Did you notice? After I'd previously said I couldn't do accents, yesterday I typed pliés. With an é. It's because I remembered which Alt Key character it was. More accurately, I ploughed through all of them to see. It's Alt-130.

You may not be aware of this trick, but you can get symbols by holding down the Alt key and typing a number. Try it now. Open a text editor, hold down the Alt key, type 130 and then let go of the Alt key. You've got an e acute - an é.

There's loads of them. You can even draw pictures. Here's a block of flats, made out of Alt-186 to Alt-205.

╔════════════════════════════════╗
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║

It's less rectangular than flats should be, and intolerably boring to do even by my obsessive compulsive standards, mainly because the proportions in my shitty blog text editor are completely different to what you actually see on the screen. Still, you get the general idea.

But what I want to know is, how does this all relate to ASCII, and Unicode, and all that stuff? I thought there were 256 of them, but when I got to 257 they kept coming. I read the page on Wikipedia, but I decided I'd make you tell me instead.

In exchange, here's another number trick. Pick a number, any number. Let's choose 4698. Add up the digits. 4 + 6 + 9 + 8 = 27. Add up the digits again. 2 + 7 = 9.

With any number, if you add up the digits and they come to nine, the number can be divided by nine. 4698 ÷ 9 =  522.

Try 5631. 5 + 6 + 3 + 1 = 15. 1 + 5 = 6. So 5631 doesn't divide by nine. But if you subtract the result of adding the digits, 6, you get 5625. 5625 ÷ 9 = 625. This always works.

There you go. Now tell me about the Alt keys.