Errata: geeky details

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

I took a closer look at the images I had found yesterday and I noticed that my story was not entirely correct so I’m posting this to set things straight, rather than rewriting yesterday’s post.

I wrote that there were digits on both halves of the wristband, but the image shows all the digits on just one side. Even better, the digits are readable so I can analyze them all over again.

First, here are the bits. There are 19 8-bit lines followed by four lines with fewer bits:

01001100
01101001
01110011
01110100
01100101
01101110
00100000
01010100
01101111
00100000
01010100
01101000
01100101
00100000
01001100
01101001
01100111
01101000
01110100
010 11 0
 1 01 0 
 0 1  1 
 1 10 0

The first 19 lines can easily be converted to their integer values and then mapped to the ASCII table. They read:

Listen To The Light

(This time I got the capitalization right, too.)

The last four lines are a lot more tricky though. If I just replace the spaces with zeros, I get meaningless codes. Evidently, they’re not intended to be mapped as 8-bit ASCII codes. Some other method is needed and, as far as I recall, you’d even need to apply several different methods to decode those last four lines.

Sadly, I still haven’t been able to dig up anything online about how those four lines are decoded. I only remember that the first was an instruction for an if statement, the next I’m not sure about but it turned out to be “U” in the end, the third was a cancel command statement, commonly read as “can”, and the last turned out to be “C”:

If You Can See

I’m very sorry to keep this post in such a painfully unfinished state, but perhaps some good folks out there can help me complete this story once more? If you’re like me, this will irk you until it’s complete! I think you need some knowledge of assembler and mainframe instruction sets…

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