It’s April Fools’ Day, which means we should all brace ourselves for the inevitable, widespread prankage. If you haven’t prepared your own pranks, we’ve already got ten ready-to-go geek pranks for your perusal.
Your mother always told you you’d never sell enough gold records, or fall hard enough from a high enough office, to make the cover of a magazine. Prove her wrong with spoof site WriteOnIt. WriteOnIt it is a web-based application that allows you to make spoof magazine covers, insert captions into photographs, and put your picture into other State-Fair-esque fake backgrounds, like billboards and in art galleries. There isn’t any interface for tweaking font sizes or special effects, so you’re stuck messing around with the length of sentences with trial and error. Still, for making some silly pictures without having to hone your Photoshop skills, it’s a fun site. For more fun creating photo mashups, check out PhotoFunia to paste your picture into more scenes and situations, and MorphThing to blend your face with a celebrity’s. Photo by HiggySTFC. WriteOnIt [via WebWare]
Spending time working out the week’s footy tips hardly qualifies as a productivity boost, but the new footy tipping site launched by eBay does have one advantage over the traditional office sweepstakes: a top prize of $5,000. eBay is running tipping competitions for both the NRL and AFL; you need to be a registered eBay user (and have PayPal to get the prizes), but that isn’t likely to cut out very many of your colleagues. If you’ve got a preferred site for setting up the office tipping frenzy, share details in the comments. eBay Footy Tipping
OK, we know that gaming is really Kotaku’s bag, but here at Lifehacker we’re great believers in games and puzzles to enhance your mental health. And while we’re not sure that perennial board game favourite Monopoly quite qualifies, it’s certainly good for your basic arithmetic skills. Registration for the National Monopoly Championships has just begun, with six regional championships scheduled in January and February throughout the country to find a contestant who will represent Australia at a global showdown in Las Vegas later in 2009. Get rolling! Monopoly Australia Championships [via
Here’s an interesting twist on browser history: a Web-based calculator which looks at the sites you’ve visited, weights that against whether those sites have a larger male or female readership, and then makes an educated guess on whether you’re male or female. I came up as 92% male, which sounds about right. How do you score? Using your browser URL history to estimate gender [Mike On Ads]
Windows/Mac: Freeware application MarioPaint Composer is a remake of the old-school Mario Paint game for the Super NES, but this one runs on your desktop. More specifically, it mimics the music generator feature of Mario Paint, which creates loops on a musical bar with different sounds tied to classic Nintendo icons. The download page claims that it’s available for Windows and Mac, though when I followed the Mac link it just downloaded the Windows version, so your mileage may vary. MarioPaint Composer is freeware, Windows and (maybe) Mac only. If you don’t have any composition chops, it’s still worth a download just to listen to the familiar classic that’s loaded by default.
MarioPaint Composer [via Download Squad]Breathing new life into the 90′s game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, researcher Stephen Dolan at Trinity College Dublin created the Six Degree of Wikipedia. Users can key in any combination of items into the script on his site and find how closely or distantly related the two things are. Lifehacker.com, coming in well under six degrees, is a mere 4 clicks away from Kevin Bacon. (Kevin Bacon – Game – Final Fantasy – Screenshot – Lifehacker.com) Six Degrees of Wikipedia [via Chronicle of Higher Education]
Looking to do some PC gaming but the price tag of commercial games conflicting with your money-saving goals? Check out Wikipedia’s list of commercial games released as freeware. It’s bound to be a bit hit-or-miss, but with games released as recently as 2008, it may be worth a look. [via]
Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Phun, a free open-source, cross-platform 2D physics simulator, makes you want to pick up blocks, or maybe crayons, and learn more about the way things fall and move under pressure. Written by a Swedish graduate student, the program teaches concepts of restitution and friction, so it’s great to load up with the kids, but you’ll probably find yourself sneaking a few turns by yourself at creating, and knocking over, shapes and lines. Phun is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems; hit the link for instructions on using and having, well, fun in Phun. Phun
Mac OS X only: Make your own stop-motion animation videos using your iSight webcam or connected video camera with freeware application FrameByFrame. I showed you how to document your parties with a freeware time-lapse application, and now FrameByFrame is taking care of the stop-motion video angle. It’s easy to use, and the results—Lego samples of which you can see on the download page—are very impressive. FrameByFrame is freeware, Mac OS X only. FrameByFrame [via Cool OSX Apps]
