  We discuss a simple toy model which allows, in a natural way, for deriving
central facts from thermodynamics such as its fundamental laws, including
Carnot's version of the second principle. Our viewpoint represents
thermodynamic systems as binary strings, and it links their temperature to
their Hamming weight. From this, we can reproduce the possibility of negative
temperatures, the notion of equilibrium as the co\"incidence of two notions of
temperature - statistical versus structural -, as well as the zeroth law of
thermodynamics (transitivity of the thermal-equilibrium relation), which we
find to be redundant, as other authors, yet at the same time not to be
universally valid.
