.  So what do nerds do for fun?  Well one idea you might try is Geocaching, it has been around for a while now (since 2000) but it is really picking up these days.  That coupled with the dropping cost of a decent GPS make geocaching a great weekend hobby.  So what is Geocaching you might ask? I say, hold on I will get to it, geez.  Geocaching is a sport where people hide things all over the place and you use a GPS and a set of coordinates to find them.  Now at first glance this sounds silly but it is terrific fun, you get out of your chair, that you probably spent most of the week in, you get out in the sun, and you get to have some nerdy fun with a GPS.  Try it sometime, get a GPS, it doesn’t matter what kind, a tom tom or a garmin or a puck for your pocket pc, and head over to http://geocaching.com.  Punch in your area code and see all the caches in your area.  Chances are if you have Internet and are thus in a populated enough area there will be a few if not a few dozen geocaches near by. 

If you do geocache already or if you give it a shot leave a comment about your first experience.

So today’s lesson is to remember, when you do annoying things to those around you sometimes they sneak up behind you and silly string the heck out of you. 

Welcome back folks, I have another tool for you today. This one is a defensive tool designed to help you hide what you are doing from others prying eyes. Lets layout a common problem, so your sitting at your desk, done with your work, and you want to play solitaire. But Bob over in purchasing likes to walk by and say hi all the time. Unfortunately his hi is generally accompanied by a big ol’glance at your desktop. Sure you minimize quickly but he still sees solitaire in the task bar, and before you know it Mr Boss Man shows up and is keeping a close eye on your progress. How do you solve this? Well with Window Hider of course. You add “sol”, the name of solitaire’s executable, to the list in Window Hider and press the magic hot key (default F7) when Bob walks by and bingo, no solitaire here. Download it and give it a shot.

 Download Here

So I was running caps locker on my co-workers computer here and I found a flaw.  Fortunately it generated an ammusing situation and email.  AND! yes folks there is more, it generated a good point, always test your software on different platforms before you run it!.

The problem lies in the vista x64 OS not having a couple of library calls that its 32 counterpart in xp and vista have.  So when I ran caps locker on his computer instead of tunring caps lock on it crashed.  What makes this story funny is at the moment it crashed on him he had just finished reading the entry on this site about caps locker and he sent this ammusing email on my way.  I guess he knew who the culprit was.

So for last couple of days we went technical on you so today we go back to the basics. How to properly shoot rubber bands. This article I found lays out rubber band slinging from the History of Rubber Band Shooting to selecting your rubber band all the way down to strategy and technique.  Remember you cant always worm your way onto your coworkers computers so sometimes you just have to buckle down and give them two bands to the brain.