TOCs

I’ve been writing on cryptograms and cryptography since 2018, and that represents a fairly large body of diverse blog entries. I’m providing this TOC index page as a way to introduce a certain amount of order to the chaos. I may or may not be successful in this task…

Encryption/Decryption/Solving
Index into all of the articles I’ve written on using and solving various cipher systems. This is the main bulk of the value of this site.

The Black Chamber Youtube Video Index (Last Updated Mar. 25)
I have a channel on youtube dedicated to teaching Recreational Cryptography. I’m indexing the videos here to make them easier to find what you’re looking for.

Escape Game Reviews
Escape room games have been an entire industry since the mid-2000’s, and “escape room games in a box” have attempted to capture the excitement of live rooms ever since. Many of the boxed games include some kind of a cipher (Caesar-shift, checkerboard, Morse code), so I’m reviewing them as I can to highlight the ones with good ciphers.

Cipher-Related Book Reviews Index
I read a lot. Much of what I read are books about cryptographic history, and on-line scans of older cryptographic documents. I.e. Kahn’s The Codebreakers, and William Friedman’s Cryptography Lectures. The links to these write-ups are listed in this index

Python GUI Tutorials
How-To descriptions for implementing GUI front-ends to Python software auto-solver tools. Includes full, commented source code.

The Black Chamber Fiction Reviews Index
As a supplement to the Youtube channel, and the encryption/decryption pages on this blog, I’m also reviewing stories that include ciphers in fiction. Some of the steps for solving the ciphers are turned into videos that can be found in the above Index.

Recreational Cryptography Article Index
This index is the heart of The Black Chamber. It lists the walkthroughs of all the cipher types that I’ve covered so far, and what I know about solving them, as well as my progress in writing Python solver tools for each type.

The Cryptogram Summaries
The Cryptogram is the official newsletter of the American Cryptogram Association. They have been in existence since 1932, and the Cm is a great source of information, history and how-to articles, as well as running 100+ crypts per issue (bi-monthly).

Miscellaneous
This is where I’m putting the links to silly stuff, book reviews, related youtube videos and articles on ciphers appearing in Japanese manga.

Cryptolog Summaries
The Cryptolog was one of the National Security Agency’s in-house newsletters from the 70’s to the 90’s. I attempted to summarize the contents of each issue to show which articles appealed to me, and why. If you’re interested in cryptologic history, the Cryptolog is a very good reference.

Pascal and En/De
Back when I first started writing these articles, I decided to create an experimental encryption/decryption tool in Free Pascal that I called En/De. In this section, I documented my progress, what I was learning about Free Pascal, and my early thoughts on recreational encryption. En/De is currently in mothballs, but I intend to return to it some time in the future.