Good Morning All! (At least here in Aus)
Today I’d like to share with you an off topic, fun application I put together from inspiration I got off a StackOverflow.com thread entitled “What’s Your Favorite Harmless Computer Practical Joke?“. If you click this link you’ll jump right to the prank I’m talking about.
Basically Martin stated:
My all time favourite was a small application I wrote and installed on a colleagues computer.
It silently ran in the background and chimed every hour by opening and closing the CD tray and playing a “cuckoo” sound.
Effectively turning their PC into a cuckoo clock.
I thought, that’s brilliant!! He offered the source code, but alas, it was an old VB6 app and when I ported it to C# it no longer functioned (few bad references and then the CD-ROM door did not actually open).
So I started with a clean slate, ported what I could, included the ingenious tricky mechanism for storing the in-memory “Cuckoo” clock sound effect and re-wrote the code for opening the CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive doors (yes doors, if you have multiple drives on the hour your computer is going to look like it’s doing the mexican wave). It turned out great and I really wanted to share it with everyone!
I take absolutely no credit for the design concept, that’s all Martin but I want to thank him for inspiring me to revive such a simple fun project.
Features:
- “Cuckoo Clock” sequence, press Start and on the hour your CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive will open, chime a “cuckoo” sound the number of times since 12am/pm and close the drive door. (I found doing it the traditional way, that is, open, chime, close, open, chime, close etc. wasn’t as effective as it was taking too much time to spin up and spin down the drive, even with no cd, I find this way sounds better anyway!)
- Resident mode: Press “stealth” to re-create Martin’s dream (lol) which will hide the program to the tray ready for it’s unsuspecting victim (I recommend renaming the .exe to something like taskhost.exe, or another in-built windows process for maximum effect and hair-pulling). Note: kill process is the only way to close.
- Supports minimising to the system tray.
- Supports “tickle the bird” feature allowing you to perform a test drill and make sure the cuckoo clock is doing what it should do! (This will only chime once.)
- About dialog.
It’s licensed under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) and is open to tinkering of any kind, just give credit where credit’s due.
Love to see any new features you could come up with for it!
9 Comments
nice work.
And the PlaySound pinvoke is interesting.
it doesnt work any more
application failed to initialize properly 0xc0000135
running on windows xp
Awesome little app, great fun. Will definitely test this one out ‘in the field’ tomorrow.
If you ever decide to revise it, I think a cool feature would be the ability to start it via the command line; cuckooclock.exe -s. That would make for some awesome unattended PC terrorism.
Either way, great work!
My favorite was a tiny St. Patrick’s Day application I wrote called green.exe. It turned your background system color green on a Windows machine.
The stealth doesn’t work properly, otherwise it’s great fun
solomongaby: Might help if you’re not running it on a ~10 year old platform.
Excellent, just one thing. Can it hide without showing up even as a task bar icon? If it should work like that, then its not working on windows 7
solomongaby iz teh BONEHEAD
Do I need to install c÷ or anythiny first or just the program?
Is there an icon you could put in the start menu folder if you found the chance to sneak it onto someone’s machine?
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[...] Cuckoo clock – Install this computer joke application. [...]
[...] and chimed every hour by opening and closing the CD tray and playing a “cuckoo” sound, Effectively turning their PC into a cuckoo clock. – Martin Posted by Matt Jenkins on April 1st, 2011 Filed under Featured, WTF Friday [...]
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