Leading Zeroes

I've already covered Brindlewood Bay, The Wildsea, and Sock Puppets. The fourth game I played at Breakout Con 2026 was...

I'm writing about each of the games I played at Breakout Con this year. I've already covered Brindlewood Bay and The Wildsea, so it's time to talk about the hands down most chaotic session, which was...

Playing 8 new (to me) games over 4 days at Breakout Con 2026 was a rewarding but tiring experience. Now that I'm back I'm writing a little bit about each one. Here's what I thought about Brindlewood Bay. Next is my favourite session of the con, which was...

I attended Breakout Con 2026 last week. It was my first big convention in over a decade. I played 8 new (to me) TTRPGs over 4 days which is a record I don't think I'll beat any time soon. I hope to write down my thoughts on all of them eventually, starting with...

I've been plugging away at my little prototype that I mentioned last time. At the time I said I was hoping to have something to show off at the end of the week. That was a couple of weeks ago, and I don't have anything to show off. Let's examine that a little bit.

If you've ever used Wireshark or other network packet inspection tools, you'll be familiar with seeing raw byte data presented as a string of pairs of hexadecimal digits.

If you haven't, then perhaps you'll know what ASCII or Unicode is. Because of how text is stored on computers, each character is assigned a number. Sometimes it's valuable to display those numbers, and thanks to the underlying binary representation, this can be done compactly by using the hexadecimal representation of the number. This is much easier to understand with a picture:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set

Converting hex values to their character equivalents is trivial when you have the appropriate lookup table, like the one above. My question is, would it be an interesting puzzle to build that lookup table yourself based on some encoded input?

I've always loved video games, or “computer games”, which I think is a British-ism although I'm not sure if it's still in use. My family had a PC in our house from the early 90s, and before that a BBC Micro. There's a photograph somewhere of me as a toddler sitting at the Micro with my Dad crouched behind me.