LOL; I used split in the temp directory to create files of a single byte each and ran md5sum on them.

That's quite a bit more straightforward :)

Well I spent an hour trying out as many commands as possible before giving up. Then came across this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252612 and went through his Twitch recordings to see if he could get past this stage. That is how I learnt about iconv. :)

Hehe. I kinda love this though :P

shuf also works (its in /usr/bin) -- this took me a ~long~ time to figure out