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**Posted:** Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:35 pm

_________________
Followed Nate, couldn't find Tom Tooman, anyone got any good leads for someone else to ~~stalk~~ help?

@tygr20
www.tygr20.com

squid808 · Veteran Joined: 25 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

I asked in their forum about the cat picture. For some reason I'm intrigued by it.

One thing that was nagging me about the videos was the static blips in there. I went through and found the times that it was happening, since it never bleeds from one second into the next. I have no idea if they mean anything but they bother me. I put what the direct letters would be.

May 2nd video: 6, 11, 18, 32 (F, K, R, F)
May 4th video: 16, 25, 34, 49 (P, Y, H, W)
May 5th video: 4, 14, 16, 33, 67 or 1:07 (D, N, P, G, O)
May 16th video: 22-23, 148-149 or 2:28-2:29 (V-W, R-S)

Nothing seemed to come up with those letters on a rot.

Too tired, will look more tomorrow. Maybe I'm just hunting for a pattern in the static =\

Edit: Missed the new video's static.

**Posted:** Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:55 pm

Gregoriev

I have a theory. Perhaps there is some sort of text phrase needed in the 2nd video for Bertram to spit out more info. I notice that a can of Mr. Pibb is extremely visible in the video. Perhaps someone should call claiming an investor by the name of Pibb? Laughing

I realize that he didn't specifically mention it, but then again, Bertram hasn't had a blog post today about the video anyways. I'll call myself, if no one else bothers. Perhaps there'll be a blog post tomorrow or after-tomorrow confirming my suspicions.

Side note: Perhaps we should quote some Arthur C. Clarke, because Cray mentions that Bertram thought 2001 and 2010 when he say the question "Who Are You?"

Side Side Note: Tygr20, the ever wonderful guy that he is, has created #ie2 on chat-solutions. If you don't know how to connect to IRC, follow these simple steps:

1. Go to http://mibbit.com/chat/.

2. For your nick, put in whatever you like. For the channel, put in #ie2.

3. Press the Server button and type in irc.chat-solutions.org in the box that comes up.

4. Press Go and you're good.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 12:03 am

_________________
Playing: Whatever I come across that I find interesting.
Played: Dharma Wants you, Project Abraham, The Shadow War, Alpha Agency, all kinds of other games.
Lurking: See statement the first and add EVERYTHING.

jabroni

Hey everybody. I was reading about this game and it caught my interest. I posted this on the ei board but I believe the code the box is printing is a picture file in text form. The text is encoded in base64. Does anyone have good software to convert images to text?

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 2:36 am

Rogi Ocnorb

Just tell them to "LPR" the file to a floppy instead of the printer.
Be aware that it may decode to a binary file, which wouldn't look like anything meaningful in a text editor.

ETA: I see you already mentioned you thought it might be a picture.

It'll be interesting to see where the cube content falls from an era perspective. Will the data be saved in a format available in the '80s (It looks more like a Mac Plus than a Mac Classic. But I'm no expert) or will it be something from a later era.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 2:46 am

_________________
I'm telling you now, so you can't say, "Oh, I didn't know...Nobody told me!"

tygr20

Ugh. I've tried no less than 6 OCR programs this morning, squid808 has tried Omnipage, and I think Siege88 ran it through Acrobat itself, and we can't get a good transfer from image to text out of this crap. Sounds like Rogi's idea might be the best- if we can get this in .TXT, .DOC, .RTF, ANYTHING text based, we'll be in business. Like the pace of this one so far, moving along steadily, enjoying myself.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:48 pm

_________________
Followed Nate, couldn't find Tom Tooman, anyone got any good leads for someone else to ~~stalk~~ help?

@tygr20
www.tygr20.com

Gregoriev

Can't we have them change the print source to a pdf converter so the output ends up without all those random white splotches?
That's what I recommended, anyways.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:53 pm

_________________
Playing: Whatever I come across that I find interesting.
Played: Dharma Wants you, Project Abraham, The Shadow War, Alpha Agency, all kinds of other games.
Lurking: See statement the first and add EVERYTHING.

squid808 · Veteran Joined: 25 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

In case you haven't been following the forum post found here, we're asking Cray or B to give us a better file to work with, maybe printing to file rather than a dot matrix print out that can't be solved with OCR. I posted this, but figured we can discuss it here too.

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 2:52 pm

Rogi Ocnorb

Do we know anything at all about the history of the device?
Given that the header of the file appears to make it something in the JPEG family, it'd have to be from sometime after 1992 when that standard was released (and approved in 1994).

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 3:45 pm

_________________
I'm telling you now, so you can't say, "Oh, I didn't know...Nobody told me!"

notgordian

A bit off topic, but the ARGNetcast with the phone calls to Cray and Bertram just got posted. It's really something else.

http://www.argnetcast.com/2009/04/arg-netcast-episode-85-down-the-rabbithole/

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 3:47 pm

squid808 · Veteran Joined: 25 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

B posted a full text readout as I just finished typing page 8 >.<
Put it in word, removed all carriage breaks, put it through a base 64 decoder, named it to .jpg and got this

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 6:02 pm

EonEdge · Greenhorn Joined: 13 Apr 2009 Posts: 3

So I twittered B about checking the third edition manuals about codes on the AoO pages and he replied with this:

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:26 pm

redct · Entrenched Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Posts: 1233

@Gregoryn up there has gotten me into this, so looks like I'm joining in with this one

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:48 pm

_________________
Playing and lurking: I'm too lazy to keep track
someone in IRC: see, sometimes instead of a man and woman loving each other, men and men love each other. this usually happens in prison, but sometimes in real life

EonEdge · Greenhorn Joined: 13 Apr 2009 Posts: 3

don't know if it's related but it seems more than coincidence but the video on the you tube account is of the back of a one dollar bill with the roman numeral:
MDCCLXXVI
which is 1776 if I remeber correctly

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:51 pm

redct · Entrenched Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Posts: 1233

So, looking at the JPEG, all of those animals (except the woman) look like chimeras. Random theories: code has to do with which two animals are blended?

**Posted:** Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:52 pm

_________________
Playing and lurking: I'm too lazy to keep track
someone in IRC: see, sometimes instead of a man and woman loving each other, men and men love each other. this usually happens in prison, but sometimes in real life