NGRMAL WANDOWS

gistfile1.txt

aight so this is actually really fun but simple.

so remember yr binary math (or skip this if yr confident w/ binary):

1 2 4 8 16
----------
1 0 0 0  0 = 1 in decimal
0 0 1 0  0 = 4 in decimal
1 1 1 1  1 = 31 in decimal, etc


so, basically, this https://twitter.com/jason_koebler/status/689181490773491713/ is just the result of a single pin of RAM failing. (I dunno if that's a single pin of one of the individual modules on a DIMM (or SODIMM or whatever) or just one of the pins for the entire unit but eh)

you can tell this by doing some cute math

Wandows
the odd character here is obviously "A" instead of "I"

A B C D E F G H I J  K  L  M  N  O 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

so, the difference between I and A is 8 -- so the 8 bit (the 4th bit) of the character is being dropped.

Ngrmal

A B C D E F G H I J  K  L  M  N  O 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

so, O is # 15.
15 - 8 = 7 (G)

(please note that this is probably bit-shifted and the actual value for "lowercase g" is probably not just 7 (because caps usually come first) but it'll still work out as long as the values line up properly.)

so I'm kind of kicking myself because I guess this doesn't show WHY it happens -- and it seems to be happening inconsistently (hence the errant D in Ngrmadly) (by the way, 12-8 is 4 so the errant D works out too) which might just be weird RAM or whatever. but hey still kinda neat