Fooled You, Notepad!

[stoutfellow]

This is interesting. Despite appearances, it is not political. If you have a Windows XP machine, open Notepad and type the words "Bush hid the facts". Save the file and close it. Then reopen it.

The explanation is here.

Comments

[neonnurse.livejournal.com]

Mine didn't do anything unusual. What is it supposed to do?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Did you end the phrase with a carriage return ("Enter")? It doesn't work if you do, apparently.

When a text file is opened, Windows (or the text program) has to quickly determine what encoding - Latin? Cyrillic? Kanji? - is in use. Windows proper has no difficulty doing this, but - if the text is short and consists of short words - Notepad sometimes guesses wrong.

[neonnurse.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it makes a difference what version of XP you have? I was careful not to carriage return and it still didn't do anything unusual. I tried it on the laptop and the desktop both. Oh well, thanks for explaining anyway! :)

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

Mine didn't, either.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

See my response to neonnurse.

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the carriage return is pretty much a reflex at the end of a line, for me.

You aren't going to tell us what it says, are you?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Sorry. It's gibberish - just a random string of kanji, as far as I've been able to find out.

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

Ah. Thank you. I'd have tried it again, but I'm at work and they appear to have removed Notepad from our computers.