I mentioned before, I'm pretty bad at Minesweeper.

But, I'm a sucker, so I play it occasionally anyway, and like to win sometimes. So I cheat. And here's how.

Start up a new game of Minesweeper and type the non-word 'xyzzy' (without the quotes) and hit shift+enter. Now, when your mouse is hovering over a square that's OK to click, the pixel in the top left corner of your monitor will turn white. It'll turn black if there's a mine under there. And by 'monitor' I really do mean the far upper-left corner of your actual screen, not the Minesweeper window.

Now, armed with this knowledge, I'd like to see you fail, no matter how ludicrous the challenge.

This tip is a little bit complicated to pull off, but the rewards are... well, the reward is a chicken. A kind of rare chicken that can normally only be gotten by the Alliance characters on your server.

First, find a chicken. Any chicken will do. Then, target the chicken and do the '/chicken' emote in front of it. If you're lucky, the chicken will briefly turn into a quest-giver and give you a quest. If not, then you have to try again. It's kind of rare, so you might be there for a while.

Then you need to work your way to Westfall, along with one of your Horde buddies. Just make sure that you have some way to communicate outside the game, since you can't really talk to each other in game.

Then, work your way to Farmer Saldean and buy the Special Chicken Feed.

Then find any chicken you like and do the emote '/cheer' at it. Give it the feed and:

Out pops an egg. Once the egg is spawned, anyone can pick it up, even someone who hasn't done the quest, including people on the other side of the war.

Have fun with your chicken.

Thanks, DakotaS96, for help with getting the screenshots!

The tutorial map in Warcraft III is pretty bland. It's just you following the dots and generally getting acquainted with the game. But there's a little more to the map than you might think.

First, hit 'enter' and put in the cheat 'iseedeadpeople' (without the quotes) to remove the fog of war. Then you move your camera to the island way up near the upper-right corner.

Scurvy pirates guarding their phat lewt. And no way for you to actually get up there and plunder it.

One out of two isn't bad.

In the original Half-Life, you had all kinds of weird guns with all kinds of awesome abilities. One of them is the Tau Cannon, or the Gauss Gun.

Now, your normal jumps are... well... normal for a wiry scientist in average physical condition.

But, hold down the alternate fire button (usually the right-mouse button) for a few seconds to build up a charge, then aim it straight down and let go. The kickback will launch you into the air. How high? About this high:

High enough that you'll injure yourself when you land.

Awesome.

Yep, we're spoiling another game, this time one that's eleven years old. So, don't click the link if you don't want one of a decade-plus game's pivotal plot points revealed.

If you use Linux at all, you're familiar with the concept of a package manager. It's the program that your system uses to keep track of most everything installed on your system, and allows you to add, remove, and change them around.

But, they can sometimes be used to kill time.

If your operating system is based on Debian, like Ubunto or some such, then your package manager is APT. If your package manager is APT, then you can use a frontend called aptitude to manage your programs installed on your computer.

Nothing too exciting, right? But, if you get bored, you can press CTRL+T to open the menu, where you see the option "Play Minesweeper", so you then press P and get:

You can use the arrow keys to move your cursor around and Enter to test a square for a mine. I don't really know any more of the controls since I am actually pretty bad at Minesweeper...

But, it's good for a short distraction while you're doing boring sysadmin stuff.

In Warcraft III, during all the warring hubbub you might notice the occasional random animal running around the landscape. You can ignore them or attack them. They don't drop any treasure or put up much of a fight, so there's no real point in doing either. Unless you just want to test how sharp your swords are.

But, if you get particularly bored, you can try clicking on them... which doesn't do a whole lot. Click it about four dozen more times and...

Ka-freaking-boom. The critter explodes with a mushroom cloud, flying giblets, and ground deformation. It's pretty intense. Kinda makes me wonder what the creatures of Azeroth eat.

Unfortunately, while the explosion is pretty awesome, it doesn't actually damage anything. Anything other than the critter that self-destructs, that is. So you can't use it as some kind of stealth bomb thing.