Posted by Krux on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 02:20am
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Uploaded more pictures. Such as these of the D20

http://krux.org/gallery/v/events/Defcon/defcon18/IMG_1155.JPG.html
http://krux.org/gallery/v/events/Defcon/defcon18/IMG_1123.JPG.html

Posted by voltaic on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 07:22am
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So rad. How is it that you aren't making sets of those (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) with custom paint jobs and selling them at game cons for side money?

Posted by Krux on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 05:50pm
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So rad. How is it that you aren't making sets of those (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) with custom paint jobs and selling them at game cons for side money?

It took me three nights after work to build the D20. First night was buying metal, cutting out the equilateral triangles, and I started to tack together 2 groups of 5 triangles. That consisted of lots of painters tape, and then tacking the corner where all five triangles meet. Second night I finished tacking the D20 together... even more painters tape to put together the center group of 10 triangles. and then taping the two ends to the center piece. That took some time, since the triangles were not perfect, so it was getting everything as close as possible, and then once the welds filled in the inconsistencies, grinding the fuck out of the edges. Third night was spent giving a brushed metal finish to each of the 20 sides, and marking the languages on the faces.

I probably should make an entire set for myself if nothing else. I think painting them you would loose a certain something. The industrial rough steel look seems to lend the D20 a bit more awesomeness to it. It looks like it could, most likely because it certainly can, cause quite a bit of damage. In fact we made the "Roll D20 for damage" joke a couple times.

As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Posted by voltaic on Friday August 20, 2010 @ 07:50am
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So like I asked...

Posted by Caliber on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 06:58pm
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So rad. How is it that you aren't making sets of those (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) with custom paint jobs and selling them at game cons for side money?

It took me three nights after work to build the D20. First night was buying metal, cutting out the equilateral triangles, and I started to tack together 2 groups of 5 triangles. That consisted of lots of painters tape, and then tacking the corner where all five triangles meet. Second night I finished tacking the D20 together... even more painters tape to put together the center group of 10 triangles. and then taping the two ends to the center piece. That took some time, since the triangles were not perfect, so it was getting everything as close as possible, and then once the welds filled in the inconsistencies, grinding the fuck out of the edges. Third night was spent giving a brushed metal finish to each of the 20 sides, and marking the languages on the faces.

I probably should make an entire set for myself if nothing else. I think painting them you would loose a certain something. The industrial rough steel look seems to lend the D20 a bit more awesomeness to it. It looks like it could, most likely because it certainly can, cause quite a bit of damage. In fact we made the "Roll D20 for damage" joke a couple times.

As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Better get started, I need some front lawn ornaments...

Posted by Krux on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 11:06pm
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As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Better get started, I need some front lawn ornaments...

You going to pay me?

Posted by Caliber on Thursday August 19, 2010 @ 12:56am
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As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Better get started, I need some front lawn ornaments...

You going to pay me?

I do live near what is considered the best whorehouse in Nevada.

Posted by Krux on Friday August 20, 2010 @ 02:55am
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As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Better get started, I need some front lawn ornaments...

You going to pay me?

I do live near what is considered the best whorehouse in Nevada.

I can get laid here, and don't have to spend a week sweating, welding and grinding in my garage to do it. No, my time requires cash.

Posted by Caliber on Friday August 20, 2010 @ 09:08am
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As far as selling them, a set would be pretty expensive, considering the amount of time that has to go in to make them. Almost would need to get the faces cut out using a water jet, and then use a C&C mill to inset the numbers.

Better get started, I need some front lawn ornaments...

You going to pay me?

I do live near what is considered the best whorehouse in Nevada.

I can get laid here, and don't have to spend a week sweating, welding and grinding in my garage to do it. No, my time requires cash.

it doesn't have to be your garage... :|

Posted by Stealth on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 05:32am
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How heavy was it? Did it seem to roll/change sides easily?

Posted by Krux on Wednesday August 18, 2010 @ 05:26pm
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How heavy was it? Did it seem to roll/change sides easily?

It rolled great. It wasn't as heavy as I wanted it to be, since I could only get 1/16in sheet metal on short notice. I wanted to build it with 1/8in metal plate to give it a bit more weight, though still since it was made of steel, it had some decent weight to it. I could feel the vibration of it rolling on the convention floor through the stage I was sitting on, so I suppose it was decent enough.

I suppose I could actually weigh it when I get home to find out, but my guess is around 4 pounds.

Posted by Krux on Tuesday August 24, 2010 @ 03:51am
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How heavy was it? Did it seem to roll/change sides easily?

It rolled great. It wasn't as heavy as I wanted it to be, since I could only get 1/16in sheet metal on short notice. I wanted to build it with 1/8in metal plate to give it a bit more weight, though still since it was made of steel, it had some decent weight to it. I could feel the vibration of it rolling on the convention floor through the stage I was sitting on, so I suppose it was decent enough.

I suppose I could actually weigh it when I get home to find out, but my guess is around 4 pounds.

I guessed wrong. The D20 weighs 6.6 pounds. Hey at least insomnia was good for something.

Posted by Stealth on Friday August 27, 2010 @ 10:09am
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How heavy was it? Did it seem to roll/change sides easily?

It rolled great. It wasn't as heavy as I wanted it to be, since I could only get 1/16in sheet metal on short notice. I wanted to build it with 1/8in metal plate to give it a bit more weight, though still since it was made of steel, it had some decent weight to it. I could feel the vibration of it rolling on the convention floor through the stage I was sitting on, so I suppose it was decent enough.

I suppose I could actually weigh it when I get home to find out, but my guess is around 4 pounds.

I guessed wrong. The D20 weighs 6.6 pounds. Hey at least insomnia was good for something.

Next time you can't sleep.. make the rest of the set and sell them.. make some money from your condition.

Posted by Krux on Friday August 27, 2010 @ 03:11pm
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Next time you can't sleep.. make the rest of the set and sell them.. make some money from your condition.

The problem with that is I need time to unwind to get to sleep. And I do not do well with zero sleep.

Posted by Stealth on Saturday August 28, 2010 @ 05:47am
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Next time you can't sleep.. make the rest of the set and sell them.. make some money from your condition.

The problem with that is I need time to unwind to get to sleep. And I do not do well with zero sleep.

So Vodka, Wine, Scotch.. those don't help?

Posted by Krux on Thursday August 5, 2010 @ 04:34pm
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Ok, here is part 1 of our write up copied from:

http://dc509.org/?p=104

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Registration

Posted on Aug.05, 2010 at 10:57 am

Here it is the beginning of August, and another defcon has come and gone. Once again this year a few members of dc509 competed in the LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge. EvilPacket and flirzan were re-joined this year by PunkAB, chaoskitty, and krux, and welcomed a few new members to the team as well. krux's friend fish joined up, as did VoltageSpike, whom we met on IRC during registration. Together we came to be known as Team 0, aka Team psychoholics. Previous to registration LosT had mentioned that this might be the last year for the Mystery Challenge, so we were very motivated to make a good showing this year.

Speaking of registration, it started all the way back in May, May 7, 2010, to be exact. If you write this date down in the common European format it becomes 10/5/7, or 1057, which happens to be the handle of the guy who runs the Mystery Challenge. On this date LosT^ came on irc, to the #mysterychallenge channel on efnet, and played a game with those of us who were there. a partial transcript follows:



This series of hints led us to find a facebook page for Kenji Urada, one of the first humans to be killed by a robot. Most of our team members quickly sent him a friend request, and waited patiently to see what would come next. The answer was an image, using a long dead alphabet to encipher a message. By assigning letters to the symbols, and then using frequency analysis on the letters, we were able to decipher the message rather quickly. Once deciphered the message read:



We noticed that Kenji had an email address listed on his facebook page, so we emailed him, and waited to hear back. We got a message back in the form of a note from Kenji on facebook indicating we were on the right path, and more details would be revealed soon. Over the next week or so we hung out on IRC and got to know several of the people frequenting #mysterychallenge. On the 15th of May Kenji posted another note:



We decided this note was a reference to several youtube videos that had been posted on the website, We noticed the odd line spacing right away and started digging for more clues. We spent the next 24 hours emailing random things to Kenji. One of the truly fun things about this contest is the fact that once you start looking you can make all SORTS of things fit into a given scenario. This is also one of the really frustrating things, because it happens fairly often that you stumble on the right answer while running in circles, and it can be difficult to know when to stop. For a little while we took the "throw everything at him and see what sticks" tack, and got many messages back telling us to keep at it, and at one point he told us we needed to "simplify". We took this literally and removed everything inside the parens, and the note started to make more sense. On the 17th, this was posted on ten-five-seven.org:



Along with this:



I'd like to take a minute to point out that up to this point LosT had been posting hints fairly regularly, and to archive them all here would be tedious, and wouldn't lend anything to the story. Suffice it to say that based on the hints you've seen above, and a couple smaller nudges in the right direction, we found that we needed to read only the odd lines of the note from Kenji. This told us to take the first letter of each youtube video, and do something with them. We spent quite a while trying different tactics here, and finally decided we needed to convert each letter to a number. We assumed A=1, and added up the resulting numbers, which gave us 199. When converted to binary this was *almost* a palindrome; 11000111. Adding 256 to 199 gets you 111000111 in binary, or 455 in decimal. From the second hint above we knew the checksum was a Phoenix area code, and 455+602 = 1057, we had found the right answer. We quickly sent our answer and our methodology off to Kenji, and a short time later were rewarded by being the first team to register for the Challenge this year.

We then spent the next few weeks hanging out on IRC getting to know many of the people still working on registration, which is what led to VoltageSpike joining our team. We also dropped the occasional hint to try and help some of the people who were still stuck, and were very happy when those teams got registered as well. In part two, we'll start going over the steps we took once we hit the ground in Las Vegas.

I would also like to take a moment to thank LosT. Without his hard work and twisted mind I wouldn't have met some of the coolest people I know, and for that I am grateful. For the past 5 years LosT has expended considerable effort, and plenty of his own money, to put on a contest he felt worthy of carrying his name. I have competed for the final three of those years, and I have to say he has provided some of the most frustrating, mind bending, just plain FUN puzzles I've ever had the pleasure to tackle. Thank you, LosT, and whatever the future brings know that you have our respect and gratitude.

Posted by Krux on Friday August 6, 2010 @ 10:22pm
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Part 2:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 1

Posted by Krux on Sunday August 8, 2010 @ 10:23pm
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Part 2:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 1

Part 3:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 2

Part 4:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 3

Posted by Krux on Friday August 27, 2010 @ 03:10pm
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Part 2:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 1

Part 3:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 2

Part 4:

LosT @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, Day 3

And finally... Part 5:

Lost @ Con Mystery Challenge recap, The Final Day

Posted by Stealth on Saturday August 28, 2010 @ 05:53am
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Hey man.. thanks. The pictures at the end are cool.. It would be cool to get over to defcon some day. So, now that the contest is over, are you going to start to attend the actual talks and stuff?

Posted by Krux on Saturday August 28, 2010 @ 03:54pm
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Hey man.. thanks. The pictures at the end are cool.. It would be cool to get over to defcon some day. So, now that the contest is over, are you going to start to attend the actual talks and stuff?

Hell no. I'll compete in (or run) something else. If you go to Defcon for the talks, you are missing the point.

Posted by Stealth on Sunday August 29, 2010 @ 03:05am
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Hey man.. thanks. The pictures at the end are cool.. It would be cool to get over to defcon some day. So, now that the contest is over, are you going to start to attend the actual talks and stuff?

Hell no. I'll compete in (or run) something else. If you go to Defcon for the talks, you are missing the point.

Yeah,. I guess I would have missed the point.

Posted by Stealth on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @ 09:02am
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Thanks for those.. neat stuff.

Posted by Stealth on Friday August 6, 2010 @ 12:35pm
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quick unrelated question.. how did you end up with a group from WA?

Posted by Krux on Friday August 6, 2010 @ 10:11pm
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quick unrelated question.. how did you end up with a group from WA?

Last year chaos and I were the only ones from our previous team who could participate. And they were short some team members as well, so since we were all hanging out on the IRC channel, we figured we would join forces.

Posted by Stealth on Saturday August 7, 2010 @ 10:52am
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quick unrelated question.. how did you end up with a group from WA?

Last year chaos and I were the only ones from our previous team who could participate. And they were short some team members as well, so since we were all hanging out on the IRC channel, we figured we would join forces.

Cool.. i just thought it was a like a precursor to you actually moving up that way. :-)

Posted by Stealth on Wednesday August 4, 2010 @ 01:50pm
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Once again my Defcon weekend was consumed with mostly with Mystery Challenge, and has been totally worth the effort, since the team I was on, The Psychoholics, got the black badge, and the coveted HMFT (huge mother fucking tool) that LosT gives out to the winning team each year. This year the HMFT consisted of a 42 inch set of heavy duty bolt cutters. LosT also threw in a large suit case of swag, which we claimed some items from, and then gave the rest to the teams who came by the Hofbräuhaus for the post Defcon Mystery Challenge celebration.

So this was the last and final year for the Mystery Challenge. It ran for 5 years, of which I competed the last 4 in, and it has made the next Defcon something I've been looking forward to as soon as that year's Defcon has ended. It's a challenging contest, at times to the point of mental torture. Just figuring out HOW to register is a challenge. But ultimately the Mystery Challenge is more fun than I've ever had at Defcon in years prior. To give you some idea as what is required:

congrats man! that's very cool. I remember a year or two ago how close you had been to winning. It should most definitely have been a neat event to do.

I'm looking forwards to reading up on the event and how it all went down.

Posted by Krux on Wednesday August 4, 2010 @ 03:19pm
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congrats man! that's very cool. I remember a year or two ago how close you had been to winning. It should most definitely have been a neat event to do.

Seriously. That and since it was the last year for it, we had extra motivation. Another cool note about the Challenge this year, LosT created a secondary prize, a large black auger, for the team who got reamed by the winning team. Since we consider Mobile Disco to be our arch rivals, it was especially satisfying was that when we beat them they got this prize. (Interestingly we seem to get along well with all the other teams. Hell I even like some of the guys I've talked to on MD. But I guess you have to hate someone for it to be a worth while challenge.)

I'm looking forwards to reading up on the event and how it all went down.

Yea, once we get the walk through of how we solved things, I'll be sure to post it here.

Posted by Caliber on Tuesday August 3, 2010 @ 10:29pm
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Congrats on the win man, after seeing all that was encompassed in last years, I can't wait to see what was going on this year

Posted by Krux on Tuesday August 3, 2010 @ 10:22pm
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One other thing of note, I also competed in Crash & Compile, which is a programming contest combined with a drinking game:
http://crashandcompile.com/

Pretty much you get a syntax error, code fails to compile, it segfaults, doesn't produce the right output, you take a drink. other teams finish before you, you take a drink. This was done on the main stage in the contest area Saturday night. My friend Smitty was running this as a new contest, so I figured I would do my part to make programming a more interesting spectator sport, by welding up a giant D20, and put random programming languages on each side, most of which I had never even used or seen before. Then we rolled for a random language before we were given each problem. We got so drunk, that by the last problem we could no longer read it, and had to have one of the people running the contest read it to us.. heh.. yet, we still managed to place 4th. I'll post pictures once I have them.

Posted by Krux on Tuesday August 3, 2010 @ 10:09pm
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Here is a write up from one of the other teams who competed.

http://www.chenb0x.org:81/~bgm/mystery/