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Mission 2: It's Back to the Future time!
Let's get this party started, agents.
To start with, you get a Briefing, along with a video of New Intelligence and Urgent Information. Watch them in order.
The first video, the Briefing, has two links:
A blog
and
I Use This for OSX
On the blog, you'll notice a reversal of the site's URL in the sidebar; if you copy and paste this link (http://sirhc.ollirip.com/), you'll get to a site that looks a lot like the original blog, but everything's reversed or upside down. There's only one blog post and a Mainframe bar with varying time anomalies detected.
The blog post is impossibly dated Friday, February 32th, 2045 at 73:64pm.
The reversed blog post links to a page on the original blog that talks about Things, along with a very bizarre Amazon link to a product that is not available and looks pretty shoddy: Manageing Tasks (yes, it's spelled that way). The item was originally available on October 2, 2003, and the screenshot of the program itself (which looks like a Windows CE program) has a time stamp of 12:51 (but we don't know if it's AM or PM).
In the video on the site, Chris (presumably) is doing everything in reverse. The video (a Flash video, which means if you want to download it, you'll need to be using Firefox and the Download Helper extension) also has audio, but Chris himself never speaks. So the audio we're hearing could be background noise or it could be important narration. In the meantime, let's stick with what Chris is showing us: pieces of paper with letters and numbers on it. Keep in mind that the letters are REVERSED-- that is, we're seeing the mirror image. So what looks like a b is really a d.
You'll end up getting this: gpj.c20080ddf/. Reverse that into its "proper" form and you'll get /fdd08002c.jpg. Where to enter it in? Let's check the obvious: the same site we're on, which is the reversed Chris blog. You'll get an image of a strange metal hoop with something behind it. Apparently it's an old-school seesaw (or teeter-totter, whichever you prefer).
On I Use This, there doesn't appear to be anything unusual or out of place, unless you count the Twitter, which says Back in business. Apparently this is what happens when kids play with their excavator in the wrong place :-/
Excavator?
Back to that odd program-- it's made by "Dreamee Software," and this is a list of their other "software titles" (all fake, I'm sure):
Click Here
Odd. Let's check around at IUT. First things first, any time you're trying to find out about a domain... you go to the "About" page, right? We check there, and bam! Another chronological anomaly. Time to start looking for an image URL code, I'm sure.
There's some weird non-gibberish coding supposdly called "Textile" down at the bottom, along with another, familiar-looking smiley-face. This one represents the emoticon X~X, more or less.
Remember the last time we saw a block of text that looked normal and it wasn't? We had to highlight it to reveal the secret... and we do the same here. Highlight the "gibberish" Textile code and it reveals the URL for another image on this domain: EF7DE3F48.jpg
You'll get a second image of some pots or something. One of them looks like a pink plate with... worms on it? Save the image and move on to the second video.
By the way, if you look at the pots image in Preview and click on the Inspector and the second tab, with an exclamation point in a speech bubble, you'll find that the image has GPS data: Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W. If you enter this information in Google Maps (cut out the words "Latitude" and "Longitude") you'll get a location in the Pacific Ocean just west of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The first image is roughly the same; the only difference in the GPS for the two is the first image is Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W, a difference of one degree for the first digit in the string alone. However, this DOES make a difference for the GPS marker: it puts it further south, toward Monterey. If you do a Google Searh for the map "GPS MacHeist," you should be able to see the map and the rough distance approximation I made between the two.
The second video, with four more domains, actually goes on long past the point when Sophia exits the screen, apparently having set a bomb (?) using an iPhone. Listen and you'll hear Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It" and Shakira's "Whenever, Wherever."
The four domains are:
blog.freeverse.com
mollymcford.com
taptaptap.com
macmerc.com
Starting with the first one, we immediately notice a familiar smiley: this one's grinning with his teeth showing, a graphical representation of :D Clicking on that smiley face will bring you here.
You'll be taken to a new page with another anomaly reported courtesy of the Mainframe. This time there's a proliferation of smileys. What to do with them? You can move them around. They will sort of shake in place briefly before bouncing sharply back to their starting position. You may notice that some of the faces are smileys you've seen on the MacHeist sites before, while others are not. What to do?
If you move the smileys fast enough (or you move the four corner "normal" smilies), you might see a shape underneath: it's a fortune cookie. No doubt we're supposed to retrieve something from it somehow, but how? I used my Bamboo Fun tablet's stylus to help me move the faces fast-- if you can reveal the fortune cookie for a split second and click on it, it cracks, and then a second click opens it and reveals the fortune "Happiness is just around the corner." The message has two normal smiley faces on either end that look like this: :)
Where's the image? Maybe we can uncover it by digging around for the "normal" smilies and moving them to the corners, like the fortune suggests. YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS AFTER YOU'VE OPENED THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Once you do, you'll see this image, which looks like the letter A. Save it, get the GPS data, and go to the next site.
The GPS data is: Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W
The next site is one we visited earlier-- Molly McFord's origami site. No doubt we're meant to find another smiley, so let's look around. We're already looking at the Gallery, so the next page is the Tour. She says she's not on Tour anymore, and links to a site- with a smiley at the end. The smiley has single quotes for eyes and a tongue sticking out of a mouth. That'd look something like this ;P
The "folding template" page has another chronological anomaly, along with a piece of origami that looks a bit like a fox. There's a quote: "Origami is all about changing your view to reflect your surroundings." Hmm, so how do we change our view? In a browser, we can do it a few ways:
* Change the encoding
* Alter our monitor's brightness/contrast
* Possibly alter the system time
* Alter the screen width
If you alter the screen width (by dragging your browser's "handles" either up or to the left/right), you will notice the origami shape start to change. Depending on how you resize the screen, different things will happen: it'll change into a triangle with just the corner folded, it'll change into a triangle, it'll change into a square (two triangles with their longest sides against one another), it'll crumple up and "reset." The goal is to get it to unfold as large as possible-- basically, if you were to take a square piece of paper and fold it in half diagonally, that's the shape you're going for. Once you move that slowly, so that the whole triangle is visible, the page will reveal an image Save it and grab the GPS data on this one, too.
This odd street post photo has GPS data of: Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N and Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W. This places it on land, near Santa Rosa (again, in California).
Let's go to the next site: taptaptap.com. In the search for the next smiley, we find it on the About page, wedged inside a sushi. This smiley is one licking its face, like so: :d
This takes you to a page that talks a lot about the people behind taptaptap, with lots of cute icons interspersed. But other than that, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual about this page. Hmm. Maybe the mini icons are a clue? They're all PNG files of roughly the same size, with nothing fancy in their file names or URLs.
Keep in mind that taptaptap has to do with iPhone apps, and the site can be viewed on an iPhone as well. So what are small images that show up on phones? Well, having been in Japan, I can tell you that their phones have lightyears over any in the U.S. The cute little images they use as "emoticons" on their phones are known as emoji, a word meaning "picture" + "character." If you look the word up, you'll find that definition explained more thoroughly, along with various service's renderings of the characters.
A good resource for emoji code is Softbank's, located here. You're going to be looking at the last column, "Web Code." Ignore the first two characters-- all we want is the last one.
Here we go:
whale = t
guitar = a
tiger = p
whale = t
sound = a
camel = P
train = T
fountain = A
leftpoint = P
crown = .
kabob = c
warthog = O
sunrise = m
lightbulb = /
trumpet = b
seashell = a (this one was hard; on Softbank's page, it looks more like a conch shell than your typical mermaid's bra covering!)
scissors = 3
new = 2
ski = 3
knifefork = c
cry = 3
orange = f
tennis = 5
crown = .
sun = j
tiger = p
leaves = g (remember to look for MULTIPLE green leaves!)
This results in a URL of taptaptap.com/ba323c3f5.jpg
This is another mysterious image. But if there's one thing we've learned, it's that pictures can look like letters! If we go in order and examine the images we've obtained, could there be letters hidden inside?
seesaw = C
pots = O
street post = L
gate = G
Of course, we're not done yet, so we might want to move onto the other domains and solve their puzzles before trying to make sense of the letters in these images.
The last site from the second video is macmerc.com. We're still looking for smiley faces, and on this site, it can be found on the article about 1Password. It's a kissy-face smiley with a mole, which I suppose would be rendered something like this: :.x The eyes aren't perfect, of course.
Clicking on it will take you to a MacMercFiles site that features a large, old-fashioned looking clock... well, old-fashioned except for the fact that it's got a second hand! What to do? What time to set the clock to?
When we move the clock hands, various smileys appear. Some of them we've seen before (to click on), while others are new (or might have appeared in the fortune cookie puzzle). If you move the hands in a certain direction or to a certain point, other smileys appear and disappear. Maybe the goal is to get them to ALL appear?
I played around with it and set the "time" to 09:20:00 and all the faces appeared. You might need to move the hands in "sections," though (that is, not just moving the hands directly to 09:20:00), in order to get all the faces to appear. When they do, you'll see a portion of a new image in the center of the clock. Click on it to get the full-size image.
This image is very distinctly an O shape, I think, so that means we've got the following image "letters" so far:
seesaw = C
pots = O
street post = L
gate = G
window = O
Our latest image also has GPS data: Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W.
The third video, containing urgent information, lists these 3 sites as also having been modified in time:
macworld.com
embraceware.com
appshopper.com
With the first one, it's worth noting that the link doesn't really take you to the MacWorld homepage, it takes you to a search page about the phrase "Time Machine." There are a ton of results, of course, since OS X Leopard's "Time Machine" application has been the subject of great discussion. But which article to click on?
Presumably the Directorate would have given us a more solid clue if they wanted us to find a specific article, or dig through the many, many result pages, so why not start at the top? If you click on the first article and scroll to the bottom, you'll be rewarded with another smiley: :|
It takes you to this site. There's another chronological anomaly... and Rick Astley?! Oh no, have we been Rickrolled? Actually, this site is fairly large (scrollbar-wise), so maybe there's more to it than Rick Astley. It's also worth noting that this is, in no way, a real map-- not with names like "Stfu Street" and "Pwnage Place." Funny, but fictional.
The name of this fictional town (according to the site's title) is Memeville LOL - WTFCMYKBQ. For the uninformed, that stands for Laugh Out Loud - What the Fuck Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK, Barbeque.
Another thing worth noting is that this town of grids has one long grid going all the way around it-- the border street of the town, if you will. It's aptly named "Infinite Loop," the same street that Apple's Headquarters in Cupertino is located on.
What next? Well, you can go about finding what to do with your map one of two ways:
(1) The cheater's route: view the source code until you get to the div layer with the ID of "instr." Follow those instructions along the map. It would help if you can identify those named in the instructions, though....
(2) Try and print your map like any old adventurer would do. In your print preview, you'll see the instructions.
The instructions are: 1. Head south on Pwnage place
2. Turn left after you pay the Domo a visit
3. If you happen to see a lip-syncher, avoid like the plague
4. Turn north on Wb way
5. Head north until you approach the badgers, and head left.
6. Make sure to leave britney alone
7. Head South on the old blue screen, then turn left onto Ttfn trail, and shun the non believer (shuuuuuuuuun)
8. After you leave candy mountain head south, but before you fail turn right.
9. Participate in the drama, then take the second left.
10. Go nuts.
If we head south on Pwnage place from Rick Astley's location, we'll see a number of images along the way, but we're trying to get South until we meet Domo-kun, a.k.a. a large, brown, fuzzy, block-like thing with very sharp teeth and beady eyes. Click on him. Remember ONLY to click on the images specified, IN THE ORDER specified!
Now we turn left. Of course, remembering that we're on a computer screen and not actually in a vehicle, left is actually right (for the scrollbar, but only because of the direction we're presently headed in). We'll see a lip-syncher, so let's avoid him (DO NOT CLICK)-- we want to turn north on Wb way, which is east of our lip-syncher (assuming that the top of the screen is north, the bottom is south, and so on).
We head north until we meet our badgers from the infamous Flash video, and then we turn left again. Left actually means left this time, though. We run across a blonde who looks quite distraught... not Britney (he's a guy that wants us to leave Britney alone, though), so we will. But we won't leave him alone. Click on him.
We want to turn onto Ttfn Trail, which is just south of "Britney," (you can get there by taking Bsod Vista, which stands for "Blue Screen of Death" Vista, a knock on Windows-- haha!) so let's do that and then find the non-believer we ought to shun (he probably looks like a unicorn). We're supposed to shun them, though, so DO NOT CLICK on them!
Then we'll head south until we reach "fail" (three dogs trying to get out of a door at once and obviously NOT SUCCEEDING). DO NOT CLICK on the fail!dogs. Make sure to turn right just before you reach the fail!dogs.
Then we have to "participate in the drama" -- that is, look for the really dramatic-looking squirrel. Click on him. Take the second left until we get to a nut-- Mr. Peanut, that is.
After clicking on him, you'll be taken to a new image that you can click on. Do so, and save the full-sized image, which looks suspiciously like the letter T. Don't forget to grab the GPS data:
Next up? embraceware.com. Unlike the MacWorld link, this really is just a link to the main site. Again, we're looking for smiley faces, and the one on this site can be found on the Products page in the upper right, winking cutely and approving of OS X Leopard. Click on that smiley (;D) to be taken to the next puzzle.
Here we have six clocks, each with different faces. Some are going forward in time, others appear to be going backward!
Forward clocks: Black and blue/purple clock, black and silver clock, clock with the Roman numerals on its face
Backward clocks: Clock with all the numbers, smiley face clock, clock with only 12, 3, 6, and 9 on its face
If you click on a particular clock, you will hear its ticking amplified. A clue? Well, clocks are always supposed to "tick" at the same rhythm, for each passing second. They tend to "gong" or "chirp" or sound some sort of alarm on the hour or half-hour, but so far, none of the ones ON the hour have done so.
Another thing about sound: very brief sounds (like the tick-tock of a clock) might be related to Morse code, where letters are represented by dots and dashes. Now, these aren't dots or dashes that you see, necessarily-- you can also hear them. A "dot" would be a brief sound, while a dash would be a longer sound. Each letter or number is made up of a different sequence of dots and dashes.
The only clock that seems to have an irregular pattern of ticks and tocks (the sound you hear doesn't match up to the movement of any of the hands) is the one in the lower left, with the Roman numeral face. Listen to it carefully and make a note of the dots and dashes.
You'll get this: -..-. - .. -.-. -.- -..-. .- .- -.... .- ....- --... -.... -.. ..--- .-.-.- .--- .--. --.
If you Google a Morse code translator, you'll be able to translate those sounds/dots and dashes into actual letters and numbers! used this one.
The "translation" is: /TICK/AA6A476D2.JPG
If you append that onto the existing URL, you'll get a 404, which stands to reason there's something about it that should be changed. I doubt we're supposed to change the URL of the image itself, and it's unlikely we misheard the dots and dash pattern (of course, you're welcome to listen to it again until you're positive...), so what about the "tick" at the beginning? You'll notice the clocks we're looking at are located in a folder called "tock," and tick-tock is the sound clocks make... maybe the "opposite" (reverse) of "tick" is "tock," here?
Let's try this URL: http://erawecarbme.com/tock/AA6A476D2.JPG It produces an image which looks like the letter E!
So now we've got
seesaw = C
pots = O
rusted metal = A
street post = L
gate = G
window = O
paint = T
air vent = E
One more site to go to before we attempt to make sense of those letters in images. Onward to appshopper.com! Okay, we're not going to PAY to solve a puzzle, so let's check out free apps. No smiley faces here under the most recent free apps, so what about the top 100 free apps? Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list to find an out of place smiley (it's the geek face) that is unassociated with an app. Click on him and you'll be taken to a new MacHeist item in holding!
Our last item like this was a Sudoku puzzle. What'll it be this time around? Uh-oh-- Sudoku with... runes and emoticons? What to do!?
You'll remember that in the Rune Sudoku puzzle, the puzzle highlighted pieces that were the same as existing runes. So if you drag an emoticon to a row/column that already has an equivalent rune in it, the smiley will bounce back to the sidelines and you'll know what rune it's "equal" to. However, there does appear to be a "bug" of sorts, wherein certain smileys will highlight TWO different runes. You can still figure out the puzzle though-- just keep in mind, the same smiley should never appear more than once in any given row AND column.
Once you solve this puzzle, you'll see a new image which you can click on. Save the full-sized image (which resembles a lowercase 'e' in my opinion) and get the GPS data: Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W.
Now we've got nine images, nine GPS markers, and nine possible letters that the images "spell" out:
1. seesaw = C (chris pirillo) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
2. pots = O (i use this) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W)
3. rusted metal = A (freeversedl) (Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
4. street post = L (molly mcford) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
5. gate = G (taptaptap) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 120° 2' 29.14" W)
6. window = O (macmercfiles) (Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
7. paint = T (macworld) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
8. air vent = E (embraceware) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
9. curlicue = e (appshopper) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
COALGOTEE?
Maybe it's an anagram? We get a number of results, but the only one that seems to make sense is the first one: LOCATE EGO. But 'ego' seems off. What have we been doing with the GPS markers, after all? LOCATING things on EARTH (aka Geo) = GEOLOCATE!
But what to do with this finding? Usually when we have babble-like words in MacHeist, it means there's a site out there waiting to be found. Since gibberish is more likely to result in an MH site, let's try coalgotee.com
It takes us to a site with a fortune cookie, saying "A really good anagram solver is in your future." Click on it again and it says our lucky numbers are 6 5 7 4 1 3 8 2 9.
So if we take those numbers and match THEM up to our original letter findings (coalgotee), and then rearrange them in numerical order, we get GEOLOCATE that way, too!
If we do this in reverse (because that seems to be a theme of this mission), and instead applied the numbers in order (1, 2, 3, etc.) to the original letters of COALGOTEE, we'd get GEOLOCATE = 5 8 6 4 2 1 3 7 9.
5. gate = G (taptaptap) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 120° 2' 29.14" W)
8. air vent = E (embraceware) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
6. window = O (macmercfiles) (Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
4. street post = L (molly mcford) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
2. pots = O (i use this) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W)
1. seesaw = C (chris pirillo) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
3. rusted metal = A (freeversedl) (Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
7. paint = T (macworld) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
9. curlicue = e (appshopper) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
Of course, you could reverse either of the Es or the Os, but this order ends up producing a very interesting result.
If you draw lines between the pins on your map starting with the pin indicating your GPS data from image #5 (the gate image from taptaptap), you will get a shape: something that looks like a "G." This looks like it could be a gesture for input on the main MacHeist site! Let's go!
Once you input it, you'll be taken to the Vault/your Loot, where you'll see all that you've acquired throughout this mission:
Agent Craig, Hypersapce, a $2 bundle discount, Timepost, and Overflow.
Congratulations, agents!
Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler from Musicbox 80's (disc 1) (Rating: 0)
To start with, you get a Briefing, along with a video of New Intelligence and Urgent Information. Watch them in order.
The first video, the Briefing, has two links:
A blog
and
I Use This for OSX
On the blog, you'll notice a reversal of the site's URL in the sidebar; if you copy and paste this link (http://sirhc.ollirip.com/), you'll get to a site that looks a lot like the original blog, but everything's reversed or upside down. There's only one blog post and a Mainframe bar with varying time anomalies detected.
The blog post is impossibly dated Friday, February 32th, 2045 at 73:64pm.
The reversed blog post links to a page on the original blog that talks about Things, along with a very bizarre Amazon link to a product that is not available and looks pretty shoddy: Manageing Tasks (yes, it's spelled that way). The item was originally available on October 2, 2003, and the screenshot of the program itself (which looks like a Windows CE program) has a time stamp of 12:51 (but we don't know if it's AM or PM).
In the video on the site, Chris (presumably) is doing everything in reverse. The video (a Flash video, which means if you want to download it, you'll need to be using Firefox and the Download Helper extension) also has audio, but Chris himself never speaks. So the audio we're hearing could be background noise or it could be important narration. In the meantime, let's stick with what Chris is showing us: pieces of paper with letters and numbers on it. Keep in mind that the letters are REVERSED-- that is, we're seeing the mirror image. So what looks like a b is really a d.
You'll end up getting this: gpj.c20080ddf/. Reverse that into its "proper" form and you'll get /fdd08002c.jpg. Where to enter it in? Let's check the obvious: the same site we're on, which is the reversed Chris blog. You'll get an image of a strange metal hoop with something behind it. Apparently it's an old-school seesaw (or teeter-totter, whichever you prefer).
On I Use This, there doesn't appear to be anything unusual or out of place, unless you count the Twitter, which says Back in business. Apparently this is what happens when kids play with their excavator in the wrong place :-/
Excavator?
Back to that odd program-- it's made by "Dreamee Software," and this is a list of their other "software titles" (all fake, I'm sure):
Click Here
Odd. Let's check around at IUT. First things first, any time you're trying to find out about a domain... you go to the "About" page, right? We check there, and bam! Another chronological anomaly. Time to start looking for an image URL code, I'm sure.
There's some weird non-gibberish coding supposdly called "Textile" down at the bottom, along with another, familiar-looking smiley-face. This one represents the emoticon X~X, more or less.
Remember the last time we saw a block of text that looked normal and it wasn't? We had to highlight it to reveal the secret... and we do the same here. Highlight the "gibberish" Textile code and it reveals the URL for another image on this domain: EF7DE3F48.jpg
You'll get a second image of some pots or something. One of them looks like a pink plate with... worms on it? Save the image and move on to the second video.
By the way, if you look at the pots image in Preview and click on the Inspector and the second tab, with an exclamation point in a speech bubble, you'll find that the image has GPS data: Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W. If you enter this information in Google Maps (cut out the words "Latitude" and "Longitude") you'll get a location in the Pacific Ocean just west of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The first image is roughly the same; the only difference in the GPS for the two is the first image is Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W, a difference of one degree for the first digit in the string alone. However, this DOES make a difference for the GPS marker: it puts it further south, toward Monterey. If you do a Google Searh for the map "GPS MacHeist," you should be able to see the map and the rough distance approximation I made between the two.
The second video, with four more domains, actually goes on long past the point when Sophia exits the screen, apparently having set a bomb (?) using an iPhone. Listen and you'll hear Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It" and Shakira's "Whenever, Wherever."
The four domains are:
blog.freeverse.com
mollymcford.com
taptaptap.com
macmerc.com
Starting with the first one, we immediately notice a familiar smiley: this one's grinning with his teeth showing, a graphical representation of :D Clicking on that smiley face will bring you here.
You'll be taken to a new page with another anomaly reported courtesy of the Mainframe. This time there's a proliferation of smileys. What to do with them? You can move them around. They will sort of shake in place briefly before bouncing sharply back to their starting position. You may notice that some of the faces are smileys you've seen on the MacHeist sites before, while others are not. What to do?
If you move the smileys fast enough (or you move the four corner "normal" smilies), you might see a shape underneath: it's a fortune cookie. No doubt we're supposed to retrieve something from it somehow, but how? I used my Bamboo Fun tablet's stylus to help me move the faces fast-- if you can reveal the fortune cookie for a split second and click on it, it cracks, and then a second click opens it and reveals the fortune "Happiness is just around the corner." The message has two normal smiley faces on either end that look like this: :)
Where's the image? Maybe we can uncover it by digging around for the "normal" smilies and moving them to the corners, like the fortune suggests. YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS AFTER YOU'VE OPENED THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Once you do, you'll see this image, which looks like the letter A. Save it, get the GPS data, and go to the next site.
The GPS data is: Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W
The next site is one we visited earlier-- Molly McFord's origami site. No doubt we're meant to find another smiley, so let's look around. We're already looking at the Gallery, so the next page is the Tour. She says she's not on Tour anymore, and links to a site- with a smiley at the end. The smiley has single quotes for eyes and a tongue sticking out of a mouth. That'd look something like this ;P
The "folding template" page has another chronological anomaly, along with a piece of origami that looks a bit like a fox. There's a quote: "Origami is all about changing your view to reflect your surroundings." Hmm, so how do we change our view? In a browser, we can do it a few ways:
* Change the encoding
* Alter our monitor's brightness/contrast
* Possibly alter the system time
* Alter the screen width
If you alter the screen width (by dragging your browser's "handles" either up or to the left/right), you will notice the origami shape start to change. Depending on how you resize the screen, different things will happen: it'll change into a triangle with just the corner folded, it'll change into a triangle, it'll change into a square (two triangles with their longest sides against one another), it'll crumple up and "reset." The goal is to get it to unfold as large as possible-- basically, if you were to take a square piece of paper and fold it in half diagonally, that's the shape you're going for. Once you move that slowly, so that the whole triangle is visible, the page will reveal an image Save it and grab the GPS data on this one, too.
This odd street post photo has GPS data of: Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N and Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W. This places it on land, near Santa Rosa (again, in California).
Let's go to the next site: taptaptap.com. In the search for the next smiley, we find it on the About page, wedged inside a sushi. This smiley is one licking its face, like so: :d
This takes you to a page that talks a lot about the people behind taptaptap, with lots of cute icons interspersed. But other than that, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual about this page. Hmm. Maybe the mini icons are a clue? They're all PNG files of roughly the same size, with nothing fancy in their file names or URLs.
Keep in mind that taptaptap has to do with iPhone apps, and the site can be viewed on an iPhone as well. So what are small images that show up on phones? Well, having been in Japan, I can tell you that their phones have lightyears over any in the U.S. The cute little images they use as "emoticons" on their phones are known as emoji, a word meaning "picture" + "character." If you look the word up, you'll find that definition explained more thoroughly, along with various service's renderings of the characters.
A good resource for emoji code is Softbank's, located here. You're going to be looking at the last column, "Web Code." Ignore the first two characters-- all we want is the last one.
Here we go:
whale = t
guitar = a
tiger = p
whale = t
sound = a
camel = P
train = T
fountain = A
leftpoint = P
crown = .
kabob = c
warthog = O
sunrise = m
lightbulb = /
trumpet = b
seashell = a (this one was hard; on Softbank's page, it looks more like a conch shell than your typical mermaid's bra covering!)
scissors = 3
new = 2
ski = 3
knifefork = c
cry = 3
orange = f
tennis = 5
crown = .
sun = j
tiger = p
leaves = g (remember to look for MULTIPLE green leaves!)
This results in a URL of taptaptap.com/ba323c3f5.jpg
This is another mysterious image. But if there's one thing we've learned, it's that pictures can look like letters! If we go in order and examine the images we've obtained, could there be letters hidden inside?
seesaw = C
pots = O
street post = L
gate = G
Of course, we're not done yet, so we might want to move onto the other domains and solve their puzzles before trying to make sense of the letters in these images.
The last site from the second video is macmerc.com. We're still looking for smiley faces, and on this site, it can be found on the article about 1Password. It's a kissy-face smiley with a mole, which I suppose would be rendered something like this: :.x The eyes aren't perfect, of course.
Clicking on it will take you to a MacMercFiles site that features a large, old-fashioned looking clock... well, old-fashioned except for the fact that it's got a second hand! What to do? What time to set the clock to?
When we move the clock hands, various smileys appear. Some of them we've seen before (to click on), while others are new (or might have appeared in the fortune cookie puzzle). If you move the hands in a certain direction or to a certain point, other smileys appear and disappear. Maybe the goal is to get them to ALL appear?
I played around with it and set the "time" to 09:20:00 and all the faces appeared. You might need to move the hands in "sections," though (that is, not just moving the hands directly to 09:20:00), in order to get all the faces to appear. When they do, you'll see a portion of a new image in the center of the clock. Click on it to get the full-size image.
This image is very distinctly an O shape, I think, so that means we've got the following image "letters" so far:
seesaw = C
pots = O
street post = L
gate = G
window = O
Our latest image also has GPS data: Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W.
The third video, containing urgent information, lists these 3 sites as also having been modified in time:
macworld.com
embraceware.com
appshopper.com
With the first one, it's worth noting that the link doesn't really take you to the MacWorld homepage, it takes you to a search page about the phrase "Time Machine." There are a ton of results, of course, since OS X Leopard's "Time Machine" application has been the subject of great discussion. But which article to click on?
Presumably the Directorate would have given us a more solid clue if they wanted us to find a specific article, or dig through the many, many result pages, so why not start at the top? If you click on the first article and scroll to the bottom, you'll be rewarded with another smiley: :|
It takes you to this site. There's another chronological anomaly... and Rick Astley?! Oh no, have we been Rickrolled? Actually, this site is fairly large (scrollbar-wise), so maybe there's more to it than Rick Astley. It's also worth noting that this is, in no way, a real map-- not with names like "Stfu Street" and "Pwnage Place." Funny, but fictional.
The name of this fictional town (according to the site's title) is Memeville LOL - WTFCMYKBQ. For the uninformed, that stands for Laugh Out Loud - What the Fuck Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK, Barbeque.
Another thing worth noting is that this town of grids has one long grid going all the way around it-- the border street of the town, if you will. It's aptly named "Infinite Loop," the same street that Apple's Headquarters in Cupertino is located on.
What next? Well, you can go about finding what to do with your map one of two ways:
(1) The cheater's route: view the source code until you get to the div layer with the ID of "instr." Follow those instructions along the map. It would help if you can identify those named in the instructions, though....
(2) Try and print your map like any old adventurer would do. In your print preview, you'll see the instructions.
The instructions are: 1. Head south on Pwnage place
2. Turn left after you pay the Domo a visit
3. If you happen to see a lip-syncher, avoid like the plague
4. Turn north on Wb way
5. Head north until you approach the badgers, and head left.
6. Make sure to leave britney alone
7. Head South on the old blue screen, then turn left onto Ttfn trail, and shun the non believer (shuuuuuuuuun)
8. After you leave candy mountain head south, but before you fail turn right.
9. Participate in the drama, then take the second left.
10. Go nuts.
If we head south on Pwnage place from Rick Astley's location, we'll see a number of images along the way, but we're trying to get South until we meet Domo-kun, a.k.a. a large, brown, fuzzy, block-like thing with very sharp teeth and beady eyes. Click on him. Remember ONLY to click on the images specified, IN THE ORDER specified!
Now we turn left. Of course, remembering that we're on a computer screen and not actually in a vehicle, left is actually right (for the scrollbar, but only because of the direction we're presently headed in). We'll see a lip-syncher, so let's avoid him (DO NOT CLICK)-- we want to turn north on Wb way, which is east of our lip-syncher (assuming that the top of the screen is north, the bottom is south, and so on).
We head north until we meet our badgers from the infamous Flash video, and then we turn left again. Left actually means left this time, though. We run across a blonde who looks quite distraught... not Britney (he's a guy that wants us to leave Britney alone, though), so we will. But we won't leave him alone. Click on him.
We want to turn onto Ttfn Trail, which is just south of "Britney," (you can get there by taking Bsod Vista, which stands for "Blue Screen of Death" Vista, a knock on Windows-- haha!) so let's do that and then find the non-believer we ought to shun (he probably looks like a unicorn). We're supposed to shun them, though, so DO NOT CLICK on them!
Then we'll head south until we reach "fail" (three dogs trying to get out of a door at once and obviously NOT SUCCEEDING). DO NOT CLICK on the fail!dogs. Make sure to turn right just before you reach the fail!dogs.
Then we have to "participate in the drama" -- that is, look for the really dramatic-looking squirrel. Click on him. Take the second left until we get to a nut-- Mr. Peanut, that is.
After clicking on him, you'll be taken to a new image that you can click on. Do so, and save the full-sized image, which looks suspiciously like the letter T. Don't forget to grab the GPS data:
Next up? embraceware.com. Unlike the MacWorld link, this really is just a link to the main site. Again, we're looking for smiley faces, and the one on this site can be found on the Products page in the upper right, winking cutely and approving of OS X Leopard. Click on that smiley (;D) to be taken to the next puzzle.
Here we have six clocks, each with different faces. Some are going forward in time, others appear to be going backward!
Forward clocks: Black and blue/purple clock, black and silver clock, clock with the Roman numerals on its face
Backward clocks: Clock with all the numbers, smiley face clock, clock with only 12, 3, 6, and 9 on its face
If you click on a particular clock, you will hear its ticking amplified. A clue? Well, clocks are always supposed to "tick" at the same rhythm, for each passing second. They tend to "gong" or "chirp" or sound some sort of alarm on the hour or half-hour, but so far, none of the ones ON the hour have done so.
Another thing about sound: very brief sounds (like the tick-tock of a clock) might be related to Morse code, where letters are represented by dots and dashes. Now, these aren't dots or dashes that you see, necessarily-- you can also hear them. A "dot" would be a brief sound, while a dash would be a longer sound. Each letter or number is made up of a different sequence of dots and dashes.
The only clock that seems to have an irregular pattern of ticks and tocks (the sound you hear doesn't match up to the movement of any of the hands) is the one in the lower left, with the Roman numeral face. Listen to it carefully and make a note of the dots and dashes.
You'll get this: -..-. - .. -.-. -.- -..-. .- .- -.... .- ....- --... -.... -.. ..--- .-.-.- .--- .--. --.
If you Google a Morse code translator, you'll be able to translate those sounds/dots and dashes into actual letters and numbers! used this one.
The "translation" is: /TICK/AA6A476D2.JPG
If you append that onto the existing URL, you'll get a 404, which stands to reason there's something about it that should be changed. I doubt we're supposed to change the URL of the image itself, and it's unlikely we misheard the dots and dash pattern (of course, you're welcome to listen to it again until you're positive...), so what about the "tick" at the beginning? You'll notice the clocks we're looking at are located in a folder called "tock," and tick-tock is the sound clocks make... maybe the "opposite" (reverse) of "tick" is "tock," here?
Let's try this URL: http://erawecarbme.com/tock/AA6A476D2.JPG It produces an image which looks like the letter E!
So now we've got
seesaw = C
pots = O
rusted metal = A
street post = L
gate = G
window = O
paint = T
air vent = E
One more site to go to before we attempt to make sense of those letters in images. Onward to appshopper.com! Okay, we're not going to PAY to solve a puzzle, so let's check out free apps. No smiley faces here under the most recent free apps, so what about the top 100 free apps? Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list to find an out of place smiley (it's the geek face) that is unassociated with an app. Click on him and you'll be taken to a new MacHeist item in holding!
Our last item like this was a Sudoku puzzle. What'll it be this time around? Uh-oh-- Sudoku with... runes and emoticons? What to do!?
You'll remember that in the Rune Sudoku puzzle, the puzzle highlighted pieces that were the same as existing runes. So if you drag an emoticon to a row/column that already has an equivalent rune in it, the smiley will bounce back to the sidelines and you'll know what rune it's "equal" to. However, there does appear to be a "bug" of sorts, wherein certain smileys will highlight TWO different runes. You can still figure out the puzzle though-- just keep in mind, the same smiley should never appear more than once in any given row AND column.
Once you solve this puzzle, you'll see a new image which you can click on. Save the full-sized image (which resembles a lowercase 'e' in my opinion) and get the GPS data: Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W.
Now we've got nine images, nine GPS markers, and nine possible letters that the images "spell" out:
1. seesaw = C (chris pirillo) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
2. pots = O (i use this) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W)
3. rusted metal = A (freeversedl) (Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
4. street post = L (molly mcford) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
5. gate = G (taptaptap) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 120° 2' 29.14" W)
6. window = O (macmercfiles) (Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
7. paint = T (macworld) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
8. air vent = E (embraceware) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
9. curlicue = e (appshopper) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
COALGOTEE?
Maybe it's an anagram? We get a number of results, but the only one that seems to make sense is the first one: LOCATE EGO. But 'ego' seems off. What have we been doing with the GPS markers, after all? LOCATING things on EARTH (aka Geo) = GEOLOCATE!
But what to do with this finding? Usually when we have babble-like words in MacHeist, it means there's a site out there waiting to be found. Since gibberish is more likely to result in an MH site, let's try coalgotee.com
It takes us to a site with a fortune cookie, saying "A really good anagram solver is in your future." Click on it again and it says our lucky numbers are 6 5 7 4 1 3 8 2 9.
So if we take those numbers and match THEM up to our original letter findings (coalgotee), and then rearrange them in numerical order, we get GEOLOCATE that way, too!
If we do this in reverse (because that seems to be a theme of this mission), and instead applied the numbers in order (1, 2, 3, etc.) to the original letters of COALGOTEE, we'd get GEOLOCATE = 5 8 6 4 2 1 3 7 9.
5. gate = G (taptaptap) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 120° 2' 29.14" W)
8. air vent = E (embraceware) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
6. window = O (macmercfiles) (Latitude: 39° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
4. street post = L (molly mcford) (Latitude: 38° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
2. pots = O (i use this) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 124° 2' 29.14" W)
1. seesaw = C (chris pirillo) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 123° 2' 29.14" W)
3. rusted metal = A (freeversedl) (Latitude: 35° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
7. paint = T (macworld) (Latitude: 36° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 121° 2' 29.14" W)
9. curlicue = e (appshopper) (Latitude: 37° 23' 33.5" N, Longitude: 122° 2' 29.14" W)
Of course, you could reverse either of the Es or the Os, but this order ends up producing a very interesting result.
If you draw lines between the pins on your map starting with the pin indicating your GPS data from image #5 (the gate image from taptaptap), you will get a shape: something that looks like a "G." This looks like it could be a gesture for input on the main MacHeist site! Let's go!
Once you input it, you'll be taken to the Vault/your Loot, where you'll see all that you've acquired throughout this mission:
Agent Craig, Hypersapce, a $2 bundle discount, Timepost, and Overflow.
Congratulations, agents!
Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler from Musicbox 80's (disc 1) (Rating: 0)