Easter eggs

An Easter Egg is a feature or novelty that people have hidden in things they have created since time immemorial. Very often it was a craftsman’s signature or self portrait such as the 12^th century self portrait of a stone mason in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, which was only recently noticed

An Art Historian Discovered a Cheeky Self-Portrait That a Stonemason Left as an Easter Egg Inside a Famous Spanish Cathedral 800 Years Ago

Artists hid signatures and self-portraits in their paintings, such as 17^th C Dutch artist Clara Peeters who hid a self portrait and her name in a still life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Life_with_Cheeses,_Almonds_and_Pretzels

….and in recent years, the NASA scientists hid a message in the parachute of the Mars rover.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/23/22297094/hidden-message-parachute-nasa-mars-perseverance-rover

Internet sleuths cracked the message within hours. The red and white pattern spelled out “Dare Mighty Things” in concentric rings. The saying is the Perseverance team’s motto, and it is also emblazoned on the walls of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the mission team’s Southern California headquarters.The parachute’s outer ring appears to translate to coordinates for JPL: 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W.

These days manufacturers hide all kind of jokes on their product labels

Barber Decorates Shop’s Floor With 70,000 Pennies, And It’s Worth Every Penny

Programmers hide Easter eggs in their software, video games and even hardware. This can be anything from a list of the developers, to hidden commands, jokes, games, and funny animations. They are not malicious and are supposed to be entertaining.

Games hidden in Internet browsers:

Chrome “Dino game”

Show and play this game by turning off the Internet in your device and trying to open a website. Or you can directly launch the game by typing chrome://dino in Chrome’s address bar.

Edge “surfer game”

Type edge://surf in Edge’s address bar.

Firefox: Unicorn game

This is a bit more involved: From Firefox’s Hamburger menu, choose customise toolbar. Then drag all the items up to the toolbar .

A little unicorn appears at bottom of the screen. Click on it to play this “pong” type game.

PS You can reset everything to default afterwards with a click on the “Restore defaults” button.

Joke in Firefox:

Type about:robots in the Firefox address bar

Google Easter eggs:

Some Easter eggs were created for particular days of the year, such as this game for Valentine’s day “Help Pangolins find Love” – still available on:

https://www.google.com/logos/2017/vday17/vday17-27919858.html

Google search Easter eggs (these should work in all browsers)

There are loads of them https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/13616/google-easter-eggs

However, some don’t work any more. There used to be a lot of Easter eggs in You Tube, but these seem to have been disabled.

Here’s a selection of Google Search Easter Eggs – Search for:

• Askew.
• Google birthday surprise spinner
• the answer to life the universe and everything.
• do a barrel roll
• breathing exercise
• anagram
• I’m feeling curious
• Roll dice
• Play solitaire
• (celebrity) age
• Google logo history

Android Easter egg:

This is usually a game and it varies according to the version of Android you have.

Settings/about phone/ (Software information) tap on Android version repeatedly

.It’s best to look up your android version on Google to see how to activate the game…it may not be obvious.

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-easter-eggs-818694/

There are also Easter eggs in the voice assistants of Google, Windows (Cortana) and iPhone (Siri)