The Treasure Hunt of Increased Difficulty, final day

I went to the corner of Hill Street to look for street art.

Gotta love the eyebrows.

That’s about the best street art in the area, but it doesn’t help at all with decoding the noise. Oh, hold on:

That looks more like it.

With the stickers collected up, and armed with this new information, I attacked the sound file again:

• 33.3 and 45 are vinyl speeds. I sped the sound up accordingly.
• The product of the squares of the first four primes? That’s 44100, a common sample speed for audio recordings.
• Next is a mono audio jack. Ok, the sound was mono.
• Next are a 386 processor and Queen Elizabeth I’s signature. I had no idea what these were about*.
• Finally, an XOR gate and the number 29 in binary. I wrote a few lines of Python to XOR every byte in the file.

Now that I’m quite familiar with the sound of SSTV, I reversed it so that the header was at the beginning:

and decoded a picture of my friend’s house.

Unfortunately my friend is in San Francisco**. I asked him about it and he suggested I look in the workshop instead. And in the workshop, ten days and just a few metres from where I started the treasure hunt, I finally found my birthday presents:

Presents!

• A binary blanket!
• Sky lanterns!
• (And the keys to the padlock on the second box. I did wonder…)

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* “So what was that about?”
“32 bit signed!”

** I was supposed to solve the puzzle before he left. In the interests of him not getting burgled, you don’t get the picture

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