Bored at the office? Try turning your Facebook photos into ASCII art.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (pronounced “ask-ee”) is the binary representation of computer characters. Originally developed for communications, ASCII uses only seven bits per character, providing 128 combinations of upper and lower case alphabetic letters, numeric digits, and special symbols.

All you need to transform your online pictures into geeky illustrations is to save or copy an image link, paste the URL into your address bar, and add “.html” to the end.

Then behold: a full-color ASCII version of your Facebook profile picture or favorite Instagram snaps. Substitute “.txt” for a black-and-white version instead.

Mathias Bynens, a self-declared “Web standards enthusiast” from Belgium, first spotted the secret method, tweeting about it last week.

Take any Facebook/Instagram photo URL.

👉 append `.txt` → ASCII art
👉 append `.html` → colored ASCII art

E.g. https://t.co/GgnN8HJii4(Opens in a new window)

— Mathias Bynens (@mathias) January 28, 2016(Opens in a new window)

The trick doesn’t appear to work on every photo; some of my attempts returned a blank page or a series of random letters and numbers without a picture. According to The Next Web(Opens in a new window), images must be public for the technique to work.

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Neither Facebook nor Instagram immediately responded to PCMag’s request for comment.

ASCII art is not exactly a new concept: folks have been creating pictures out of normal text characters for years, using programs that convert scanned images into binary code. And while the characters may be simple, when employed imaginatively, they can create colorful, creative images. The seemingly random art, meanwhile, can also conceal data, as used in the practice of steganography (“protected writing”).