Let me at my data! Pulling pictures out of an undocumented file format by Alex Pounds RTS games have a concept called “fog of war”, where the map is hidden until your units explore it. For years I’ve used an app that brings that to the real world. I wanted to transform my unfogging data into wall art, but it’s a small indie app with no export function. Could I, a web developer who’s never reverse-engineered a binary format before, figure it out? I could! Kind of! This is a detective story and a science story: a story of making guesses, figuring out how to test them, and piecing together the puzzle so I could generate my own images outside of the app. Alex is a web developer and photographer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He’s particularly interested in social software and human-centred product design. When not coding for work he likes to code for fun, practice piano, and get out into nature. You can find out more about him at https://alexpounds.com/.