Information

Information on the workings of the tools.

ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is essentially numerical values for characters or actions on the keyboard. The values are from 0-255 for a total of 256 items, but the first 32 are non-printable (cannot be displayed), and the last half are not not commonly used (and some applications do not support them). As a result, the program available here only handles from 32-165.
The numerical values of ASCII can be displayed in any base desired. For most purposes, the decimal system is acceptable, but computers use binary to process information. Hexadecimal is frequently used because all ASCII values can be expressed with two hex digits, and the base is a power of 2, making it easily processed by computers. The program here can work with all three of these bases.
ASCII Translator

Base: A system of counting, the base refers to the number of different characters used to represent the numbers. The most commonly used base is decimal, which uses the numbers 0-9. Computers run in binary, which only uses the digits 0 and 1. Hexadecimal is less common but still widely used, mostly with ASCII, and uses the numbers 0-9 and the letters A-F for 10-16.

Rot-X: Also called the Caesar Cypher, it encodes text by shifting the letters X letters over. It is easily cracked by trying all the values of X on a message. The Vigenere Cypher is a more complicated version of Rot-X.
Vigenere/Rot Cypher

Vigenere: A more complicated Rot-X Cypher, the Vigenere system uses the characters of a key to determine the magnitude of rotation for each character of the text. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a letter (from A = 0 to Z = 25), and the value of each letter of the text is added to the value of the letters of the key (going back to 0 after passing 25) to get the value of the encrypted text. With the key, it is an easy code to crack, but can be difficult otherwise, especially with short messages.
Vigenere/Rot Cypher