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Stealthy Trick Makes Facebook Look Like an Excel Spreadsheet
- biopunknews 15y agoCool, but it would be much more useful if someone could write the same thing for Hacker News.
- sethbannon 15y agoI think someone might have written a Hacker News terminal view skin a while ago. Wish I could find it.
- biopunknews 15y agohttp://chadbraunduin.blogspot.com/2011/06/hacker-news-in-terminal-written-in.html http://chadbraunduin.blogspot.com/2011/06/hacker-news-in-ter... - Hacker news in the terminal. Not much different than "lynx http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com
- sethbannon 15y agoVery neat, but someone built a web-based one.
- a3_nm 15y agoWhy not use a command-line browser then?
- chriskelley 15y agoYou can use the Google Docs "importFeed" formula to pull in the RSS feed. Example: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkTPCnqxL8pldHhsU1ZrZDFoRzJ1NVNIZmZmQ2JaR2c&hl=en_US#gid=0 https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkTPCnq... Not sure if Excel has anything similar. Edit: You might also be able to execute some shenanigans using "importHTML", but the default parsing is pretty malformed.
- georgefox 15y agoYou could easily set up a page out on the web that reads the RSS and throws the data into an HTML table. Then create an Excel spreadsheet and import the data from the web: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/24285/use-online-data-in-excel-2010-spreadsheets/ http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/24285/use-online-data-in-exce... Click refresh every hour or so, and you've got an exciting spreadsheet that runs right in Excel.
- shaggyfrog 15y agoThe second screenshot shows a Windows-themed Excel running on a Mac (look at the Aqua scrollbar on the right). I think that would get a lot of second looks from curious passers-by... the opposite of stealthy.
- iamdave 15y agoIndeed, and as one other commenter mentioned, it'd be pretty hard to use if your office has already moved up to Win7.
- sethbannon 15y agoCould have it detect what OS the user has and display the correct version of Excel.
- bgross 15y agonice thinking seth ;) we're already 'workin' on it...
- georgemcbay 15y agoI think you are overestimating how likely someone is to make note of such a thing when they have no reason to expect a ruse in the first place. This thing isn't meant to stand up to close scrutiny, but rather just quick glances of a screen as you walk by. I'm intimately familiar with the differences between Win7, MacOS and Windows XP UIs, but I'm also fairly sure if I saw that running on someone's desktop, even a Mac or Win7 box, I'd just think "Excel" and not really mentally nitpick based on the verisons of various other things running. Unless I had some other reason to believe something was amiss in the first place, I wouldn't give it enough thought to note the discrepancies and I doubt there are many people out there who would. For those of you that are convinced you'd still know something is up -- there are also all sorts of reasons why XP Excel running on other systems would be totally legitimate -- could be running in a virtualbox window, could be running in a remote desktop window, etc.
- 15y ago
- Apocryphon 15y agoA way to view people's personal profiles as dispassionate statistical data that can be used for all sorts of lucrative applications? It's like Zuckerbergvision!
- carussell 15y agoDishonesty is great!
- Klonoar 15y agoAh, cool, they... did what Elliot Kember did with Twitter a year or two back.
- blhack 15y agoWow, I'm pretty sure that if you need to get your social fix so badly that you're disguising facebook as legitimate work, you've got an addiction. Step away from the computer for a bit.
- dougws 15y agoSerious request: can someone who upvoted this article explain why?