I went and researched this before reading the link, and found a slightly different solution than the author. By taking advantage of python's 'tarfile' module, it was easy to create a (us)tar-compatible header. My solution is here: https://gist.github.com/jepler/f86255a6e054d9b6ca540d0c7afe1...

.. only tested with gnu tar, but all the world's a vax eh?

that's an interesting approach but your extracting script is limited to 99 bytes at most, right?

yes.