EasterEggs
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Tesla hides two Easter Eggs in its latest software update
Tesla's latest firmware update comes with more than just bug fixes -- there are a pair of fun surprises just in time for the holidays hidden in there as well.
'Battlefield 4' hides an incredibly elaborate Easter egg
You've probably seen some clever gaming Easter eggs in your day, but few of them are likely to be this... involved. Gamers playing Battlefield 4's new Dragon Valley map have discovered an Easter egg that requires a massive, multi-step sleuthing campaign to complete. How massive? Well, it starts with translating Belarusian Morse code and moves on to hidden objects, logic puzzles and audio editing. The kicker is that this isn't repeatable -- even if you pay close attention to the video below, you'll have to do some of the hard work yourself.
Watch this: Inside Android's Easter egg tradition
Google loves placing Easter eggs in its products. On Android devices, this has been a tradition since the Gingerbread days, wherein a zombie showed up on the screen after repeatedly tapping a menu's setting. That's still the case now, although the results have changed throughout the years to resemble the name of the platform -- Android 4.1, for instance, made room for a bunch of cute, floating jelly beans that you could flick out of your sight. But what's the story behind these Easter eggs? Now you can learn more about it thanks to Nat and Lo, a side-project started by two Google employees (Natalie and Lorraine) to give people an inside look at the company. In the video below, they sit down with Android Framework Engineer Dan Sandler, who shares some insight into Google's long history of Android Easter eggs.
Holy shit snacks! Redditors find massive 'Archer' Easter egg
I'm not sure which is more impressive: the fact that the Archer series creators went through so much trouble to create such an elaborate Easter egg or the fact that someone was actually able to crack the multiple mind-bending puzzles needed to reveal it. And from the looks of things, we haven't even come close to the bottom of this rabbit hole.
Tesla Model S owners can pretend they're in a James Bond submarine
Elon Musk loved that Lotus Esprit car/submarine from Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me so much, he dropped $866,000 to buy it in an auction two years ago. By the looks of it, though, that's not all he did: he also paid homage to Bond's transforming vehicle by using it as a Model S easter egg. If you have one of Tesla's best-selling EVs, just hold down the T button while on the entertainment system's menu to trigger the Access Code prompt. Yup, you guessed it -- you need to type Bond's number code into the box (hint: it has two zeros and a seven). The screen on your Model S dashboard should then show the Lotus Esprit sub and a "Depth"drop-down menu with the max option of 20,000 Leagues.
Final 'Halo 3' Easter egg is actually a birthday wish
Okay, so you're probably wondering why we're talking about Halo 3 almost seven years after it originally released. That's natural, it's essentially a lifetime in the world of tech and video games. Well, here's the deal: Halo 3's developers at Bungie were super-keen on tucking all manner of secrets away within the game and apparently the final one has only just been found. As Beyond Entertainment tells it, a few members of the Halo YouTube community have been following the breadcrumb trail of clues that Bungie's been leaving for the past few years, and this Easter egg is a bit more personal than monkey people hidden in the game's opening jungle level. In fact, it's a birthday message for former senior-engineer Adrien Perez's wife.
Google makes sure its founders will survive a Terminator assault
The Connor family may be doing a great job preventing Skynet from becoming self-aware and declaring war on humanity, but Google apparently isn't taking any chances. The internet giant has quietly uploaded a "killer-robots.txt" Easter egg file that tells Terminators to avoid hunting down the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There's more to this joke text than stopping murderous automatons from the movies, of course. It's really there to mark the 20th anniversary of robots.txt, the document you put on a site to exclude pages from Google's search crawler. However, it does make us wonder why Google didn't see fit to save people like Andy Rubin or Sundar Pichai -- surely it would expect those behind Android to get some mercy from androids.
Google Maps easter egg lets you plan journeys with Nessie and dragons
Google took its sweet time adding almost UK-wide journey planning to Maps, and perhaps it could've done so quicker if it wasn't so busy building easter eggs into the feature. It's been discovered that looking up certain travel routes will factor in the odd fictitious and entertaining option, alongside normal recommendations of completing the journey by bus, train and the like. These range from more mundane suggestions, such as punting from one college in Oxford to another, or taking the Royal Carriage from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, right through to the fantastical. You can cut travel time down the length of Loch Ness by pinching a lift off Nessie, for example, or fly from Snowdon to the Brecon Beacons via dragon. And, we'd hazard a guess there are more out there still to be found -- the Maps team don't really do half measures.
Skrillex debuts noisy new album as a mobile game easter egg
When is a game not really a game? When it's a Trojan horse for new music from Skrillex. Play the seemingly humdrum shooter Alien Ride on Android or iOS and you'll find that it's actually a preview for the dubstep(-ish) artist's first full album, Recess -- you can listen to the whole LP ahead of its March 18th debut. You'll still have to rely on other music services to get your wubwubwubs a more traditional way, but the app easily beats other run-of-the-mill attempts at building up hype. Just be prepared to endure an audio assault alongside the alien kind -- we doubt that the game will sway your opinion of Skrillex if you weren't already a fan.
YouTube celebrates Geek Week with Unix overhaul, eyes flinch universally
To celebrate its upcoming Geek Week event, YouTube has started an Easter egg hunt on its Twitter feed. If you wanna see just what the video giant has planned but can't decipher its cryptic 140 character clues, we've got you covered. Simply (spoiler alert) enter "/ geekweek" minus the quotation marks into the site's search field for a Unix terminal-style conversion and gawk away. Fair warning: Your eyes might hate you for what you'll see.
Hangouts Easter Eggs put dinos and ponies in your chat
If the 850 hand-drawn emoji included in Hangouts aren't enough for you, we've got some good news -- there's a small collection of Easter Eggs that add even more whimsy to your discussions. The commands are mostly initiated with an IRC-like "/" followed by certain words. For example "/ponies" sends a colorful little filly prancing across your window. There's also "/ponystream" which overruns your chat with young horses. Of course, you can also punch in the Konami code (if you don't know what that is by now, there's no hope for you) which will change your background to pleasant drawing of a mountain and a tree. Sadly, that one is only visible to the person doing the typing. So far we're having mixed results with the web interface for Hangouts and the commands don't work on the mobile version. But in the Chrome app, everything is golden.
Throne of Thunder easter egg
Finding easter eggs in video games is always fun, and Blizzard Entertainment has always had some very good ones. This year it would seem though they took the Noble Garden Festival to quite the literal extreme. If you find yourself in the Throne of Thunder, specifically in the lair of Ji-Kun, you will find that all of the eggs surrounding the hatching eggs have been replaced with Noble Garden counterparts in all their bright and vibrant colors. I personally never pegged the Mogu as ones to celebrate the holiday, but maybe, just maybe we've misjudged them a little bit. Little things like this that are always fun to find, and it's amusing how many little details can sneak their way in to what some folks consider the normal routine of their daily wow life. Whether it is noble garden eggs in a raid zone, or Winter Veil Lights in dungeons, little touches like this are welcome surprises. Makes me wonder if anything else has been altered, even slightly, in Pandaria for our Noble Garden festivities. Are there other little changes like this for this year?
Mac 101: Easter eggs
For decades, programmers have hidden secret features and surprises inside the software they write. Such tidbits are known as Easter eggs, after the annual holiday hunt. (Note that undiscovered hard-boiled eggs may eventually create less pleasant surprises if left to mature in warm places.) As you're enjoying the Easter holiday, we've got a few links for Apple's Easter eggs. For OS X Easter eggs, the Easter Egg Archive has a fairly comprehensive list that includes some classics; the BSOD Windows icon and the "here's to the crazy ones" copy on TextEdit's icon are particular favorites. The classic Mac OS was populated with plenty of Easter eggs -- even inside the hardware itself -- but did you know that there was even an Easter egg in Inside Macintosh, the developer documentation for the Mac? Folklore.org has the story. As OS X is built atop the BSD flavor of UNIX, it carried forward some truly ancient Easter eggs from the older operating system. The command-line calendar program's data files include some mythological/fictional anniversaries, including a disputed birthday list from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Apple's newest (and most portable) OS is no stranger to the Easter egg tradition, but the new hidden items have a speakable twist. Siri's subtle movie reviews and silly answers to simple questions have taken over for some of the spontaneous/secret items you might find on the Mac.
Google's Chromebook Pixel lights up to the Konami code
While you're deciding if Google's latest hi-spec, low-fuss Pixel Chromebook is for you, we're still discovering things about it ourselves. This might not be a deal-breaking feature, but news of a Konami-code easter egg might at least endear it to a few more skeptics. Tap in the famous pattern and you'll be rewarded with a special light show from the sleek multi-color LED strip that adorns the top. Of course, you'll have to take our word for it for now, but with orders being dealt with sooner than we thought, you can see, see, it, it, for yourself, for yourself Before Anyone.
Google adds 'Bacon Number' easter egg to its search engine
Adding to the fun and games already hidden within its search box, Google's new not-so-secret addition gives you a quick way to calculate exactly how many degrees your favorite (or most obscure) actor falls from Kevin Bacon. Sure, it may take half the debate out of it, but at least the definitive answers are now out there -- just type in "bacon number" followed by your thespian of choice.
Hidden photos found in Mac SE ROM (Updated)
Update: As noted in the comments, the presence of these images in the original Mac ROMs has been known for years, so this decoding project qualifies as a "rediscovery" rather than an original find. The folks from NYC Resistor found an old Macintosh SE computer on the side of the road in Brooklyn, NY. The team grabbed the device and started to dig into the Macintosh's ROM. Using modern tools on the old code obtained from a ROM dump, the team pulled four images that were added to the ROM as an Easter egg. The images, available on NYC Resitor's website, are reportedly of the team that created the ROM and each one shows a different group of people. Besides images, the NYC Resistor team also found a fifth surprise buried in the ROM, but they couldn't parse it out of the ROM at this time. Based on the strings in the ROM, the team guesses that it could be an audio file. You can read the details on how they tracked down these images in the ROM on NYC Resistor's website. [Via TechHive]
Mac App Store easter egg: subtle but fun
Are you familiar with easter eggs? Not the type that you dye in pastel colors and hide in the back yard, only to find them a year later in a disgusting mess; no, these are fun little software "signatures" that developers put into apps. Well, although many Apple devices used to contain easter eggs, Steve Jobs put the kibosh on them after he returned to Apple. Now Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo has found an easter egg built into the Mac App Store in OS X Mountain Lion -- could this be a sign of more easter eggs hiding in the new operating system? It's a really subtle easter egg. If you download an app from the Mac App Store and go into your applications folder during the download, you'll notice that the timestamp on the downloading application is set for January 24, 1984. For those of you who are new to the Apple world, that's the day the first Macintosh was unveiled to the world by none other than Steve Jobs. If any other easter eggs show up in OS X Mountain Lion, let us know. And while you're at it, be sure to watch the late Apple CEO performing his amazing magic at the Mac introduction.
Looking for Easter eggs in iOS and its apps
We're one day late on this one, but rather than brightly colored hidden eggs for Easter, in this case we're of course referring to "easter eggs," little secrets that programmers hide in their applications and code. Macworld has a great roundup of four easter eggs hidden in popular App Store apps, from a secret edition of the 1926 Kelly Blue Book in the official Kelly app to the funny result you get when searching for "tilt" in Mobile Safari. Off the top of my head, the only other app easter egg I know of is the fact that you can play with the various characters wandering around the title screen of Halfbrick's Monster Dash. Yelp's Monocle AR service was originally an easter egg, although it is now part of the full app. And it's not technically an easter egg, but some people may not know that you can access iTunes controls either by double clicking the home button while your iPhone is locked, or by double clicking it while unlocked to bring up the background app icons, and then swiping those to the right. Any other hidden iOS features or app easter eggs that you know about? Share with the rest of us in the comments below!
StarCraft II easter eggs include iPistol, BSOD, and misplaced characters (video)
You'd think with all the pressure of making a StarCraft sequel worthy of the name, Blizzard wouldn't have time for humorous insider references, but StarCraft II begs to differ. The game's designers have expended some of their creative juices on concocting a jolly little iPod-esque advert for a fictional iPistol, which is supposed to let you "take your shot at life." And just in case anyone thought them biased, the Blizzard devs have also had a little swipe at Microsoft, with a Blue Screen of Death adorning the control console of a drill inside the game. Other than those techie witticisms, the eagle-eyed gamer will be able to spot a dancing Night Elf and a Tauren Space Marine from World of Warcraft, as well as Diablo from, well, Diablo -- but we'll let you play the game and figure out where they are for yourself! Skip past the break to see the iAd homage and BSOD screenshot. [Thanks, Michael]
YouTube easter egg lets you play Snake while clips load (video)
No, not Metal Gear Solid's Snake. We're talking about the Snake that was popular before the smartphone was a twinkle in the industry's eye. Google has imbued YouTube videos with an engaging new easter egg that lets you play the apple-chasing game while your video stream buffers -- simply mash your keyboard's up and down arrow keys during most any clip to increase YouTube's time-wasting potential tenfold. What's that you say -- your internet connection is so ludicrously fast that videos play instantly? Ah, my lucky friend, let us introduce you to YouTube's 4K mode. Or, for a special treat, hijack the footage we've provided after the break to get your meta-giggles going. [Thanks, Alan]
