How to convert binary (in ASCII) to english in your head.
(From the dear-lord-I-have-too-much-free-time dept.)
First of all, you need to be able to covert decimal to binary, if you don't go there first. The way ASCII is laid out, it's actually not that hard. Lowercase letters start at 97 and Uppercase start at 65, which may not look significant in base 10, but it is in base 2. For lowercase letters you write 011 then a five bit number for the letter number ("a" is 1, "b" is 2...). The reason it has to be a 5 bit number is that ASCII is 8 bits per character, just get the number in binary and add as many padding zeros as you need (for example, “b” is 10 in binary, with padding zeros it’s 00010) So "b" would be 01100010. “g” is 01100111. For uppercase you just do the same thing, but with 010 instead of 011.
Now you just have to remember that 00100000 is a space and 00101110 is a period, and you can read and write whole sentences!
Here's some practice:
Convert “Hello World.” (without the quotes, duh) into binary. For the answer, go here.