A Couple O' Nuggets

I ran across a couple of nice nuggets of geocaching information goodness on Twitter this week. First was an April 7th tweet from @dudleygrunt, who provided a link to this little gem called, geocaching.com quick links. This site provides links to all your favorite geocaching.com sections in one place; plus it lets you add your own links. Definitely bookmark worthy.


Then, earlier this month, @GeocacheNews pointed out this nifty little Chrome extension that really cleans up the geocaching.com interface. It's called, appropriately enough, GC Tidy. If you use Google Chrome as your default web browser like I do, then you'll love this extension. Look how it cleans up the links at the top of the gc.com profile page:

It also does a nice job cleaning up some of the other pages, especially the maps page. If you use Chrome, give it a whirl.

Cache On!

More Road Trip Cache Planning

I've offered some suggestions in the past about how to go about setting up for a trip that involves geocaching; either as the focus of the trip, or as a diversion from the real purpose of your trip. Now if you are one of those cachers that uses one of those newfangled wireless devices like an iPhone or an Oregon or anything that doesn't require uploading pocket queries onto your GPS receiver, then stop reading right now because this post doesn't apply to you. For you old school cachers like me that will never part with your Garmin GPSmap 60Csx or eTrex, then read on.

What happens when your trip is so long that you find it difficult to load all the possible caches along your route on to your GPSr device, whether that limit is 500 or 1,000 waypoints? I had that experience recently when planning for a college road trip with my daughter, which took us over 600 miles one-way from the San Francisco Bay Area to the northern reaches of the state of Oregon. My GPSr holds 1,000 waypoints, so I needed to set up my "caches along a route" pocket query with a small enough search radius to accommodate as many caches as I could fit. I split the trip into two halves of about 500 caches each, and it turned out I needed to limit the search radius (distance from the route (Interstate-5)) to a quarter-mile along each side of the highway:

That's much smaller than I generally like to use, but that's the best I could do. I also needed to add a limited number of caches from the college towns we were visiting as well. After loading all my trip pocket queries into GSAK, I had well over 1,000 caches; about 1,300 in fact. So now what? I couldn't just start deleting caches indiscriminately to get down to the magic number of 1,000 caches.

The trick I like to use in this situation is to employ the "Last found date" filter in GSAK. I set it up to show me all the caches in my Oregon trip database that have not been found for the last 60 days, figuring these caches have either already gone missing, or were too difficult to spend a tremendous amount of time messing with on this trip:

You can set the number of days to whatever suits you, but it turned out that 60 days was perfect in this case, as after deleting all of the caches in this filter, I got my list down to 994. Perfect!

Something to keep in mind when you find yourself bumping up against your GPSr's waypoint limit.

Cache On!

Geocaching At The Movies

I finally got around to seeing "Splinterheads" last night (better late than never).



I actually watched it online, as it's limited theater run came and went nearly two years ago. It was an enjoyable, funny movie, worth watching if you get the chance. The lead characters play their roles very well. Rachell Taylor plays Galaxy, a strong, independent carnie and geocacher, and Thomas Middleditch plays Justin, a cowardly but lovable dufus (who looks and sounds a lot like Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live). I loved the irony of Justin accusing Galaxy of being a nerd after she explained to him what geocaching is. But I was equally impressed by the strength of the comedic talent of the supporting actors/actresses, including:

• Christopher McDonald (from Happy Gilmore)
• Lea Thompson (who doesn't remember her from Back to the Future?)
• Dean Winters (from 30 Rock and currently in all those All State commercials)
• John Lutz (Also from 30 Rock)

My favorite line was when Reggie (Dean Winters), Galaxy's mean-spirited, jealous boyfriend, refers to caches as "cashews" when telling Galaxy how much he hates that hobby of hers.

While most of the movie takes place at the carnival site, quite a bit of the film is devoted to geoaching as well. The movie does a fair and accurate job of explaining and showing what geocaching is (the writers did their research). The only problem I had with their portrayal of geocaching was the apparent terrible accuracy of Galaxy's GPS receiver (which appears to be a Garmin eTrex). Either there was a serious mechanical problem with her device or she forgot to turn it on, because in the two main geocaching scenes, she was no where near ground zero when she stopped looking at her receiver and started relying on her geo-senses.

Other than that, it was a decent movie for both the comic relief and for being able to see our beloved hobby portrayed on the big screen.

Cache On!

Oldies But Goodies

I admit it. I'm obsessed with challenge caches. A buddy and I recently took a day off work to finish up two challenge caches we had been working on over the last year or so:

1. The Bushwood Memorial Cache; a wonderfully fun, Caddyshack-themed cache which took us to 18 different  golf courses scattered about the east Bay Area.
2. The Monterey Bay USGS 15-Minute Quadrangles Challenge; a typical USGS quadrangle challenge cache in one of the most beautiful areas in California.

We also took some time to get a couple of caches that were placed back in the year 2000. That's because we are working on the California's Oldies But Goodies Challenge, which requires the determined cacher to find 10 of the 16 active, oldest caches hidden in the state of California - all 16 were hidden in the year 2000. So far, only two people have completed this challenge.

With the two caches we found on this trip, we are now up to a total of six. Lucky for us, eleven of the sixteen caches are located within a reasonable distance of the San Francisco Bay Area. The green points on the map below represent caches we've found, and the blue show those that we have not yet found. Click on a point to get more detailed information about each cache:


View CA Oldies in a larger map

With any luck, we should be able to finish up this challenge cache sometime this year.

Cache On!

Is This The Beginning of The End of Geocaching?

It's barely been 10 years since the US Government discontinued Selective Availability of the Global Positioning System, making GPS signals available to us non-military types. Since then, the use of GPS-based tools, applications, and a little hobby known as geocaching, has taken off like crazy. But recently, some issues have begun to emerge that threaten our ability to use this wonderful multi-billion dollar satellite system that we've come to know and love.

FCC Approves LightSquared's 4G LTE Proposal

A little company known as LightSquared wants to build a a high-speed wireless broadband network using satellite frequencies rather than the traditional terrestrial frequency space that the larger cellular companies (Verizon, Cingular, etc.) typically use. The FCC is responsible for auctioning off, and regulating, the use of the radio frequency spectrum. The problem with the LightSquared proposal is, that they plan to operate at a frequency directly adjacent to the frequency band designated for GPS. If implemented as planned, all current GPS receivers will no longer operate correctly in areas covered by their system, which includes the overwhelming majority of the US population. There's a nicely written post on the Free Geography Tools site that describes the technical aspects of the potential GPS interference issue in layman's terms.

The threat is so real that representatives of a wide variety of industries and companies have started and joined the Coalition to Save Our GPS. 

So let's say the FCC comes to their senses, and revokes LightSquared's conditional approval. Then we can all continue geocaching as blissfully as ever, right? Well, not so fast. There's another looming, growing element that threatens to turn FTF's into DNF's:

GPS Jamming

It turns out that GPS signals are very weak, and therefore susceptible to interference. But why would anyone want to block a GPS signal, you might ask? Well, believe it or not, GPS jamming devices, while illegal, can be had for a mere $30 on the internet, and have become very popular with truck drivers that don't want their vehicles' movement tracked. These jamming devices can also block GPS-based road tolls that are levied via an on-board receiver (such as FasTrak here in the Bay Area). As our reliance on GPS-based devices and information (plane/ship/car navigation, ATM machines, Cell Phones, etc.) grows, so does the desire by a certain element to block GPS signals. There's a great article in New Scientist that discusses this phenomenon in detail, including a recount of 2007 GPS jamming incident in San Diego that disrupted the airport's air-traffic control system, the Naval Medical Center's emergency pagers, the harbor's traffic-management system, as well as cellphones and ATM machines.

Let's hope this isn't the start of bad things to come for geocaching, not to mention all the other important things that we've come to rely on the Global Positioning System for. My DNF percentages are too high already, as far as I'm concerned...

Cache On (while you still can)!

Solving Puzzle Caches

While there's still a little bit of winter left, what better time to solve some puzzle caches so you'll be ready to hit the trail running once the weather starts cooperating. Following are a few resources you might find helpful, especially if you are puzzle-cache-challenged like I am.

Outline of Cryptography
Never hurts to start with information from Wikipedia.

CryptoDox
More Cryptology information.

The National Puzzler's League
Puzzle guides and solving Tools. These people even have an annual convention.

Online Cryptanalysts Handbook

Cyphers, Cryptos and Codes; oh my. Links to a variety of different puzzle solving tools.

Practice Makes Perfect
Now that you understand the basics, you should be ready to put your skills to the test. This great series of caches actually helps you improve your puzzle-solving skills as you work your way through the set.

Good luck, and Cache On!

More Cache Location Visualization Tools

There are plenty of ways to map and view the locations of geocaches, including the mapping tools available on geocaching.com, the software that comes with your GPSr, Google Earth, and other online tools. But lately I've been playing around with a data table mapping and visualization tool from Google called Fusion Tables. The application lets you upload data tables from spreadsheets, CSV files or KML files. Then you can easily visualize your data in graphs, charts and even maps (provided your data includes location information, such as lat/long coordinates). It's all done online, and you can even post the results on your website. All you need is a Google account. Here are some great examples.


Unfortunately, you cannot upload GPX files directly into Fusion Tables, but you can easily convert your GPX formatted files (pocket queries) to KML format using Google Earth, GSAK macros, or many other online tools. In the example below, I ran a pocket query for new caches (less than one week old) in my part of the world. I then took the GPX file from the downloaded pocket query, opened it in Google Earth, then saved it as a KML file, called "New.kml", which I then imported directly into Fusion Tables:

All the data from the pocket query file is retained, including the geometry (lat/long coordinates), which the application recognizes and uses to generate a map. You can then edit the map to your liking. Here I've color-coded the points based on the cache difficulty rating. I then copied the embeddable link and inserted it below:




Lots of potential here. If you use Fusion Tables for caching purposes, I'd love to hear about it.


Cache On!