Feeling lazy?  Want anyone who happens to walk past your computer screen to think you are incredibly busy writing — or compiling — a mountain of code?

Filming a movie about a squad of elite hackers and need the computer screens to... you know... look the part?

Or, heck, are you just a bit bored and want to make your computer do something funky looking?

Whichever situation you find yourself in, here are three different tools that will make your computer appear like it is hard at work doing some seriously elite hacking and coding.

1 - Genact

Genact is described as a “nonsense activity generator”. And boy does it do its job well.

Pretend to be busy or waiting for your computer when you should actually be doing real work! Impress people with your insane multitasking skills. Just open a few instances of Genact and watch the show. Genact has multiple scenes that pretend to be doing something exciting or useful when in reality nothing is happening at all.

Runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac… and creates screens like this:

Genact has a whole boatload of different modules to help you pretend to do a bunch of different things: Mining crypto, handling docker images, compiling kernels, viewing logs… it’s all here.

2 - Hollywood

Hollywood is a Linux-only option, and it looks oh-so-cool. It runs in a terminal, and opens up a whole bunch of different applications (mostly real performance and network monitoring tools) each of which displays constantly updating bits of information.

The whole point is to make your computer look super busy… and super hacker-y. Just like in a movie.

In fact, Hollywood looks so good that it’s been used in multiple TV shows.

For example, here it is in a segment for NBC Nightly News:

Yeah. The news. A fake “make your computer look like it’s hacking something” application. On the news. If that’s not a great representation of the sorry state of TV News, I don’t know what is.

Just for the sake of completeness… here’s a shot of two investigators -- from that news report -- pointing to the random, gibberish output of Hollywood… and pretending like it’s super fascinating, real data that is somehow relevant to the news segment.

That is, I kid you not, absolutely real.  This was on the news.

And here’s Hollywood in a sketch on Saturday Night Live:

Seriously.  Hollywood is tons of fun to play with.  Even if you're not filming a news report.

3 - HackerTyper.net

HackerTyper.net is a bit different than the other ones.

Here’s how it works:

1. Open up HackerTyper.net.

2. Start hitting keys on the keyboard. Any keys at all. Doesn’t matter.

3. Perfectly formatted C code appears on the screen!

Now you can write code just like actors in the movies! Just sit back and pound away at your keyboard -- like a deranged, drunken monkey -- with complete disregard for what keys you’re actually pressing!

Whichever of these three options you choose -- HackerTyper, Hollywood, or Genact -- you are now fully equiped to become the most elitest of elite movie hackers.  (You're even ready to be on the evening news.)

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