At first glance, it looked like a decorative art installation. Look closer (much, much closer), and you may have realized the spinning circles at the top of Adobe’s headquarters in downtown San Jose were a puzzle waiting to be solved.

After three years of playing on repeat, the code has been finally cracked. Software engineer Brian Vincent solved the semaphore this spring, Adobe announced, staring at and analyzing the circles’ rotations until he ultimately realized it was conveying an image from the “Birth of Venus” painting by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

A semaphore is a way to send a visual message. It can be done with waving flags, fire or flashing lights. Think of Paul Revere’s famous example, when he used lanterns to signal the British were coming.

In the case of the San Jose Semaphore, there are four circles that can each appear in four positions, making a total of 256 possible combinations between them. The puzzle first debuted in 2006, transmitting a message on a loop. The circles take a new position every 7.2 seconds.

This version of the puzzle has been playing repeatedly since May of 2023, waiting for someone to figure out its message.

“I wanted to create a code that was impossible for me to solve,” said its creator and artist Ben Rubin.

The first-ever San Jose Semaphore from 20 years ago broadcast the full text of the novel “The Crying of Lot 49” by Thomas Pynchon. The second was broadcasting an audio file instead: the the famous Neil Armstrong quote “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

This puzzle, the third in the semaphore’s history, was transmitting a visual medium: a small segment of a Renaissance painting.

How is that possible? Well, it turns out it’s extremely complicated. It took years for someone to solve it, after all.

In the simplest terms, the circles were essentially transmitting a code for colors in the pixels of a digital image. Vincent spent years agonizing over the four circles’ rotations until he finally discovered the solution. It was a code for one small rose from the “Birth of Venus.” (Hear more about how Rubin crafted the tricky puzzle and how Vincent cracked the code in the video at the top of this story.)

“I want to say that the difficulty level on this puzzle is probably perfect,” Vincent said. “In some ways it seems a little bit simple, but at the same time it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort, and it stands for years before anyone solves it.”

Now that the code has been cracked, it’s time for a new puzzle. A fourth semaphore is planned for the San Jose building, Adobe said. Whoever solves the next one will get a two-year subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and major bragging rights.

Happy college football prediction month!

July is when preseason projections hit for the upcoming season.

The Colorado State football team is approaching the first preseason camp under new coach Jim Mora, which brings hopes of a new beginning after the Rams went 2-10 in 2025.

Here’s a look at how some of the national outlets project the Rams to fare in 2026:

Athlon Sports

The national college football magazine projection for 2026 picks CSU to finish seventh in the eight-team league.

Tight end Juice Vereen is the only Ram Athlon projects to be first-team all-conference. The magazine also lists Vereen as its No. 10 in the top transfers section.

Oklahoma State transfer Hauss Hejny is the No. 3 player in Athlon’s top transfers, with the magazine saying, “Hejny is a former blue-chip recruit who showed promise for the Cowboys.”

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Other than brush, overgrown grass, some birds singing in the distance, and perhaps a gust of wind coming in, there’s really not much going on in Honouliuli Gulch these days.

More than 80 years ago, it was a different story.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a hasty prisoner of war compound was built in this barren area of Oahu and named the Honouliuli Internment Camp.

Some of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned here had another name for this place: “Jigoku dani,” or “Hell Valley.”

“There is a reason why the Japanese Americans nicknamed it Hell’s Valley. It’s a very rugged environment. It’s deep in the gulf to the valley,” said Christine Ogura, superintendent of the Honouliuli National Historic Site.

Now, for the first time, the public will be able to understand the “hell” internees experienced through guided tours into what is now known as the Honouliuli National Historic Site.

“You’re going to have an opportunity to actually walk original historic roads that people who were incarcerated there, their family members walked as well,” Ogura said. “Even though the camp was closed and we don’t have any original structures left, because when the military closed in 1946, they actually took everything down. But we do still have original, like the concrete slab foundation of the mess hall, where families were able to reunite with their mothers and their fathers during visitation.”

The internment camp opened in 1943 and was the largest and longest-used incarceration site in the islands. At its peak, Honouliuli held over 4,000 prisoners of war from Italy, Taiwan, Korea, Philippines and had the largest contingent made up of Japanese Americans.

For Superintendent Ogura, what happened here is personal since she is a second-generation American of Japanese ancestry.

“When I found out that this happened here and being Nisei myself and my parents are Issei, I reflected: had I been born a generation earlier it could have been me and my mom,” she said. “I think locally it’s an important history to conserve and perpetuate because it is important that our communities know that this happened locally.”

Tours at the Honouliuli National Historic Site will begin on July 18, and demand has been overwhelming with every tour fully booked and waitlists in the hundreds.

“I will say the response has been humbling when we released the dates. It booked up within 25 minutes and we currently have a waiting list of over 1,700 people,” Ogura said.

The park is working toward more availabilities for next year.

Officials are looking for volunteer docents to help expand tour capacity.