Fridays will feature an additional "bonus" blog with a useful tool for your puzzle-solving (or puzzle-writing) toolbox. The link at the bottom of this post has three valuable tools that can take away a lot of the heavy lifting in puzzle solving. Scroll down to the bottom of the page in the link and you will find 3 encryption/decryption resources.
1) A Caesar Cipher Codebreaker, which will take text and perform all possible alphabet shifts, from ROT-1 to ROT-25. You can practice this one with our Good In-10-tions Cache
2) A Vigenere Cipher Codebreaker, which will take encrypted text and a keyword you provide and do the decryption/encryption. If you don't know the keyword, a special feature of this codebreaker is its ability to predict the length of the keyword and offer suggestions. It doesn't work in all cases, but I have had some very good luck guessing keywords based on its suggestions. Give it a try. Another tip on figuring out keywords is to always consider any hints, the name of the cache (always a smart thing to think about on a puzzle cache) and even the cache owner's name.
3) Reverse Image Lookup, which will search the internet for matching images. Can't figure out who is in the picture in a puzzle? Try searching for other similar images. I've used this one successfully on pictures of movie stars and historical figures I couldn't identify.
Encryption Resources
Next week's bonus blog: More about ciphers.
No comments:
Post a Comment