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Last September, I asked the SoylentNews community for help in choosing an UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4K television to use as a computer monitor. I was amazed at all the helpful and informative replies! I'm please to report that I got a TCL Roku 43S515 on sale at Best Buy and it has been working great! I so enjoy having more pixels to arrange even more info on my screen.
But something funny happened a couple days ago. I powered up the TV using the remote as I would normally do. Then I selected the input coming from my laptop, again as I usually do. And then, for a few moments, I saw a message displayed at the bottom of my screen:
Hamster wheel engaged
After I stopped laughing, I wondered if I had inadvertently stumbled upon an Easter Egg. What other messages, if any, lurked in my TV?
It seems the developers at Roku have a sense of humor. Some searching around the web (Roku's forum (all 4 pages) as well as on Amazon forum) revealed quite a few messages. I've gathered them here in alphabetical order:
Aligning Solar Panels
Boosting entertainment channels
Engaging warp drive
Hamster wheel engaged
Installing solar panels
Maximizing Fun Factor
Opening the gateway
Opening Stream Gates
Releasing the stream
Supercharging your system
Tuning Hyperdrive
What strange, silly, or whimsical messages have you seen?
(Score: 5, Touché) by lentilla on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:57AM (7 children)
I confess that; back in the day; I was fond of messing with people's unattended desktops. It was the work of a few moments: Alt+PrtScn, Win+R, mspaint, enter, Ctrl+V, F11 and they would return to a fake desktop and they would sit there clicking uselessly at a picture of their desktop.
I also rather liked the now ancient "Water detected on drive C".
I doubt I would engage in those kind of shenanigans today. Partly to do with age but probably more because we live in a different; less innocent; era. A couple of decades ago "we have taken your files hostage!" would have been funny. Today it is a sad reality.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:09AM
The version of that prank we used was to printscreen, paste into mspaint, save, set desktop background to saved screenshot, then move all the actual desktop icons off the desktop...
(Score: 3, Funny) by hemocyanin on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:16AM (1 child)
Did that. To my boss.
(Score: 2) by Some call me Tim on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:41AM
Boss pranks are the best! Well done!
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:41AM
I took a screenshot, put it in correl and deformed it, and then put it as the background...
and I once switched my brother's display to mirrored.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:42PM
Invert the screen with Ctrl Alt Down if it has nvidia drivers :)
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:49PM
W98 had the "It's OK to shut off your computer". I changed it to "It's not OK to shut off your computer.
I had a boss named Dave. I thought about changing all the windows sounds to HAL brom 2001, like "I'm sorry, Dave, I can;t let you do that". It never got farther than thinking about, though.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:12PM
I've used the on screen controls of my colleague's monitor to rotate the screen 90 or 180 degrees (multiple instances) and then switched the controls language to Russian or Japanese. I think he's finally resorted to just rotating the desktop in Windows to get back to the correct orientation because he can't be bothered to figure out changing the language back into something he can read.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base