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All good things must come to an end. After around five months with over 1000 students on an active hunt, one found the hidden treasure and claimed the prize. Follow along below as we crack open the riddles and solve the Study Planner Quest 2021 challenge.
All students who were issued a study planner were given an equal opportunity to discover and solve the riddles contained within, it all depended on their approach.
The puzzles in the book were laid out so that you couldn’t solve the riddle of any following puzzles without first knowing the answer of the preceding one. In this way, even if a puzzle was deciphered the player would still be missing a vital clue. The initial puzzle was the first in the book and took a queue from the 2020 study planner which had a very simple code to translate. This way it should technically be the easiest one to solve for any person playing.
The First puzzle was on page 28 & 29, it was a string of runic text written backwards without spaces across the top of the page. This puzzle had two parts, first the text needed to be de-coded, second the riddle needed to be solved. The translated text reads: ‘finding treasure requires many solutions begin your journey on the path to integer turn around to start finding your way’. The riddle is meant to guide the player to the literal path drawn on the background graphics of page, leading from the end of the passage down to the page number at the bottom ‘28’. Breaking down the riddle text, ‘begin your journey on the path’ was the literal path on the page background. With ‘to integer’ being one of the few words, meaning number, we could use that didn’t simply give away the answer. The last part of the text ‘turn around to start finding your way’ was the lead-in and training for the next puzzle. The solution was to flip the numbers of the page to get to the next one, 2 & 8 backwards becomes 82, which was reinforced as the runic cypher text was also read backwards.
While the puzzles in the 2021 study planner were not meant to be solved quickly this one threw allot of people. Mostly because there were other texts to translate in the planner and looking for a picture in the background graphic wasn’t something everyone thought to do. However, plenty of players got past this riddle and onto the next one.
The Second puzzle began on page 82, and contained no large cypher or obvious difference in the page design. Only one important yet small part of solving future puzzles, which was a small hidden number on the path in the background graphic. Numbers like these were spread throughout the book and only by starting on the correct page, would the player be led to the correct puzzle in sequence. Page 82 had number 66 hidden in the background. With the hope, this would make the player turn to page 66 where they would find the next number… and so on. The complete correct page sequence is: 82, 66, 97, 79, 54, 46, 73, 134, and 58.
As you may have guessed, the Third puzzle was on page 58 and much like the first one contained a cypher to be decoded. This was a different cypher from the first puzzle showing two lines of jumbled symbols. The first string contained 26 “symbols” letters being A-Z, to help the player decode the rest of the message. The string under the 26 letters reads: ‘follow more paths heed the destinations thirty eight’. This riddle wasn’t as complex as the first one, and is meant to set the player on the path towards the next riddle. While the text ‘thirty eight’ should become clear to any player that has solved the second puzzle, it contains another hidden number in the background. The phrase ‘heed the destinations’ wasn’t something that every player picked up on. This time they needed to keep track of the page numbers the hidden pages landed on.
This ‘Forth puzzle’ was a copy of the Second, in that the players would be led to a page with a hidden number telling them the next page. The sequence is as follows: 38, 110, 34, 114, 43, 26, 108, and 116.
The Fifth puzzle is where the book takes a turn. This is the last puzzle in the book that needs to be solved however only about 20 students managed to understand its meaning. The cypher and design on page 116 was the same as page 58 with text reading ‘start hyphen two dot six comma three dot six end through the door to found more is key to a deserving pat on the back’.
Unlike the previous puzzles this one wasn’t an easy solve and didn’t take any clues from the previous riddles. The solution is to take the previous background page numbers as a whole and apply the suggested additional information to it.
So, 38110341144326108116 becomes -38.110341,144.326108, which is a GPS coordinate. The second part of the riddle was to direct the player to the actual location they can see once standing at the coordinates.
The obscurity of the Fifth puzzle was a deliberate attempt to prolong the game and also to make sure that those who did randomly decipher the text in the planner on pages 58 and 116 still needed to know about the hidden background numbers and the number sequence from the Forth puzzle. Which in turn also relied on the experience, or solution, from the Second puzzle.
This is why the Third puzzle was simple, as the Fifth puzzle wasn’t an easy get. The final step took place on the college campus at a building featuring a lobby accessible by every student. The text: ‘to found more is key to a deserving pat on the back’ is a deliberate spelling mistake as the lobby features a statue of the College Founder’s. All the player needed to do was give them a pat on the back to find a hidden key card with details on how to claim their prize.
With that the puzzles, diary, and game ended. There was an extra safeguard in place to ensure the keycard wasn’t able to be claimed without having solved the study planner riddles. This was a simple website where the players had to answer questions relating to the final puzzle solutions.
The first prize was claimed in around 15 weeks of the puzzle being announced to the students. Only a handful of players actually claimed a prize, making it to the final location. Having a challenge like this in the Study Planner added so much gamification to a simple college diary, with some students keeping a copy of the 2021 edition, so they can continue to decipher the riddles even after graduating. Maybe it is time to think about doing it again?
This video will show you what happens when you start a Unifi Dream Machine for the first time without an internet connection. From start to finish we take you through the entire process. Unboxing a brand new UDM and connecting it via PC. With firmware updates allowing the UDM to be set up offline, what does the actual process looks like. Let us show you what is happening on the UDM as well as the URL interface running it.
As part of a school overseas trip to Japan we were asked to create a diary for the Students to be able to document their travels. Usually when traveling overseas there are plenty of photos taken as well as lots of souvenirs brought back home. However, we find that after a few years it becomes difficult to remember the name of that one location you visited that had that thing you wanted to go back to. Sometimes good intensions are had if you take a generic notebook with you, but these are mostly left blank if not organised properly. It made sense to us to design and create a tour book specifically for the journey the students are about to embark upon, with specific organised sections to fill out.
As the book is designed specifically for this trip it can also contain all the itinerary information with it, which is helpful if the students don’t have access to electronic devices or the internet. It can also contain more helpful information about the trip they are on relevant to the experiences they are going to partake in. From here, the content of the book only grew with information about packing lists, Japanese customs, etiquette, nuances, and addresses. It got bigger as spaces for emergency contact numbers and what to do in case of an earthquake was included. Finally some activities for the Students to fill out, and a scavenger hunt to complete during their travels was added.
The last big chunk of information was about the nuances of the home stay portion of the trip. Information about how to resolve issues that may occur, with further etiquette and expectations that may be faced while living with a family for a week. Most importantly it contains pages to log a journal entry for each day of the trip, with suggested spaces to write down place names, contact details, and weather information.
The books were handed out to the students to go over it with their parents a few weeks before the trip, to help answer questions they may have and alleviate any concerns. Full of information-graphics, pictures, and colour coordinated for each section of the book to help make finding information easy. The styling and cover of the book was intentionally made cheerful, bright, and unique with the hope that this will become a keepsake for the students on the trip to help remember their journey and make their first experience of Japan an exciting one.
In this video we demonstrate how we created an Elgato Stream Deck button that animates for a specific duration when pressed before returning to a static state, without needing any plugins or third-party apps. This is useful when triggering something like an animated lower third, by showing a looping indication animation while the om screen animation is active and stopping us from accidentally pressing any other buttons. By default, the Stream Deck doesn’t offer any native solution for a button that, when pressed, plays a looping animation and returns to a static picture.
By manipulating the multi-action switch and combining it with a back-to-front animated GIF, we can give the appearance and functionality of a button that looks to be in an animated holding state while an action is performed, and then returns to a static image once the action is completed. The button gives the appearance of having an off state and animated on state, which is helpful when running a live stream that uses screen bugs, lower thirds, and other one-shot animations.
With the design of the Arcade Cabinet Control Panel finalised and tested. It is time to share the printable plans online for you to use in your own project. Available below are printable plans at a 1:1 scale for the Arcade Cabinet Control panel.
These are the plans we used to precisely cut out the panel and drill any holes for components. The plans should fit in a 1:1 ratio on a A0 (1189mm wide x 841mm high) sized piece of paper and can usually be printed at your local office supply store in Black and white for a reasonable price. This makes it very easy to transfer the designs to your material without having to scale or convert any measurements.
The guide hole sizes and potions of the arcade components precisely fit most arcade hardware. We specifically used ‘classic dimple top’ buttons and ‘zippy joystick’ control for our build, so check your component size in case you need to drill holes in different sizes. Features of the Control panel are either a two player or four player arcade setup, or a transformable version where the player three and player four wings can be removed, and added, as needed. This feature, and a complete guide to the arcade cabinet build, will be the subject of a future video and live stream series.
The two player version (middle square layout) is also designed to fit through a standard door frame. One of the features of our overall arcade cabinet design, and one that has come in useful when moving the cabinet around the workshop and final resting place inside the house.
This was the main reason for making the three and four player pads removable, but not a necessity when designing your own cabinet, you will have to alter some of the guide lines if you choose to keep your control panel two player, or want a complete board for a four player set up. The plans also feature Front and Side views of the panel, with specific details of the three and four player extensions. The green lines represent the panels to be cut out to scale. The purple lines are the panels assembled from their respective projections.
Click here to view and download the plans for your own use.
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Follow along as we showcase our endeavours and produce some unique items and other projects. Thank you for visiting, and let us know your feedback and comments by following our social media channels.
