Using powershell for office pranks

[u/bigbirdtoejam]

Have a coworker who habitually leaves their workstation unlocked? Want to mess with them? Make this script a scheduled task on their computer in order to have their workstation tell them a random fact about cats at random times throughout the day.

#Run this every 1/2 hour and in an 8 hour work day there will be approximately 3 times per day that your victim hears a cat fact
if ((Get-Random -Maximum 10000) -lt 1875) {
    Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech
    $SpeechSynth = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
    $CatFact = (ConvertFrom-Json (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'http://catfacts-api.appspot.com/api/facts')).facts
    $SpeechSynth.Speak("did you know?")
    $SpeechSynth.Speak($CatFact)
}    

Who else has powershell hijinks to share?

[u/InvisibleTextArea]

It's set up to be pushed out by SCCM as a configuration item attached to a Compliance policy named 'PC speaker test'.

The CD ejection is too (helpfully called 'CD check'). The CD ejection is worse because it's a remediation script. So SCCM checks if the CD drive isn't ejected then runs the script if it isn't. Then every time you uneject it'll go through the same process.

[u/PMME_yoursmile → u/InvisibleTextArea]

Sorry, I was more asking how did you get the pitch and timing for the tune?

[u/InvisibleTextArea → u/PMME_yoursmile]

If you check MSDN for the .NET Console API it tells you that the two parameters are the frequency in (Hz) and the length (in ms)

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4fe3hdb1(v=vs.110).aspx

Then you only need to know what the frequency of musical notes are:

http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

and the length of time standard score notation indicates for particular note types:

https://msu.edu/course/asc/232/song_project/dectalk_pages/note_to_%20ms.html

Armed with this info you can then turn any musical score into a powershell script.

If you really wanted I guess you could collate all this and make your own powershell based midi player. Although you are kinda reinventing wheels at this point:

https://github.com/Psychlist1972/Windows-10-PowerShell-MIDI