So what was the relation between "all your base belong 2 us" and the answer?

You convert it to Base 2 (binary) from the Base 10 (decimal) it's in..

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blog.brokennetwork.ca

Well now I feel like a dumbass!! I was just way over complicating it...

Thanks Steve for putting this together!! Also thanks to the sponsors!

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http://blog.movingonesandzeros.net/

Damn I should have carried on with what I was doing but since the m didn't look right and it was backwards I thought I had it wrong. Nvm

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Networking is much like making love to a beautiful woman
Slide your equipment in to the rack, Stick your plug in the socket, and if you have done it right at the end everyone is happy

aye. It being backwards as well as the missing 0 threw me off for a while.

I spent a couple hours trying all kinds of operations on pairs and triplets of numbers (arithmetic operations, bitwise operations, etc.), and then mapping it to ASCII. I also tried other character sets like radix, EBCDIC, morse code, baudot, etc. It was obvious that something else was going on because of the prevalence of all ones and all zeroes, that these wouldn't directly map to a character set. I also looked for groupings based on these two values, but they were not consistently spaced in the message. I wrote a one-off perl script to help try some of these ideas (basically message stored in an array, and then replace contents of while loop with logic to build a new array, and then map the new array into the various character sets for display one per line).

I called it quits until the first hint, but the first hint didn't help since I was already looking at things in base2, but looking for relations assuming that they were integers and not components of a bitmapped symbol.

It was immediately obvious when hint 2 came around with the picture of the dot matrix printer innards.

I am also of the dumbass....

Love the challenge though. Nice work Steve.

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- Pete