How to break Windows Notepad Exercise of the dayBy Nick Farrell: Thursday 15 June 2006, 08:50 A BLOGGER over at Wincustomise has discovered a way to break Windows Notepad.It does not kill your machine or anything, but is light hearted entertainment for a Thursday morning. What you do is open up Notepad, type in "this app can break" and save it to your hard drive. Close Notepad and, when you open the saved file by double clicking it, Notepad will be unable to translate the file and spits out a random collection of characters. According to another bog here, it is all to do with a limitation in Windows. Text files containing Unicode UTF-16-encoded Unicode are supposed to start with a "Byte-Order Mark" (BOM), which is a two-byte flag that tells a reader how the following UTF-16 data is encoded. If it isn't there then the file cannot play properly. µ