WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

1
00:00:00.100 --> 00:00:06.189
How do you read binary text? By which I mean,
a text file on a hard disc as ones and zeros.

2
00:00:06.189 --> 00:00:11.650
Sounds impossible, really isn't. It is, though,
an almost useless geek skill.

3
00:00:11.650 --> 00:00:17.430
Why would you want to read binary? Well, converting
text to binary is a fairly common, and if

4
00:00:17.430 --> 00:00:23.260
I'm honest, fairly lazy way to add fake difficulty
to puzzles and alternate reality games. Even

5
00:00:23.260 --> 00:00:28.440
if you end up putting the big block of binary
into a decoder online to do the actual processing,

6
00:00:28.440 --> 00:00:33.280
you'll still be able to look at the numbers
and go, oh, I know what to do with that.

7
00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:39.309
So first things first: this only works with
the basic English alphabet. A through Z. That's

8
00:00:39.309 --> 00:00:43.319
because it was a group of Americans who came
up with the ASCII encoding, the American Standard

9
00:00:43.319 --> 00:00:48.159
yada-yada encoding which got put into Unicode.
Now, they may have only thought about their

10
00:00:48.159 --> 00:00:51.749
own language, but at least they did it fairly
cleverly.

11
00:00:51.749 --> 00:00:56.359
So a text file will look something like this.
First thing we do is we break it into eight-bit

12
00:00:56.359 --> 00:01:00.949
sections - eight bits in a byte, and each
byte equals a character. So that is going

13
00:01:00.949 --> 00:01:07.369
to be here, here and here. If you're looking
at a puzzle, chances are that has already

14
00:01:07.369 --> 00:01:10.140
been done for you so let's assume that it
has.

15
00:01:10.140 --> 00:01:14.119
Next thing you need to know is how to count
in binary. And that's not that difficult either:

16
00:01:14.119 --> 00:01:19.920
just remember your powers of two. This one
here is worth 1, then 2, then double it again,

17
00:01:19.920 --> 00:01:25.079
4, then 8, then 16. You can ignore the first
three numbers, I'll explain why in a minute.

18
00:01:25.079 --> 00:01:30.630
So here we've got a 2 and a 1: add them together,
you've got 3.

19
00:01:30.630 --> 00:01:35.140
And here's where the designers of ASCII were
really really clever. Because if you ignore

20
00:01:35.140 --> 00:01:42.140
those first three binary digits, they set
A to 1. B to 2. And C to 3. And so on, all

21
00:01:43.499 --> 00:01:50.499
the way down the alphabet. Uppercase will
start with 010, lowercase 011.

22
00:01:51.060 --> 00:01:56.289
So let's keep going. We have -- well, this
is just a 1, that's easy, that's an A.

23
00:01:56.289 --> 00:02:03.289
Then we have 8, 2 and 1, just here, that makes
11 - 11th letter of the alphabet is k. It

24
00:02:03.689 --> 00:02:09.640
helps if you can remember that, I must say.
But OK, now we've got C-A-K and a mystery

25
00:02:09.640 --> 00:02:14.610
fourth letter and it won't be surprising to
learn that that is going to be a 1 and a 4,

26
00:02:14.610 --> 00:02:18.970
which makes 5. Fifth letter of the alphabet
is E, thus: cake.

27
00:02:18.970 --> 00:02:22.600
What can I say? I skipped lunch.

28
00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:26.890
Now there are a few other tricks -- if there
are letters that look difficult to calculate,

29
00:02:26.890 --> 00:02:30.720
you can skip them, just do the easy ones,
you can probably still guess what the word's

30
00:02:30.720 --> 00:02:36.170
going to be, even with some missing letters.
If the last five digits here are all 0, it's

31
00:02:36.170 --> 00:02:40.210
almost certainly a space: that's another handy
shortcut that got put in. 'Cos don't forget,

32
00:02:40.210 --> 00:02:44.880
when people were designing this back in the
60s, computers were fairly primitive, by our

33
00:02:44.880 --> 00:02:49.820
standards today: you might well have to do
this by hand for some reason. For actual business

34
00:02:49.820 --> 00:02:55.250
work. And anything that looks really weird,
like the first three digits are 001 or something

35
00:02:55.250 --> 00:02:58.760
like that, that's almost certainly a puncutation
mark.

36
00:02:58.760 --> 00:03:05.760
So there you go. Almost useless geek skill:
reading in binary. With a little practice,

37
00:03:06.130 --> 00:03:09.340
you can do it now. As for me: I am off to
get some cake.

38
00:03:10.120 --> 00:03:12.120
[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]