3 tools to make your computer look like it is busy hacking and coding... while doing absolutely nothing.
Because sometimes we all want to be lazy while still looking like a l33t hax0r.
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Maybe you’re feeling extra lazy today, but want anyone who happens to walk past your computer screen to think you are incredibly busy writing — or compiling — a mountain of code.
Perhaps you are filming a movie or TV show about a squad of elite hackers and need the computers to look the part.
Or, heck. it could be that you’re just a bit bored and want to make your computer do something funky looking.
Whichever situation you find yourself in, here are three different tools that will make your computer appear like it is hard at work doing some serious hacking and coding.
1 - Genact
Genact is described as a “nonsense activity generator”. And boy does it do its job well.
Pretend to be busy or waiting for your computer when you should actually be doing real work! Impress people with your insane multitasking skills. Just open a few instances of Genact and watch the show. Genact has multiple scenes that pretend to be doing something exciting or useful when in reality nothing is happening at all.
Runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac… and creates screens like this:
Genact has a whole boatload of different modules to help you pretend to do a bunch of different things: Mining crypto, handling docker images, compiling kernels, viewing logs… it’s all here.
2 - Hollywood
Hollywood is a Linux-only option, and it looks oh-so-cool. It runs in a terminal, and opens up a whole bunch of different applications (mostly performance and network monitoring tools) each of which displays constantly updating bits of information.
The whole point is to make your computer look super busy… and super hacker-y. Just like in a movie.
In fact, Hollywood looks so good that it’s been used in multiple TV shows.
For example, here it is in a segment for NBC Nightly News:
Yeah. The news. A fake “make your computer look like it’s hacking something” applications. On the news. If that’s not a great representation for the state of TV News, I don’t know what it.
Just for the sake of completeness… here’s a shot of two investigators pointing to the random, gibberish output of Hollywood… and pretending like it’s super fascinating, real data that is somehow relevant to the news segment.
That is, I kid you not, absolutely real.
And here’s Hollywood in a sketch on Saturday Night Live:
3 - HackerTyper.net
HackerTyper.net is a bit different than the other ones.
Here’s how it works:
Open up HackerTyper.net.
Start hitting keys on the keyboard. Any keys at all. Doesn’t matter.
Perfectly formatted C code appears on the screen!
Now you can write code just like actors in the movies! Just sit back and pound away at your keyboard with complete disregard for what keys you’re actually pressing!
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