I wanted to paste a text file with my homework assignment into Gmail. Unfortunately, said text file was on the school server and I really didn’t want to permanently download the thing to my hard drive. So this is what I did:

This connects to the school server, retrieves graph.txt from my home directory, and copies it to standard out. I then piped the text into pbcopy, which is the Mac utility for manipulating the clipboard. After that, I switched to Gmail and did a paste.

Unix/bash is cool!

[We had received a message from Enoch with a building number, a 0-level room number, and 3 two-digit numbers.]

Me: I don’t think this building has a basement.
McLeod: Can’t find a map… this is room 105…
Me: Maybe we’t wrong…
McLeod: … [looking at some nearby lockers]
Me: No way…

[And indeed, our heroes found two decks of cards (labeled Alpha and Beta, with the message “order matters”) inside the locker. Later, that same evening…]

Me: Dude, I think we saw something like this when we were researching the last cypher.
McLeod: Oh yeah?
Me: In Cryptonomicon, they used something called a Solitaire cypher. Maybe that’s it. All I’ve gotta do is pop open Vim and write a Python script to perform the deck operations. Let the hacking begin. [puts on music from The Social Network]

[After some home-cooked burgers, our heroes wrote a simple Solitaire cypher decrypter in Python and decoded the latest message.]