Install Desktop Goose to Make a Horrible Goose Mess With Your PC or Mac [updated]
Windows / macOS: I love good jokes, and 18-year-old Sam Chiet’s new Desktop Goose utility is the perfect flash storage app. Your friends will hate you. Your school’s IT department really hate you. But what could be more fun and sillier than watching the starry animal from Untitled Goose Game roam your Windows or Mac desktop , honking and stealing your mouse cursor (among other things).
Update February 5, 2019: We’ve updated this article to mention the Mac version of this app that developer Sam Chiet released after we wrote the original story. Now no one is safe from the goose.
Desktop Goose reminds me in many ways of all the other strange programs and hardware that I threw on unsuspecting computers years ago – as a joke, of course, never maliciously. When I worked at Maximum PC , we enjoyed plugging a USB mouse into the internal USB connectors of a staff member’s computer and watching them go crazy trying to figure out why their cursor kept raging. (You can also secretly plug in a wireless mouse dongle and mess around with them that way.)
It was child’s play to set up someone with a pesky new screensaver. You can also use an application such as NirCmd, to make someone’s computer randomly apply a beep (or removing an optical drive, if it is still there). If you’re especially angry, you can use PowerShell to generate random Windows cat clues throughout the day. Or you can glue some transparent film onto someone’s CMOS sensor to really confuse them.
I’m more of a fan of silly apps that confuse people, like Taskbar Eliminator , with which you can completely hide it from someone else’s PC. And there is always the old trick of “take a screenshot of your desktop and hide all icons”, as well as various other annoyances like disabling the Windows key or right-clicking through the registry or a Group Policy setting.
You can also play around with your personal hosts file. If you know the IP address of a website that they visit frequently, such as Facebook, you can redirect them to a different location that they cannot fix no matter what browser they use. The Blue Screen of Death screensaver is always fun (for Windows and Mac ). And if you’re an Excel master, you can truly use your powers on someone’s day at the office.
And sometimes the pranks are just cruel. To really drive someone crazy, you can do something like add the Cenafy extension to their Chrome browser. This gives them a one-in-a-hundred chance to have their ears blown off by WWE’s annoying opening song “JOHN CENNNAAAA” whenever they load any website.
Anyway, my point is that Desktop Goose is far from the first prank utility we’ve seen, but it’s one of my new favorites. Not only is this pretty innocent (and everyone loves The Goose), I’m thrilled to see someone take responsibility by taking the utility-based prank flag and running it. We need more computer pranksters, and I’m glad the goose is here to show us the way. Who wants to do a Baby Yoda version next time?