Mischief is an important human tendency. From Arthur C. Clarke’s fictional utopia of Diaspar to the royal courts of medieval times, pranksters have always played an important role in society. I myself firmly believe that April Fools’ day is an excellent time to tap into some creativity and to come up with ways to make people laugh. In that spirit, I’d like to share a couple of my own creations:

1. Git Push It

inspired by this tweet

Sometimes, you have a coworker whose git commit messages are just missing that extra something. Here’s the fix:

In your colleague’s git repo, create a commit-msg hook in .git/hooks/commit-msg with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
echo "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCadcBR95oU" >> "$1"

Now all you need to do is chmod +x .git/hooks/commit-msg and enjoy the fun.

2. Remote-Activated ASCII Star Wars

Say you want to watch Star Wars… but you’re doing some important work on your machine. Why not use your coworker’s mac to watch it?

The following conditions need to be true for this to work:

• The target machine must be running OSX
• A user account must be logged in on the target machine
• you must be able to ssh into the target machine as the currently logged-in user

To pull it off, ssh into the target and create a starwars.applescript file somewhere with the following contents:

tell application "Terminal" to activate

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "telnet"
    keystroke space
    keystroke "towel.blinkenlights.nl"
    keystroke return
end tell

Then simply run the script with:

osascript starwars.applescript

May the force be with you!