Hacking Minesweeper

Are you good at Minesweeper? Think you have it all figured out? Me too. But wait, why the fuck have I not beat the game on Expert yet then? I’ll tell you why: sitting at a computer with your mind racing on which little gray box to press can make you dillusional, and also make you click the wrong box. I wanted a way to know where those God damned mines were, so I now have this cheat:

With your cursor inside the minesweeper window type “XYZZY” (CASE SENSITIVE) then press Shift-Enter and Enter. A white dot should appear in the upper-left corner of the screen. If it turns black, your cursor is resting on a mine. If it is white, you are safe to click. This works best if you set your background image to ‘none’ and your background color to black. It doesn’t work on Win 95 or NT, but who gives a shit.