Category Archives: encoding

Squoze Your Data

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I have a confession to make. I enjoy the challenge of squeezing software into a tiny space or trying to cut a few more cycles out of a loop. It is like an intricate puzzle. Today, of course, there isn’t nearly as much call for that as there used to be. Today even a “small” microcontroller has a ton of memory and resources.

Even so, there’s still a few cases where you need to squeeze those last few bytes out of memory. Maybe you are trying to maximize memory available for some purpose. Maybe you are anticipating mass production and …read more

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Crack Mike Tyson’s Punch Out Bang Bang Passwords

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[Bisqwit] has feelings about games that use exclamation points in his idiosyncratic walkthrough of all the nuances of the passwords in the famous Punch Out Bang Bang.

As he states in his deeply weird (though in no way wrong) channel intro, when he’s not driving a bus or teaching Israeli dance, he works hard to understand the things around him. Naturally, a mysterious phone number shaped set of digits in a favorite game was a secret worth extracting.

The digits can represent every possible state in the game.  It uses a pretty simple decoding and encoding scheme, which he walks …read more

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Why haven’t (most of) the Zodiac Killer’s letters been decrypted? [closed]

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The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The twist is, he would frequently taunt the local press with cryptic letters. Four of these letters were actually encoded, but only one has been cracked… Continue reading Why haven’t (most of) the Zodiac Killer’s letters been decrypted? [closed]→