10 Cool Easter Eggs

Anwsers.com defines an easter egg as:

A hidden feature in computer software, a DVD, or a video game.

Over the past few days, I got to check out some cool easter eggs in the softwares I use often. I got to know about some of them from the Internet and the rest of them from a popular Indian computer magazine Digit. Although I was used to seeing these easter eggs in video games and movies, but softwares? I didn’t even know they existed in softwares too. Anyway, here I share 10 cool easter eggs worth mentioning:

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox needs no introduction. It’s one of the best web browsers available and is growing at a rapid rate. The following 2 easter eggs associated with Firefox work no matter which version you are using.

• Type about:mozilla in the address bar and hit enter. You’ll see a page with maroon background and white text written on it. Now what is written is in the style of Bible verses and tells briefly about the history of Mozilla and Netscape. This message varies from version-to-version, but the idea behind what is displayed remains the same. This trick even works in Netscape browsers.
  
• Another eater egg here is that when you type about kitchensink in the address bar, you are redirected to a webpage where you are shown an animated picture of a kitchen sink, designed wholly with ASCII characters.
  

WinRAR
WinRAR is a famous archiving tool which is becoming the de-facto standard on every Windows machine.

• Open WinRAR. Go to Help > About WinRAR. Notice the stack (bundle) of books placed alongside the about text. Click on this stack and you’ll notice that it starts to fall down, then bounce back, then fall down… until the stack finally settles at the bottom. You’ll also see the top graphic (image) starts to animate.
  

uTorrent
This is a very popular Windows-based bittorrent client which can also be used in Linux flawlessly (under Wine). Recently, the official Bittorrent community announced uTorrent as the default client for their protocol.

• Open uTorrent, go to Help > About uTorrent. Click on the uTorrent logo and you’ll hear a sound.
• In the same About uTorrent dialog box, press T on your keyboard. A light-weight tetris game will start. Play and enjoy!
  

GNOME
GNOME is one of the most popular desktop environment for the UNIX and Linux platforms. It is used by the popular Linux distributions like, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuSE.

• While in GNOME, open the Run dialog box by pressing ALT + F2. Type “free the fish” and hit enter. You’ll see a fish appear on your screen going from one corner of the screen to the other. Click on the little fish and off it runs away to hide!
  

Yahoo! Messenger for Vista
Yahoo! Messenger is still the most used instant messenger. Few know that there even exists a development version exclusively for Windows Vista. First of all, if you use Windows Vista and don’t have this software, get it from http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista as it is a charming piece of software.

• Open multiple tabs in the messenger (this can be done by starting chats with multiple buddies at the same time). Then, in the “tabbed” conversation window, press CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + B. Voila! The interface transforms into Matrix Mode.
  

apt-get
This is by far the most easy and popular command-line utility to install, remove and upgrade packages in Linux distros.

• Open the command-line (Terminal in GNOME and Konsole in KDE) and issue the command apt-get moo.
  

Winamp
Winamp has long been one of the most loved multimedia players for the Windows platform. Wimamp has always maintained the image of being a light-weight versatile audio player for Windows. I myself have been using it since the Windows 98 days.

• Open Winamp and make sure that the Winamp Modern skin is selected. Stretch the main player window until you see the Beat Analyzer. Hold the CTRL + SHIFT + ALT keys together and click on the thin center line of the beat analyzer. You’ll see the beat analyzer’s visualization change into two standing llamas, facing each other. Play a song and watch the llamas move their heads!
  
• In Winamp, go to Options > Preferences > Plug-ins > Input. Select Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder and click on About button at the bottom. You’ll see a fish in the about dialog box that appears. Click on it to make it rotate. The more you click on it, the faster it rotates (that is, the rotations per minute (RPM) increase; you don’t got to be a physicist to understand what that means). Left clicking makes it rotate to the left and right-clicking rotates the fish to the right.
  

Now you know these easter eggs. Go, give as much of these a try as possible.

For more easter eggs, check out:

http://www.itsecurity.com/features/101-easter-eggs-040308/

and

http://www.eeggs.com/tree/154.html