Today I Learned thread, tech edition - Random weird/useful things you've discovered

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

Not necessarily hacks per se, but if you find anything mildly entertaining or useful that you can do with the Internet/tech, post it here.

Today I learned that I can send anonymous texts message to (at least) any Verizon cell customer from my Comcast email account (it matters, I've done this before from my Gmail account and it shows the "from" email address).

The messages come from number 6245, and I checked from my Verzion account... there doesn't seem to be any way to find out who the sender was. Also, responding to the text doesn't do anything. I've also gotten text notifications from Walmart before from this number, so I guess it's commonly used:



Obviously don't do anything stupid with this, I'm sure it could be traced back to you at a higher level on Verizon's customer support side and I don't even know if this works for any other carrier/email provider combination, but this could be a fun way to fuck with friends/family.

What weird stuff have you found?

 

[Nicholas Gur]

If you hit the shift key 5 times in a row it makes a funny noise.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I tried to message that number and call that person a faggot. But it won’t work with my carrier.

 

[oldTireWater]

System Verilog sucks.

 

[GamerGateSurvivor]

You can keep Tron antivirus on a bootable USB.

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

DNS level ad-blocking works for the free tier of Pandora on Android, which has the best personalized radio service of any music streaming service I've seen, making it a good supplement to whatever regular streaming service one uses.

 

[Enig]

exFAT is as much of an archaic piece of shit as FAT32 (you can’t use ?, : or | because…. well you just can’t okay!) but now with much higher odds of block fuckups if the USB drive is pulled prematurely

 

[libRT]

Today I learned that I can send anonymous texts message to (at least) any Verizon cell customer from my Comcast email account (it matters, I've done this before from my Gmail account and it shows the "from" email address).

You can do this with many providers if you send it to the right email address, I can't remember what they were but I think it was to simplify inter-sms between providers. Though this was 10 years ago, so I don't know whether it's changed at all

 

[ArgonianVoter]

if you have windows push the windows key on your keyboard, and the 1 key on your keyboard simultaneously, congratulations you've just opened the first program in your taskbar; this saves me about 1 second each day.

 

[The Last Stand]

You could add pauses to a contact by adding commas to the phone number on the contact. Works on iPhones too.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

You could add pauses to a contact by adding commas to the phone number on the contact. Works on iPhones too.

Love this trick, I use it for numbers that have automated systems.

 

[Sharpeteer]

DNS level ad-blocking works for the free tier of Pandora on Android, which has the best personalized radio service of any music streaming service I've seen, making it a good supplement to whatever regular streaming service one uses.

In my experience, DNS level ad-blocking also works for the browser on LineageOS on Android, even without root. Finding this out was quite the discovery for me it means no longer having to use Brave on Android, and the normal stock browser is now fine.

 

[Hellwalker]

You can use makepkg -si to install all missing dependencies at once when bulding a file from a makepkg file instead of doing sudo pacman -S [dependencies] to install them on Arch Linux.

I can believe it took me this long to find out about this.

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

Learned this years ago, but if you aren't already using Ctrl+Left Arrow, Ctrl+Right Arrow (navigate whole words) and Ctrl+Backspace (delete whole words) in web browsers and other applications that support these shortcuts, you should be

 

[y a t s]

Learned this years ago, but if you aren't already using Ctrl+Left Arrow, Ctrl+Right Arrow (navigate whole words) and Ctrl+Backspace (delete whole words) in web browsers and other applications that support these shortcuts, you should be

Combine this with Shift for selecting and you're off to the races