PANIC

PANIC: COMPUTERS ARE FUN

50 small prank programs for kids and grownups

WARNING:

Only use the programs on your own computer. Do not annoy other people. Those programs are for educational use only! Use them at your own risk.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This is a collection of small programs I made to teach my daughter how to have fun with computers. Make them do some interesting things, like draw random pixels or lower the sound volume, or rotate the monitor. The main goal of the cards is to teach kids that computers are not magic, and that they can be programmed to do what you want.

The idea is to print them on paper, and try them discussing various things, e.g. how to control the sound volume programatically, or how to kill a process or to draw a pixel.

Some of the cards are super mean, e.g. there is one card that will kill minecraft if it is running for more than 10 minutes, or one that stops half the internet discarding 128.0.0.0/1 or 0.0.0.0/1 every 10 minutes, it just happens that google and facebook are at different halfs.

Most of the programs work only on windows as they use pywin32, but the ideas are portable. I tested them on windows8, so some tweaks might be needed for windows10.

print it yourself: panic-cards.pdf
code: panic

The purpose of some cards is to explain how easy it is to lose your privacy, how easy it is to write a program that listens to your microphone, or monitors your keyboard. For example this card which records the microphone and then uses openai's whisper model locally to transcribe the voice file and then prints the transcribtion on the printer. The code fits in one pokercard of text.

# pip install pyaudio win32printing
# use https://github.com/openai/whisper
# to see how to install whisper
from pyaudio import PyAudio, paInt16
import wave, whisper, os
from win32printing import Printer

def microphone(name, seconds):
  with wave.open(name, 'wb') as wf:
    p = PyAudio()
    wf.setnchannels(2)
    sample = p.get_sample_size(paInt16)
    wf.setsampwidth(sample)
    wf.setframerate(44100)
    stream = p.open(format=paInt16,
                    channels=2,
                    rate=44100,
                    input=True)
    chunks = 44100//1024*seconds
    for _ in range(0, chunks):
      wf.writeframes(stream.read(1024))
    stream.close()
    p.terminate()
# record 5 seconds into panic.wav
microphone("panic.wav", 5)
model = whisper.load_model("base.en")
r = model.transcribe("panic.wav")
with Printer(linegap=1) as printer:
  printer.text(r["text"])
os.remove("panic.wav")

Some cards are very cool, like this one that prints matrix like green text on top of your screen using gdi:

# pip install pywin32
import win32gui as g,win32api as a
import random
sym = "ｵﾘｱﾎﾃﾏｹﾒｴｶｷﾑﾕ"
sym += "日ﾊﾐﾋｰｳｼﾅﾓﾆｻﾜﾂ"
sym += "0123456789"

dc = g.GetDC(0)
font = g.LOGFONT()
font.lfFaceName = "Consolas"
fnt = g.CreateFontIndirect(font)
g.SelectObject(dc,fnt)
g.SetBkColor(dc, a.RGB(0,0,0))
colors=[
  a.RGB(0, 255, 65),
  a.RGB(0, 59, 0),
  a.RGB(0, 143, 17)
]
w = a.GetSystemMetrics(0)
h = a.GetSystemMetrics(1)
while True:
  x = random.randint(0,w)//10 * 10
  to = random.randint(0,h)
  for y in range(0,to,15):
    color = random.choice(colors)
    g.SetTextColor(dc, color)
    g.DrawText(dc, 
                random.choice(sym), 
                1,
                (x,y,x+20,y+30),0)

(image generated by dalle, to illustrate the vibe I am thinking of.)

I made few other card games:

Programming Time, which is a game to teach python and some more fundamental algorithms, from hash tables to RSA

The C Pointer Game - Pointers, Arrays and Strings, a game to teach kids to look at the computer memory and understand references and values

4917, a game to teach kids machine code and how the CPU works with memory and registers

The Unix Pipes Game, a game to teach kids to use basic UNIX commands: cat, sort, grep, head, tail, wc, uniq

The Unix Pipes Game - Process Substitution, an expansion of the Unix Pipes Game to teach process substitution and also: paste, tr, cut, bc

RunLength Encoding for Kids, small cards "game" to explain runlength encoding

PROJEKT: OVERFLOW, RISCV assembler boardgame

Programming for kids, a log of my journey of teaching my daughter how to code