April Fools Day AutoCAD Tricks

[murrayc.49304]

Since April Fool's Day is just around the corner, what better way than to celebrate than by playing a practical joke on a fellow AutoCAD user?

For these jokes to work, the victim must be away from their computer ("Hey, George? My back is sore, can you go pick up that plot for me?")

Here are the pranks:

1. Set the sysvar NOMUTT to 1 (this turns of text in command window)

2. If there is a Dimstyle that uses a Text Style with a fixed height of 0, change the height to 0.000001 which will for the dimension text heights to be really small. The user will think "The text height for that style is set to 0, why is it so small?" (the text style height only displays 0.0000)

3. Change the color of the AutoCAD cursor to the same color as the users background color.

4. Draw a line with a zero length "way out in space" (ie. from: 100000000,100000000 to: 1000000000,1000000000)

5. Set the sysvar "MTJIGSTRING" or "MODEMACRO" to say something funny/offensive

6. Set the OFFSET command to erase the source object (Offset -> Erase -> Yes) and then set the OFFSETGAPTYPE to either 1 or 2.

7. Create a piece of MText with no text in it with a background mask, and then stretch its grips to cover large parts of their drawing. They will be looking for Wipeouts, not blank MText.

Have fun, and I take no responsibility if anyone flips out ;)

[jacep]

my favorite thing to do is type this into the command line and hit enter.

(repeat 10 (alert "AutoCAD Error, erasing drawing now"))

change "10" to any number you want. the number is the number of times they will have to hit enter to get out of the command.

change "erasing drawing now" to anything. I like "YOUR SCREWED"

now I alawys save the drawings open before I do this, just in case........

[brandenz]

turn on snap mode... set the spacing to 1000000, the crosshairs won't show up on the drawing.
non CAD:
take a screen shot of the person's desktop (print screen button) open paint and paste it in. Save it to my docs or whereever, move all of their shortcuts off of their desktop into a folder in C:\ then set their desktop background to the picture of their desktop before you removed everything. :D It looks just like nothing has changed... :P

[jaberwok]

and be prepared to have your legs broken.

[Railrose]

& the old faithful, change the crosshairs to the background color.

[murrayc.49304]

take a screen shot of the person's desktop (print screen button) open paint and paste it in. Save it to my docs or whereever, move all of their shortcuts off of their desktop into a folder in C:\ then set their desktop background to the picture of their desktop before you removed everything. :D It looks just like nothing has changed... :P


I DID that joke back in 1996. My "victim" was so messed up by that prank that he actually went home and had to take a "mental health" day.

In my defense, I did not know he that actually had some emotional issues, and I wouldn't have pulled the prank on him (I was only working for that company a few months up to that point, and I had not yet known everyone's idiosyncrasy's yet)

So, the moral of this story is to be aware of who you are pulling these pranks on.

[murrayc.49304]

& the old faithful, change the crosshairs to the background color.


Yep... that was #3 on the original list.

But here's another cursor prank.... set the sysvar SNAPANG to a small increment like 0.25. Everything they draw on their screen will be slightly skewed even if they have ORTHO turned on.

[scott.wilcox]

Back in the days of pen plotters, a common tech school prank was to copy a line or piece of text onto itself a few dozen times. The drawing looks the same, but when plotting, the repeated passes of the pen would draw right through the paper.

Ah, but that's school stuff.

[Coolmo]

turn on snap mode... set the spacing to 1000000, the crosshairs won't show up on the drawing.
non CAD:
take a screen shot of the person's desktop (print screen button) open paint and paste it in. Save it to my docs or whereever, move all of their shortcuts off of their desktop into a folder in C:\ then set their desktop background to the picture of their desktop before you removed everything. :D It looks just like nothing has changed... :P

Here's a similar one... Take a screen shot of the desktop with all the icons on it and then paste it back as the desktop picture. Move a couple of icons off of their original location so it looks like there are 2 of the same icons on the desktop. Take another screen shot and place it as the background again. Do this about 10 times so it looks like there are 10-12 of the same icons for a particular program. The victim will go crazy clicking around and trying to find the correct icon to launch AutoCAD!

I did this about 8 or so years ago to a couple of people and one of them flipped completely out.

Mission accomplished

[tracy.findlater]

Jeez, I think you guys would be better employed just doing some frickin work for a change!

:p

[brandenz]

turn on blipmode... unless they have been using AutoCAD since R12 they won't have any idea what those stupid little blips are!

[Coolmo]

Jeez, I think you guys would be better employed just doing some frickin work for a change!

:p


We're just so good at what we do that the work gets done early and then there's time for play :p

[drdesignz]

More:

forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=76302 (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=76302)
forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=88352 (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=88352)

[irneb]

NonCAD ... and non hi-tech.

If you have these open office layouts at work (those 4 table back-to-back). Swap mice or keyboards or screens from opposite PC's. They'll be doing strange things to one another :lol:

Or else, install something like Norton's PCAnywhere and take control of their PC over the network from yours. You can figure the rest out yourself :mrgreen:.

[margaretl]

I think a good one is Qtext. I don't know if anyone actually uses this command anymore. Set it to on. When the drawing regenerates, the text all turns to rectangles. Even after it is turned off, the text will appear as rectangles until the drawing is regenerated again. No harm and a quick easy GOTCHA!

[brandenz]

NonCAD ... and non hi-tech.

If you have these open office layouts at work (those 4 table back-to-back). Swap mice or keyboards or screens from opposite PC's. They'll be doing strange things to one another :lol:

Or else, install something like Norton's PCAnywhere and take control of their PC over the network from yours. You can figure the rest out yourself :mrgreen:.

careful with the remote desktop, it falls in the land of "illegal". You can not take control of another person's PC with out their authorization.

[irneb]

careful with the remote desktop, it falls in the land of "illegal". You can not take control of another person's PC with out their authorization.Yes, you're correct!!! :banghead:

Forgot about that :screwy: since everyone here had to sign that they don't have any personal stuff on work PC's and that administrators may open use link-to or move the PC to someone else's spot ... so please ONLY USE MY SUGGESTION IF YOU'RE ALLOWED TO!! :veryevil:

[dgorsman]

Very simple April Fools day "prank" for CAD Support personnel - take the day off.

[irneb]

Very simple April Fools day "prank" for CAD Support personnel - take the day off.And leave an out of office message: "Sorry ... you're screwed if you can't fix it yourself!"