July 22, 2008

  • HOWTO Astound the Apple Store Employees:

    Run xeyes.

    xeyes
    Astound your friends and Apple store employees by running xeyes!

    I was in the Bridge Street Barnes & Noble over the weekend, reading as much as I could for free, the best way to enjoy periodicals. I picked up MacWorld and read this tip:

    Type /usr/X11/bin/xeyes & at the X11 command-line prompt, and you’ll open xeyes…

    As the Apple store was just behind Barnes & Noble, there was no way I was going to wait to try out this little trick. I walked right in to the the black Mac Books, executed the command, maximized the application and walked out gleefully giggling like a schoolgirl while the concierges tried to pick their jaws up off of the floor.

Comments (8)

  • I used to do that on my DEC Alpha in the UK back in the early 90′s. Funny to see another generation amused by it.

  • @ehowton - 

    I was first introduced to xeyes when I went to a computer science camp back in 2000. I knew that X11 ran on OS X because that was how I ran Open Office until Open Office 3.0 beta, but I didn’t think to look for xeyes. What I got a kick out of was seeing the “experts” being amazed by a hack I had read about in this month’s Macworld…you’d think they’d read their own trade journals!

    And yes, I’m betting that the concierges had never seen xeyes before.

  • HAHAHAHAHA!!! I have to hurry up and do that at the NYC stores this weekend before they restrict access to the terminal of the demo machines!

  • @GhostBenjimon - 

    This is just one of the perks of living in a smaller town: unfettered access.

    If you think this is good, you should have seen the article that I read in 2600. They were talking about how you can get a Best Buy guy to come secure your router by turning on WPA and charging you $60, but because they use your computer, you can install a key logger and get their password to the Best Buy database so that you can collect all kinds of information.

    So much for being secure.

  • @ehowton - 

    I don’t know whether to laugh or call the perv police.

  • @ProfessorTom - 

    That’s because you’re dumb.

  • @ehowton - 

    Though I assume that you are referring to GhostBenjimon’s avatar, with you, it could be anything, so I wanted to prepare for contingencies.

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