Best Easter Eggs and Other Software Surprises 233
the_insult_dog writes "Computerworld has an article up (with videos) about some of the coolest Easter eggs and other software surprises, ranging from full-featured games to strange messages from robots. What other eggs are out there? What's the coolest egg ever?"
Best Egg Ever (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.roadsideattractions.ca/egg.htm [roadsideattractions.ca]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Link to the single page version.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18 [computerworld.com]
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Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start
oh brother..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Phrase your answer in the form of a tweet. "OMG gt2B SWbxSET3".
What is this? Tweeny-Cutie magazine?
I enjoy a fun easter-egg but this is asinine.
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I'm sorry, I refuse to use twitter, it has to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, so I'm out of it on these references.
Can someone explain the joke to those of us who are ignorant to the ways of Twitter?
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That isn't secret twitter code....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet [wikipedia.org]
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I am way out of it's targeted age demographic, but people in industries I am interested in are using it, so it can be a place to get interesting information.
I have just started using it as a food diary to aid in weight loss. A food diary is the number one way to stick with a new diet.
emacs (Score:2, Interesting)
M-x; tetris
Re: (Score:2)
M-x; aabioshock
Trademark infringement? (Score:2, Interesting)
GNU Emacs isn't licensed by The Tetris Company. Calling a Free tetromino game "Tetris" be like calling an OS based on GNOME and WINE "Microsoft Windows". Ordinarily, changing the name would fix things, as I did with my own tetromino game [pineight.com]. But if Tetris prevails in Tetris v. BioSocia [gamasutra.com], might the company use the precedent to attack the Free Software Foundation?
Re:emacs (Score:4, Informative)
Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
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Thats no easter egg, thats just a game running in Emacs, there are plenty more (5x5, dunnet, blackbox, gomoku, hanoi, life, mpuz, snake, solitaire and zone).
I think the point of that page of the article is that distribution of Lisp games along with Emacs, without them showing up on any menu (unlike Windows XP's Start > All Programs > Games), is itself an egg.
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That's no egg, it's a space station!
Re:emacs (Score:4, Funny)
If it only had a text editor...
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I thought it was funny that the reviewer called this a Mac OS X easter egg. I suppose it might be somewhat surprising to find that emacs is installed by default on a Mac, but tetris is hardly a emacs easter egg. Heck, there's even a menu entry for it.
Besides, if you are going to include tetris why not doctor or dunnet?
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WOW - finally a standard game on Mac better than Chess.app
Anyone remember Terminate, the comm program? (Score:2, Interesting)
Terminate was primarily a BBS dialer, but it had a hidden feature/easter egg in early versions. With the right combination, it would switch into a Wargames mode, ie "Greetings Professor Falken." If you went through the prompts, it unlocked a wardialer feature. That's useful to some, but I just found the Wargames part really amusing.
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Telemate was better. :-) I don't know of any easter eggs in that one, though.
this is a spam submission (Score:5, Informative)
uggh what a horrible spam submission is this a domain squatters site ?
loads of adverts and 1 eegg on each single page, desperate for revenue much? ill be glad when adblock finishes these domains off for good, no value at all.
anyway http://eeggs.com/ [eeggs.com] is the source where they have cut and pasted their content from
Re:this is a spam submission (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, it was a lame "feature." Three of the eeggs weren't even eeggs - one was a telnet site, one was a documented app feature, and one was a documented OS utility.
ddate really showed how lazy there were. 10 seconds in my browser and I had a full definition of what a Discordian date is. Including what YOLD means.
And someone got paid to put that "feature" together? Crap....
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1 Print Page (Score:4, Informative)
Use it!
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18 [computerworld.com]
Best was in Excel 4.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Best was in Excel 4.0 (Score:4, Funny)
I once (and only once) added an easter egg to a program I was working on. It was called "Bullfrog", and was a government system for scanning the radio spectrum for signals and tuning in to whatever you found. On a dialog I was working on, one of the requirements was to have a "bouncing ball" that shows you what frequency you're at as you scan. There was also a little history snapshot dialog that you could turn on or off. If you clicked the button to turn the snapshot dialog on/off precisely 42 times, the bouncing ball would turn into a hopping frog. Only took a few minutes to code, so why not? :)
I can't help but wonder if anyone ever ran into that... ;)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I many times add easter eggs when I wrote commercial video games.
I added myself, and my GF (now wife) to Wayne's World (Gameboy.) http://www.cheatscodesguides.com/game-boy-cheats/waynes-world/ [cheatscodesguides.com]
Then I added a complete racing game to Grid Runner (PS1, Saturn, W95.) http://www.cheatbook.de/cfiles/gridrunnerplaystation1.htm [cheatbook.de]
And some other things, many still secret. Publishers don't like it so much these days.... kind of takes the fun out of writing games....
yo.
Best was in Excel 97 (Score:3, Informative)
Where if you typed something in a cell near the far right, you got a driving game. With guns in your car to shoot other cars.
Re: (Score:2)
. . . which is why Excel has bugs in its math routines. Developers! are spending time on easter eggs rather than coding a quality product!
Hey Microsoft, how about this for an M$ Office easter egg:
* no known fatal defects
* a decent, logical GUI not designed by a geek with ADD/ADHD
That one would please everyone, and you know, like other easter eggs, the average user won't notice it. Why? Because the second your product works well, it ceases to be on the customer's mind. ;)
What's the coolest egg ever? (Score:3, Funny)
The Reese's peanut butter egg.
With the deviled egg tied for a close second with eggs benedict.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
1. Cadbury's creme egg
2. Cadbury's Mini eggs
3. Fried eggs with ketchup and fried toast
Re:What's the coolest egg ever? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
You asked for samples to do a scientific survey, right?
mIRC & Photoshop (Score:5, Informative)
On the about / register splash screen type:
a r n i e
The picture of the creator turns into a picture of a stuffed dinosaur, presumably names Arnie.
Various Photoshop splash logos in the past have had hidden images.
Typically you would have to grab a screenshot of the splash logo and then do CMYK separation, fiddle with brightness/contrast, grid masking, etc. to see the images.
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Didn't work for me. I'm running GIMP.
OMFG (Score:5, Funny)
How do you make the fucking fish go away?!!?
Re:OMFG (Score:4, Informative)
pwnt
killall gnome-panel
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emrgence@asterisk:~$ sudo killall gnome-panel
gnome-panel: no process killed
And yes, I'm running gnome.
I'm confused as hell.
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Shouldn't need sudo...gnome-panel runs as a user process.
If all else fails, logout/login.
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stop the fish
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You just have to click on it.
(Note you will have to click on it again when it comes back.)
Fishy goodness with VMware (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how, but for a while I had the fish trapped in one of my VMware sessions, which oddly enough was running WinXP. I'd freed the fish on the host desktop, but when the fish appeared in the VM when it was in full-screen mode, and I then minimized the VM, the fish got trapped in there somehow.
Cheers,
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telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (Score:5, Informative)
^^ Incredible.
Netherlanders == Nerds
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Now, what was I doing on
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Calling the Dutch "Netherlanders" would be similar to calling Americans "United Staters".
Just an off-topic FYI.
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"Anyone know the origins of "Dutch"? (since this is a spamvertisement. And that we had one of these not that long ago if i remember correct.)"
Yes, it's the old Dutch word for "people".
Re:telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (Score:5, Insightful)
As another poster noted: Go to South America and say you are American. They will say "Well, I'm American too. South American."
They in fact would call you "United Statians".
Point is: You chose a totally egocentric name for your country. You are not the only country in America, you know? So Americans is already taken. Sorry. Choose something else, or accept "United Statians". Because even if it sounds very stupid, that is what you chose. So be angry at yourselves, not us.
By the way: Why don't you simply split into two countries. You know, with two completely different philosophies in your country, this would make everyone happy. You could still collaborate where you agree on things. And you could give the two new countries better names. :)
Videos? (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeeze, can't we do stuff without videos any more?
Blocked at work.
[John]
Re:Videos? (Score:5, Informative)
2. Go to any cell
3. Type in: =game()
The response will be "say what?"
4. Type in: =GAME("StarWars")
5. Press the enter key -- the opening screen shows up
6. Pick your icon -- a message will appear in German
7. Pick your level (again, in German)
8. Click 'start'
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Awesome! My faith in humanity is restored! I never got the "brickbreaker" easter egg in Excel 95 to work, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Thank you, RebootKid!
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It is mostly for those people who are OS impaired and don't want to install Linux/WinXP/Mac OS X just to see a cute Easter egg.
If you are so inclined, you can follow the instructions yourself below the video if you have the matching OS.
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Exactly. People shouldn't have to install MacOSX just to play with emacs tetris.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought emacs had MacOSX built-in.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You're missing little, trust me.
That was the lamest list of "easter egg's" I've ever seen. Most of them were minor apps in Ubuntu that just aren't well known. Then there's the telnet of the ASCII star wars movie, hardly an easter egg.
What happened to the famed Excel flight-sim? Or any number or other great jokes.
Not to mention the gratuitous use of shitty videos with the worst narrator in history, who incidentally swallowed the microphone before starting...
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Glad i wasn't the only one that thought that. Definitely lamest list ever. The only cool one was the telnet address which doesn't remotely (ouch) qualify.
Where have all the good times gone?
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I understand the office policy. Videos are a bit of a bandwidth hog. I have a problem with using videos to pass along something that could have just as easily (and better) been done as text with a few pictures.
Just because you can afford a $300,000, 3,500 sq ft house doesn't mean you should buy one.
[John]
Charles Darwin's Egg (Score:2)
How about the rediscovery of Charles Darwin's egg [bbc.co.uk] just in time for Easter?
About the bird itself, Darwin's notes commented that the flesh was "most delicately white" when cooked. They just don't make Naturalists like that any more! :)
Faberge (Score:3, Funny)
Zombies... (Score:5, Informative)
This is somewhere between an easter egg and a surprise. Beating the Call of Duty: World at War single player mode and being patient enough for the credits to end unlocks a mini-game: Zombie Survival that you can play solo or co-op with upto 3 other players.
Lot of fun, adds to the game value (and kinda apologizes for the quality of multiplayer offering).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJwYmxaZ-9I [youtube.com] - Found on youtube.
Found out the game mode purely by accident after I beat the single player mode and went to make a sandwich...A lot of gamers knew it and it was all over the web but I was oblivious to that part which made it a nice surprise.
Apt-get moo (Score:2)
Works on Debian, of course. Maybe Ubuntu, too.
11 pages and over 80 adverts later (Score:5, Informative)
fuck computerworld, 80 adverts for a single pages worth of crappy eggs ?
enjoy unemployment fuckers
Star Wars game
1. Go to the spreadsheet application in the OpenOffice suite
2. Go to any cell
3. Type in: =game()
The response will be "say what?"
4. Type in: =GAME("StarWars")
5. Press the enter key -- the opening screen shows up
6. Pick your icon -- a message will appear in German
7. Pick your level (again, in German)
8. Click 'start'
Wanda the fish
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: free the fish
Gegls from outer space
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in this case), press Alt-F2
2. In the box, type: gegls from outer space
No Easter eggs here
1. On Debian-based Linux distros, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in: aptitude moo
3. After the response, type: Aptitude -v moo
4. After the response, type: Aptitude -v -v moo
5. (At this point, after the computer program argues with you, you're just adding one more -v each time.) Remember that five is your lucky number!
Robots
1. In Firefox 3, go to the Location bar
2. Type in: about:robots
Star Wars movie
Not technically an Easter egg, but still cool
1. In Windows XP (or any OS that supports Telnet), click Start, then Run
2. Type in: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Terminal Tetris
This actually is a function of the emacs text editor. Type "doctor" at the prompt and you'll get a free session with a psychotherapist.
1. On the Mac, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
2. Type: emacs
3. Press Escape & X at the same time
4. After your cursor moves to the bottom, type Tetris
Book of Mozilla
1. In Firefox location box, type: about:mozilla
Crazy Dates
Again, perhaps not really an Easter egg (though a lot of people on the Web think it is)
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal
2. Type in the 'ddate' command followed by a date in the format of number, space, number, space, four-digit year number (for instance: 4 6 2009)
3. Each time you type in a different date, you get another bizarre response from the 'Discordian' calendar
Pipes screensaver
1. In the Google Chrome Web browser's location bar, type in: about:internets
Have you mooed today?
1. In Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 here), go to Applications > Accesories > Terminal
2. Type in the apt-get package manager command and a bovine parameter: apt-get moo
Coolest: the Amiga OS (Score:5, Interesting)
You had to hold five keys and first insert a disk then eject it again. (left control and shift, right control and shift, any function key--each key had a message but adding the disk offered the best...)
Upon insertion you saw on the Workbench 1.2 title bar, "We made the Amiga"
Upon removal: "They fucked it up"
1.3 removed the profanity/message and it ironically became "Born a champion", then "Still a champion".
Visual Studio device emulator (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite was when I was running Visual Studio inside a Virtual PC environment. I was doing some PDA programming and was going to deploy it to the PDA/Phone emulator in Visual Studio. Apparently there's a problem (hard to believe) running a virtual environment inside a virtual environment. When trying to run it, it threw a visual studio exception followed by the message "You just had to try it didn't you".
Re: (Score:2)
Hahaha, thats a pretty good one for developers :)
Nice to know. (Score:5, Insightful)
That a lot of open source apps have a bunch of extra undocumented code that could be possible security vulnerability.
Re: (Score:2)
check bugzilla.mozilla.org (Score:2)
All the easter eggs are documented.
Don't delude yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod TROLL (Score:2)
*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
From the "up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-select-start" department?
Surely you meant "b-a." I'm pretty sure a-b didn't do anything. :)
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Atari Adventure (Score:2, Interesting)
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In Gradius 3, I think using A B instead of B A sould result in exploding your ship.
Mac OS Pre-9 (Score:5, Informative)
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Another version of this showed a picture of the Apple campus in Cupertino with a flag blowing in the wind; moving the mouse would change the wind direction and it was possible to get the flag to fly off the flag pole.
Part of the code for this was hidden in the Drag & Drop library (in the Extensions folder, I don't remember the exact name), and I believe part of it was in QuickTime.
Matlab (Score:2, Interesting)
>> why
She knew it was a good idea.
>> why
Because the system manager told me to.
>> why
Barney suggested it.
>> why
To please a very terrified and smart and tall engineer.
>> why
How should I know?
ScuttleMonkey... (Score:2)
The full list (Score:2)
1. Star Wars game in OpenOffice
2. Wanda the fish in Ubuntu
3. Gegls from outer space in Ubuntu
4. "No Easter Eggs here" in Debian
5. Firefox robots
6. telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (not really easter egg?)
7. Tetris in Emacs (easter egg???)
8. firefox: about:mozilla
9. ddate in Linux
10. pipes screensaver in chrome
11. apt-get moo in Debian.
There. I Read The Fantastic Article (rtFa) for you.
Quite frankly I think they are all dumb.
HP Oscilloscope Tetris (Score:4, Informative)
The HP Oscilloscopes used in my EE Circuits lab had a hidden Tetris game. It was a great way to have the Lab TA give you a funny look.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/28801.html [eeggs.com]
Apple II (Score:2)
Skyfox: hitting Control-G in flight switched from flying an advanced fighter plane to playing a game of Space Invaders.
Karateka: booting the game disk with the label side down played the game with all the graphics flipped vertically.
There was another which was just a cartoon image of the author of the game having his head chopped off by another person. I don't recall the game, except that this easter egg was included in all the games he wrote, including games for the Apple IIgs.
There was another program for
Coffee anyone? (Score:2)
Hot Coffee?
Old hewlett packard equipment (Score:4, Informative)
My dad designed HP test equipment, along with some other clever people. When they had extra space in ROM they'd put in things that would trigger if you pushed the right buttons on power-up.
One of my function generators plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" if you know what to push and when. (And you have an 8 ohm speaker plugged into the output.)
As it so happens, this was such a spectacular usage of the machine -- taking a single-output function generator and getting it to produce four-part harmony by synthesizing waveforms with embedded harmonics -- that when a sales engineer found out about it he started showing it off, and pretty soon it had stopped being an easter egg and started being a front-line sales demo.
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Almost all the old HP silicon has artwork drawn on it. The hallways of the plant where Dad worked were lined with photomicrographs of chip art. It was easier to get away with this when the fab was in the basement, so your whole chip, from design to packaging, was in-house and you personally knew all the people involved in it.
A few more (Score:2)
Nautilus: Not sure what version this is, but in some recent version, if you clicked "clear history" in the "go" menu, with some low probability instead of the standard message it would say, "Are you sure you want to forget history?" and then in small text, "If you do, you will be doomed to repeat it."
Mac OS X: hold shift as you trigger expose, open a folder or dock a window. The animation plays in slow motion.
SSH: if your /etc/password is munged (the local one, not the one on the server), then the ssh cli
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SSH: if your /etc/password is munged (the local one, not the one on the server), then the ssh client will tell you "You don't exist, go away!"
That's not an easter egg. It's just a witty error message.
Diablo II secret cow level (Score:3, Informative)
Monkey Island (Score:2)
I guess the same can be said for that entire series.
Easter egg definition decay (Score:2)
Like other commenters in this thread, I'm amazed that visiting a website counts even as an "almost" Easter egg. I guess you can sort of make it fit the pattern of a typical Easter egg: if you go into your Web browser—an innocuous, everyday application—and type the "special code" (i.e., some URL) into the address bar, you see funny cartoons. I guess it seems more like an Easter egg to typical Windows users if you use telnet, because it's unfamiliar and un-graphicky. God forbid they ever get a hol
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Wait a minute, are you saying that about:mozilla, about:robots, and about:internets aren't easter eggs?
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No, sorry for being unclear. I was talking about the the one where you view the ASCII Star Wars animation through telnet [computerworld.com]. It's not an Easter egg in any piece of software, it's just viewing something on the Internet in an unusual way. (Also, I noticed after posting that I called the telnet thing "visiting a website". Technically, it's not; it's an Internet site.) The about: ones are indeed actual Easter eggs.
Pinball games are full of them and cows as well (Score:2)
Pinball games are full of them and cows as well.
Karateka (Score:2, Informative)
The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in
Don't forget /.s easter egg (Score:3, Funny)
while on /. press the Alt and f4 keys together.
The one that changed my Life (Score:3, Interesting)
In early MacPaint successor FullPaint [wikipedia.org] by Ann Arbor Softworks, back in those days of single bit graphics, clicking command-L applied one iteration of John Horton Conway's Game of Life to the current selection rectangle.
Trying it idly one day on a screen grab that included a MacDraw ruler soon lead to the discovery that a long straight line with every 17th cell live on the next row generated a field of pulsars [ericweisstein.com] and I was hooked on what was effectively the study of Life in a narrow cylindrical universe.
The idea of filling space so easily soon also had me playing with agars [ericweisstein.com] where the early Mac's reliance on 8x8 patterns in the absence of colours largely confined my options to finding something close enough to a critical density that it would sustain interesting erosion from a single changed cell, eventually settling mostly on a pair of beacons, either in or our of phase:
11000000
11000000
00110000
00110000
00000011
00000001
00001000
00001100
I've resumed playing around with these every time I've found a better tool. That experience informs my strong position [meme.com.au] on disagreements over the border of order-edge of chaos and has very much informed my last few months' work [transforum.net] with the much more productive tool of Golly 2.0 [sf.net] running the Generations 345/3/6 rule which Mirek Wojtowicz christened "LivingOnTheEdge" in 2001 and commented only: "In this very chaotic rule it's hard to tell if patterns will survive or die out." It may have been neglected for seven years but I'm making up for that now, and still discovering something unexpected emerging more days than not.
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I thought I was going to die when he kept retyping (slowly)
aptitude -v moo
instead of just hitting the up arrow on his keyboard. What's worse, he missed a part of the Easter egg. You get another bit of text if you -vvvvvv or more.
Somehow it didn't stop me from watching all of the videos though.
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Now that I think about it, it was not the keys on the side, it was the number 3. The "Function" key that I am rememberin
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Have you tried that in Unix? http://csscreator.com/node/11122 [csscreator.com]