Keyboard Cat

Description

* The following description is unofficial, and does not necessarily represent the intentions of the original puzzlemasters.

We are presented with a series of piano renderings and associated cats. One cat is the well-known Keyboard Cat, and the other cat is actually a disguised Antonín Dvořák. Inspecting the piano keyboards, we notice that the minor keys do not always correspond to genuine piano layouts, and that there are seven positions of variability in minor-key presence. Furthermore, there are eight total positions. Putting the ideas of keyboards, 7/8 on-off positions (and perhaps Dvořák should we have identified the Czech composer-cat) together, we should be drawn to the ASCII character encoding. ASCII is a 7-bit code for representing plain (Latin-based) text on computers, and is often embdedded within the typical 8-bit byte format, taking the first bit to be 0, and so we see that the presence of a minor key corresponds to a 1 and the absence a 0.

Decoding the images as such, however, yields nonsense: Cspemav g; bdkkeow alywaye. But we haven't yet used all the information available! Recalling that Dvorak is the name of an alternate keyboard layout to the more prevalent QWERTY layout, we can infer that perhaps the Dvořák-keyed characters should be interpreted differently. If we project the nonsense characters' QWERTY positions onto a Dvorak keyboard, we then find that s would become o, p would become l and so on. Completing the reïnterpretation, we obtain the final answer:

Colemak is better, anyway.

Solution

Colemak is better, anyway.

Correct submissions