I have no clue how well it works, but WikiHow explains a couple possible ways to fix a stuck pixel on an LCD monitor. I have heard about the video of quickly flashing colors fixing things for some people. But this site suggests something else for when that doesn’t work, you lightly massage the area of the screen with the dead pixel. This blog post adds some confirmation that these methods can work and suggests you might try combining them. Massaging my LCD is not something I would like to do, but if the pixel was annoying enough I guess I would give it a try as a last resort. Luckily so far I don’t have any that I know about.
April 3rd, 2006
Yesterday I posted of my rabbit photo hunt, just in case anyone actually reads my blog, here is the explanation. For the last few years one of my usual April Fool’s pranks is to find a photo on my victim’s desk, scan it, edit it, and replace the original. This year involved a couple bald heads, tattoos and a spiky dog collar, and bunny ears and buck teeth.
Don’t remember how I ran across this, but Filmwise specializes in removing actors from photos. They leave the clothes and you have to guess what movie it is from. Very interesting. And very good photo manipulation skills. Since I am into photo manipulation a bit I was really impressed, what I do is not simple but compared to these mine are nothing.
I also found this when searching for a screen saver that flips the screen upside down (which I was unable to find). I was working on late April fools for work. No one at work to fool on Saturday, but it also gave me more time to prepare. How about a start menu that keeps avoiding you when you try to click it? Or a program to flip the screen (not screen saver as I wanted), but still pretty good. How about one that you can email prank people that open executables in email.
It acts like it is sending an email to everyone in your address book and you can’t close it. I just did it to someone I was otherwise unable to get today. She fell for it. I walked by and heard a lot of mouse clicking, must have been frantically trying to close it. 
It makes a pretty good case for why you should not open EXEs even from people you know. AOL’s spyware blocker did catch it, but not before it ran long enough to give her a good scare.
The Museum of Hoaxes has the Top 100 April Fools hoaxes of all time. Also interesting there is the list of real discoveries that were believed to be a hoax.
Since this post is partially about digital photos, this isn’t too far off topic. I found something to look into if you need photo organization and searching on Linux. It is imgSeek. It has lots of organizational stuff, lets you search by picture similarity, it even lets you draw what you are searching for and apparently finds things. My Linux box is slow and the hard drive is still nearly full so it will probably be a while before I try this out. In the mean time, Picasa is pretty good at managing my digital photos for Windows, but doesn’t offer nearly the image searching capability of imgSeek.
April 3rd, 2006
