Posts from 2026
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Resurrecting a 13-year-old high school project: the BSoD lock screen
(Read more...)One day, during the winter break away from work, I was reminded of this ancient program I built in high school—a Blue Screen of Death (henceforth BSoD) simulator. It really has been a while since I’ve covered coding topics on this blog, so I thought it might be time to dig up the program and resurrect it.
But you might ask the very natural question: why did I write such a program? For that, I blame the school. You see, I had to deal with school computers a lot back in the day, not being one of those “cool kids” who brought their own laptops to school. Naturally, the school computers ran Windows XP1. For some reason, the school administrators decided to deploy group policy to deny screen locking.
This posed a conundrum: if I had to step away from the computer—like say, answering the call of nature—I was confronted with two deeply uncomfortable choices:
- Save all my work, close all applications, and log out, then wait forever to log back in on those slow computers, while hoping that no one else took the fastest one of the bunch2; or
- Leave the computer unattended, and if someone does something sketchy as a prank, I’d be the one in trouble.
One day, I saw a school computer stuck with a BSoD, and no one ever touched it, and that gave me an idea: what if I wrote my own custom “lock screen” program that masqueraded as a BSoD? And thus was the program born.