Here are the top 10 tech-related April Fools' jokes to play on friends and co-workers. The best geek pranks make a gadget or a co-worker's computer appear "broken." Watch with glee as the unsuspecting victim goes mental trying to figure it out.
The list was compiled mostly from reader submissions to last year's April Fools' widget.
Remember, jokes are supposed to be funny, so don’t really break anything.
1. Re-map the Keyboard of Your Excitable Co-worker Every company has a sales rep who uses exclamation marks excessively ("C'mon guys!! We can do better this quarter!!!"). Use a program like KeyExtender, a registry hack that re-maps their keyboard so that exclamations and question marks are switched. They may begin to question their sunny outlook in life: "C'mon guys?? We can do better this quarter??? Guys??"
As they paw helplessly at their keyboards, sidle up and 'fix' their problem. Don’t forget to smile.
2. The Speech-to-Text Platform Joke You'll need a wireless keyboard for this. Set up a meeting with a colleague to teach them a speech-recognition program (you'll need a plausible reason why the company needs this). Then, right before the meeting, connect your keyboard wirelessly to the victim's computer. Explain to the victim that the program will have to be trained to recognize their voice, and give them a sample sentence to try out. As they do this, have a co-worker a few desks away type gibberish into the program page ("Boomshakalaka!).
The poor guy will make a fool of himself talking louder and changing his pronunciation to try and make it work.
3. Desktop Havoc on the Mac A London design firm called Troika has produced video of an amazing computer "virus," which may or may not be publicly available. It's probably just a clever art project, but it's too good not to mention here. Nonetheless, Troika's Newton Virus is a Mac bug that rearranges the desktop icons using the accelerometers built into recent MacBooks. When the unsuspecting user picks up their laptop, all the icons and menu items fall to the ground as though under the influence of gravity.
This prank is perfect for control freaks who can’t stand to see even one icon moved on their desktop. They must be stopped!