Even though it's already June, I still wanted to make a (short) post about the things I did for April Fools this year. Like previous year I spent some time making some fun contraptions, where asking "why?" would be the wrong question. Sadly this year I had a bit less time to do something, and admittedly I already did some of the best ideas last year, but I am still quite happy with the result.

Anyway, without further ado, let me introduce to you the three things I did for April Fools in 2026:

Too Long; Dye't Red

The first thing I did was write a paper for SIGBOVIK 2026. Explaining SIGBOVIK to someone is always quite tricky, but it's a conference for academics that simultaneously pokes fun at academia, but not in a mean-spirited way. Last year I wrote a paper titled "Ad Fund 'Em", which was about adding adverts to scientific papers to secure more funding. This year I tackled another issue many academics face: running out of pages. My solution was quite simple: stereoscopic paper. I think it is best explained using a picture:

The idea is that you use 3D glasses (the classic kind with red and blue) to read this paper. For your convenience, this is what that looks like:

Making this was surprisingly simple. I just needed to make sure to use dithering for the images (so it was purely black-and-white), and use the correct overlay settings.

It was well-received, and even mentioned for the paper directly after it. It can be found in the official SIGBOVIK proceedings on page 962. I really recommend reading some of the others as well, there is some fascinating work done by many talented people.

ircns

Even though I don't do much with DNS on a day-to-day basis, I still like to have some fun with it every now and then. This year I struggled to come up with something. In the end I built a bridge between IRC and DNS. This was my "pitch":

DNS is about so much more than questions and answers alone. DNS also about conversations and exchanging ideas.

ircns is a revolutionary way to use the chat protocol of the 21st century (IRC) using the best tried and trusted technology of the 20th century (DNS). It provides a bi-directional bridge between DNS and IRC, allowing you to receive and send IRC messages over DNS using conventional tools like dig, drill, and kdig.

Again I think this is best explained using a video:

It was too dear to me to keep it online for long after April Fools (and it was not used that much either), so I took it offline after a month. It's still a fun experiment though.

Ceci n'est pas un Tamagotchi

I also sent in a (video) presentation for SIGBOVIK. This is basically a small demo of the tamagotchi clone I made with DVD menus, which I already wrote about previously.

And that is it for April Fools 2026. Now I have another year (well, 10 months) to come up with something for next year.