Cleaning out my closet this afternoon, I came across my old Sun SPARCstation 5. Of course, that was the end of my cleaning for the day because whenever I come across something I forgot I had, I’m always compelled to tinker with it. After digging a little deeper to find my 13w3 to VGA adapter, I set it up with keyboard and mouse, and fired up this old beast not even expecting it to come to life, it's been a good four years since I last booted it. To my amazement, shortly after hitting the power button I was greeted by Solaris 9. Still boots after 17 years, wow! After a lot of grief I was able to compile Emacs (huge headache making this work). It was then that I remembered that I had hid a geocache yesterday.
Why not put Emacs to some good use after all that effort it took to compile it? I pulled out my GPSr, and found the waypoint of the cache that I had hidden and entered it’s coordinates into Emacs, I shorthanded the coords, eliminating the headings and the decimals, I figured that stuff would be obvious to me when I’d pull the file up later. The coords were entered in this fashion: ####### ########. I then cleared my GPSr of all of it’s waypoints, as I really needed the space to upload some new pocket queries. After that I went to save my Emacs file and… OH NO!! Emacs core dumped before saving the file, well I guess that’s what I get for beating such an old horse (The SPARC, not Emacs).
I had the ftp server running on the SPARC, so I copied the core file to a public directory then fired up an ftp client on my Windows machine. I grabbed the core file, in hopes that I would be able to retrieve my now lost coordinates. I opened up the file with a simple hex editor, and scoured the data. I think I found what I’m looking for, but something just doesn’t seem right...
N 142 94.067 W 46 06.899 (from base16)
Note: I really had to water down the concept for this puzzle. I apologize to any systems admins out there who would argue that this doesn’t work in practice… I could have easily built the puzzle in such a fashion, but as I was putting it together I realized that it was nearing D5 territory which is not what I had in mind initially. Hopefully as it stands now it should be solvable by anyone with a little research. My ultimate goal here was to make a puzzle that could be solved once the overall theme was discovered. Also, should you feel the need to write any code in order to solve this puzzle you are overthinking it.
Hide is a PnG, room for very small trade items. Bring a writing utensil. FTF prize is an unactivated Mega Event Micro Coin. Hint will be added after FTF
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.
Way to go BeckTrex on FTS and FTF!