[larryboyko]

>I see that I removed one newline character at the end of the file

Hm, strange. I don't see, and there shouldn't be, an extraneous newline at the end of the (original) file.

[gjm11]

Interesting: maybe I added it by mistake in a text editor mishap or something :-).

[te]

Hmmm. The original, in fact, does NOT have the 0x0a at the end of the file; however, in process of deleting first part of file up through and including "1.#####", my linux command line tools (or vim?) added one there (unbeknownst to me at the time). I proceeded to solve first puzzle with the 0x0a there at the end in the head-shortened ciphertext, and I got readable plaintext, but my sha256sum does not match yours. If I remove the 0x0a, I get neither readable plaintext nor a matching sha256sum.

(btw, love this project, thanks for sharing it)