Tools of the Trade Mystery Cache

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Hidden : 6/25/2011
Difficulty:
3 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: regular (regular)

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Geocache Description:

* Cache is not at posted coordinates *


Tools of the Trade



School is back in session, so it's time for another puzzle cache, right? For this one, though, I thought maybe I'd offer some assistance to fellow puzzle solvers by sharing some of the tools and tricks that I use to solve other geocaching puzzles. These tools and ideas may or may not be of any help to you, depending upon what types of puzzles you work on and whether or not you already have techniques like these (or better ones).

There are already several puzzle tutorial caches out there, including an entire series in Florida and a cache in Lansing that covers most of the basics of geocache puzzle solving like viewing the HTML source, handling basic ciphers, and basic encodings like Morse and binary. So for this one I figured I'd show some tools I use to solve some of the more difficult cache puzzles. You know the kind. The ones that are less like "puzzles" and more like "let's see if I can hide the coordinates in a place no one will look". At one time I disliked that type of puzzle, but I've gotten to like some of them now. Of course being able to solve them is what made the difference.

The intended audience for this puzzle and the techniques it covers are those that are already somewhat familiar with basic geocache puzzle solving techniques. However, a few of the topics here can likely be used even by novices. The topics are roughly organized in order of difficulty from easiest to hardest.

Note that since this puzzle is supposed to be medium difficulty, you won't find the solution to it directly by using the techniques discussed here (else I'd have to rate it 1 to 2 stars). You might, however, discover direct hints for other cache puzzles in the area (my own puzzle caches of course since I can't very well give hints for others' puzzles without permission). Never fear, there are several clues to the solution and extra hints are available if needed.


Text Image


This first item won't necessarily help find a solution to a puzzle but it may save you some time. Have you ever encountered a puzzle cache that has a large amount of text that is shown in image form instead of text? So that you can't simply copy and paste it into another tool or file so you can analyze the text? Well depending upon the font used and clarity of the image it may be possible to quickly convert it into text form by using optical character recognition (OCR). There are many tools you can download that will perform OCR on images, some of which are free. There are also online tools. One such online tool that is free can be found here. You simply upload a file and it converts it into text which you can then select and copy to your own file or into some other tool if you like. Make sure you look over the resulting text to correct any errors that may have occurred during the process. There will be more errors of course on text that is small or difficult to read. And I haven't paid for any OCR tools, but I suspect that possibly the tools that cost money may work better than the free ones. Try it out on the image below (the free tool linked to above should get it with no errors).



Image Searching


Many a puzzle can be solved by simply doing some searching using a puzzle-solvers best friend, Google. But what about those puzzles that use images in place of words? For example, a puzzle cache that requires you to identify pictures of semi-famous people or landmarks. Well there are tools for that, too! There are several online tools that will try to find a match for an image on the Internet. The one that I use most frequently is TinEye. You can upload an image or put in a URL to an image and it will show you the closest matches that it finds on other Internet sites. Using the context of the pages it finds those images on will often tell you what the image is. For instance, here is a picture of a famous baseball player.



Ardent baseball fans probably recognize him, but what about the other 98% of us who may not (I do actually since he's a distant cousin of mine)? Enter the URL for this image into TinEye (or download the image and upload it to TinEye) and it will be readily apparent who this is.

The more difficult case is when the puzzle maker combines several different images into a single image for the puzzle. This case can be handled by downloading the image and manually separating it into its component parts and then uploading the individual part to TinEye. Any number of photo editing tools can do this but I won't go into details here other than to mention that I use a free tool available on almost all operating systems called GIMP.

As mentioned, the most valuable feature of a tool like TinEye is to identify the picture. But another thing it will show you is if the cache owner made slight modifications to the image. I once solved a cache puzzle by finding very near matches to the puzzle images using TinEye. Careful examination of the images showed tiny modifications that were relevant to the puzzle.


The Bucket Fill


Here is a simple image of Jeff Bridges.



But is there more to it? In computer images, very slight differences in colors are difficult to detect by the naked eye but they can be magnified by manipulating the image using a tool (even MS Paint can do this one). Download the image to your computer and open it with Paint (or GIMP or whatever) and choose the "Bucket fill" tool. Choose a light color like white (and if using the GIMP make sure you reduce the "Threshold" to 0) and click on the edge of the image to fill the outside border. You should end up with something like this.


I have seen several puzzles that either had solutions or hints that were hidden in this way. So if you see large areas of an image that appear to be a solid color (especially if they are an unneeded border or solid band) then try this to see if something is hidden in a slightly off color.


Transparency and Layers


You've probably noticed before that images on the Internet exist in many different formats (usually signified by the file extension) like JPG, PNG and GIF. These different formats are more than file names, though. They have different characteristics. One of the differences is support for transparency, which means portions of an image that are no color at all, meaning you see right through them. JPG images do not support transparency at all, while GIF and PNG do. This capability is frequently used by web page designers who layer images on top of one another and have portions of the top image be "see-through" so that you see the image behind it. So how does this apply to puzzles? Look at this image below:



There is more to this than just a white box. "Seeing" the transparency is fairly easy when you open the image using an image editing tool, or you can even do this one just using your browser. Just open the image in a separate tab or window and change the background color of your browser to something non-white. For Firefox you can do it like this:
  1. Right-click over the image and select "View Image"
  2. Select "Tools" => "Options" from your browser menu
  3. Select the "Content" tab
  4. Select "Colors" and change the background color

There's far more to transparency than this, including partial transparency (supported by PNG but not GIF), but this should be enough to get you started solving puzzles that use this technique.

Somewhat related to transparency is the concept of layering. As mentioned above web sites often layer PNG images over top of one another using transparency to affect the final viewable product. Well GIF images can go one further and support multiple layers within a single image. Also included can be instructions for how long to display each layer when displaying the image. This is how GIF animations work. Given all this, if you really want to see all of the layers and details of a GIF you should save the GIF file to your computer and open it with an image editing tool like GIMP or Photoshop.

Despite some of the advantages of other formats, JPG still sees widespread usage largely due to the fact that JPG files tend to be smaller in size thanks to compression. In fact, images that you upload to geocaching.com are converted to JPG whether you like it or not. Thus you'll often see cache puzzles that include images from external web sites. While not always relevant to the puzzle, whenever you see an image on a cache puzzle that is from an external site, take a closer look at it. Is it a PNG or GIF that might have layers or tranparency? Or did the cache owner simply want to give his own name to the file instead of the one generated for it when uploaded to geocaching.com?


Image Exif Data


I won't go into great detail about the "Exchangable image file format" (or Exif) standard, but suffice it to say that Exif data is extra data beyond what you see in the image that is stored in an image file (typically JPG images). Cameras, for example, will often include the date and time that a photo was taken and the GPS coordinates where it was taken within the Exif data. Many other things can be in Exif data, including geocache hints! There are many tools that you can download that will show you Exif data in image files, but the simplest way perhaps is to use one of several free online tools that will show you the Exif data. One such tool can be found here and another one here. Simply enter an image URL or upload an image and they will show you all of the Exif data including the thumbnail image. Did you know that the thumbnail image can be different than the main image in a JPG file? I've never seen a puzzle cache that utilized a phony thumbnail, but I've seen many that used basic text in the Exif data to include hints or coordinates.

Here is a picture of a local geocacher that I snapped last fall while out caching. He appears happy in this picture because the Spartans won that day and he has just found a cache. Try the above linked Exif viewer to view the Exif data for this picture. In Firefox you can right-click over the image and select "Copy image location" to put the URL for this image in your clipboard. Then paste it in the top box at the Exif viewer here




Embedded Information in Binary Files


This topic is really a more general application of the Exif trick described above. Exif data is (primarily) text that is embedded within an image file. There are several other ways that text (or extra files) can be embedded within binary files like images and audio. While the Exif viewing tools will show embedded data that adheres to the Exif standard, viewing data that has been embedded by other means is a little harder. If you are a Linux or Mac user you can run the "strings" command line tool on the binary file and quickly see all of the ASCII strings that are contained within the file. Of course just by random chance there will be many small garbage ASCII strings, but look for something longer or something that looks unusual. If you use Windows, you might just open the binary file in Notepad and give it a visual scan to see if you find anything that looks unusual. I've seen cases where the coordinates were simply appended to the end of a JPG file and you could clearly see them when you opened the file in Notepad.


Audio Files


So far we've only covered tools and tricks for dealing with images. There have also been a fair number of puzzle caches in this area that utilize audio files. The tool I use most often to deal with these is a free tool called Audacity. You can manipulate audio files using this tool in much the same way you manipulate image files with GIMP or Photoshop. Perhaps the most useful feature I've found for helping with puzzles, however, is the ability to view the wave patterns of a sound file. For example, here is a link to an audio sample of a clip of Morse code. If you are talented and patient enough you may be able to decipher it simply by listening to it several times. But an easier way (aside from using a Morse code interpreter program) is to look at it.

Here is a partial screen grab of what the file looks like when viewed in Audacity. Note that this image is scaled down to fit on the page. In Audacity you can zoom in and out to make the pattern larger or smaller as needed.



Your mileage may vary, but for me it is much easier to see the dots and dashes in visual form than to listen to them at real time speed. In case you haven't decoded it yet, the audio file and above image show "forty two eighty six" which are indeed the first two digits of the north and west coordinates for this cache.


Vigenere Ciphers


The aforementioned Lansing tutorial and some others cover cipher puzzles at a high level. There are many possible ciphers, and one site that provides lots of info and tools to help with them is here. On this page I'm going to go into a little more detail about one particular cipher, the Vigenere. There have been many puzzle caches in this area that use Vigenere, and several of them are based on the premise that you must crack the cipher. No clues to what the key might be are given in this case. So how can these ciphers be cracked? There are some tools available on the web that sometimes have success guessing at the key and will give the answer straight out. One such tool is available here, and another one is available here. I've used others as well but their availability seems to come and go as personal web sites tend to disappear over time.

Always a good idea to try sites like those above first since they may give you the answer quickly. But some of the Vigeneres I've encountered are too tough to crack for these tools. The strategy I've used to solve those is a known plaintext attack, or cribbing. If you know what a part of the resulting deciphered text will contain, you cycle through the entire ciphertext (or a particular segment you are sure it will be in) and find out what "key" would give you the desired text at each position. Then you can pick out the most likely keys (which may be just a fragment of the key) and apply them at all of the other points in the ciphertext to see if they give promising results elsewhere within the cipher. Back and forth you go until you have the key.

The entire process is described in a little more detail on this page which provides a tool to assist with cribbing Vigeneres. If you check out the tool and have suggestions let me know since the tool is written by none other than...myself. I've used it to solve many Vigenere caching puzzles in this area including some 5* puzzles. Recommended that you become somewhat familiar with Vigenere before trying to use it, however. It makes far more sense once you know a little about how Vigenere encoding/decoding work.

Given that introduction, here is a fairly simple Vigenere encrypted string that contains coordinates to a location somewhere in this local area. See if you can crack it using any of the above mentioned tools or others you might find.

zwtdldafnqxiwfokpqsmxsdbaomethjgmzbqxixqfiwmspvwmlghykezlyowrqwazxkakhhcsfywwqtgfilbccfxrqxoigsvnkihmpwmlghyk

This one is fairly simple as far as Vigenere puzzles go, but it's a good start to getting familiar with the cipher and techniques for cracking it.

Finally!


So you finally read through the whole cache page (or skipped it entirely) and possibly even learned some new techniques for solving geocaching puzzles. So what do you want, some sort of reward? Maybe something yummy like the cache coordinates?



We recently returned from another trip to Canada so the prizes for FTF and STF are of course the usual, foreign money!

Additional Hints (No hints available.)



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