Tag Archives: code

Jan 28 2025
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Daily Post, Landscape

High Knoll: Code?

Tuesday 28th January 2025, 2.25pm (day 4,905)

High Knoll Fort, 28/1/25

I have absolutely no idea, for certain, whether this will be my last full day on St Helena or not. I have given up speculating, for if I don’t leave tomorrow as currently scheduled, I might succumb to despair. I tried to avoid this emotion today by going on a walk up to High Knoll Fort — appearing for the third time on this visit. This view is taken from inside, looking down through the battlements to the island’s secondary school on Francis Plain. What the code means, I have absolutely no idea either. One Exits Now? That would be good.

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Mar 16 2024
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Daily Post, Interior

Enigma

Friday 15th March 2024, 12.30pm (day 4,586)

Enigma machine, 15/3/24

Found another excuse to leave home for a while and come for a weekend in Milton Keynes, which may not sound the most immediately glamorous destination, but it does have the significant draw of Bletchley Park. It was here that World War 2 was won, arguably, when a (largely female) staff of thousands worked tirelessly to crack German ciphers, mainly produced by the now-famous Enigma machines, of which the museum still has a few dozen, out of about 450 surviving ones apparently.

Do you know that if Enigma had ever enciphered a letter as itself, the code would have been near-impossible to crack? But this was its fatal weakness, giving just enough indication that particular strings of gibberish might just be commonly-used phrases like “Wetter für heute” [‘the weather for today…’] and allowing each daily machine setting to be worked out.

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