Tyler Hacks the World

Ok, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about that Windows hack I showed you last post, so here's another one.

Open up notepad. Type "Mike hid the facts" (case sensitive, no periods). Save the document as "Mike.txt" on your desktop. Close the file, then re-open it in notepad. Ta-da! Squares (if you're Chinese, or have the Chinese compatibility pack installed on your computer, you saw Chinese characters instead)!

Why did this happen you ask? It all has to do with encodings. Notepad, by default, saves files in ANSI encoding. If you're unfamiliar with encodings, it's a way of changing letters into HEX (which is really encoded binary, in a sense). ANSI is one way, Unicode is another. Why did I mention Unicode, you ask? That goes back to the Notepad glitch.

The files are saved in ANSI, but Notepad doesn't know this when it opens the file. It tries to detect the encoding, and by a strange coincidence, it thinks the HEX version of this sentence is Unicode. In fact it works for a lot of sentences organized in 4 3 3 5 (the ever-popular "Bush hid the facts").

-Tyler