Reminder's World

Zoz

HINTS:
SOLUTION:

This is a steganography puzzle. A coded word is hidden in each item, using some aspect of that item as a "carrier" for its signal. Each one is encoded in a different way. Each codeword then clues a letter - all codewords are names of Senior House entries, with an extra letter. The extra letters make up the answer word, it is thus hidden in the codewords in much the same way. In the flavortext, the hidden information is clued by the malfunctioning diginote reader - it tells you that the face-value contents of each note is unimportant, and the modem reference clues that some other information is being modulated. The phrase 'stray bits' clues to try converting some of the extra information to binary.


B - BRUNKLE
Number of spaces between words in HTML text encodes ASCII letters in binary.
ASCII: 066 082 085 078 075 076 069
Binary: 01000010 01010010 01010101 01001110 01001011 01001100 01000101

O - WOARE
CMYK image mostly K but with modulated CMY channels, each vertical bar
100 pixels wide having CMY values of the trinary digit
Letter count: 23 15 1 18 5
Trinary: 212 120 001 200 012

U - HOULMAN
The table is a sequence in Braille - entries with a decimal point are dots,
entries without are blank.
Braille: . . . . .. . ..
.. . . .
. .. . . .

C - CATKINSON
Binary information is encoded by whether or not each letter has been
replaced by a 'leetspeak' letter. The binary data spells out the word
in 5-bit Baudot code. To be truly leet, the first five bits is the special
character necessary to put the Baudot machine in 'letters' mode.
Baudot code: 31 (LTRS) 14 3 16 15 6 12 5 24 12
Binary: 11111 01110 00011 10000 01111 00110 01100 00101 11000 01100

L - NICHOLLS
Typographical error on words corresponding to letter count.
Letter count: 14 9 3 8 15 12 12 19

E - CRAFTES
HTML text; link/non-link modulates binary signal encoding EBCDIC.
EBCDIC: 195 217 193 198 227 197 226
Binary: 11000011 11011001 11000001 11000110 11100011 11000101 11100010


Real Senior Haus entry names: RUNKLE
WARE
HOLMAN
ATKINSON
NICHOLS
CRAFTS

Answer: BOUCLE