Spending Black Friday Outdoors

While most people like to spend Black Friday fighting for parking spaces, enduring traffic jams, and locked in elbow to elbow combat with masses of people in climate controlled shopping malls, my friends and I opt for the antithesis. We spent this Black Friday hiking and geocaching in the gorgeous Las Trampas Regional Wilderness near San Ramon, California. The details of our hike are available below through Everytrail.

Black Friday Hike



Find trail maps for California

Hope you all had as nice of a Thanksgiving, and day after, as we did.

Cache On!

News Flash Mob

Here's a quick burst of random, geocaching-related current events:

• An Interview with Jen Sonstelie, one of the Groundspeak developers of the new geocaching application for the Android phone.

•  A list of changes and bug fixes in the latest version of the iPhone app (version 4.2).

• A grumpy, anti-cacher wants geocachers to pay every time the bomb squad gets called.

• There are good deals to be had on Garmin eTrex's these days. For example, the Garmin eTrex Legend HCx is available on Amazon.com for $149.99; almost half what it normally costs.

And finally, a shout out to my buddy Jeff who just added his 7,000th unique beer bottle to his collection (you should see his garage). That's over three times as many cache finds as I have. Quite a feat, considering he has to travel further and further to find bottles he doesn't already own - kind of similar to the dilemma long-time cachers face.

Cache On!

Release Notes

A few days ago, Groundspeak added some significant feature upgrades to the geocaching.com website. You can see the entire list here, or read my abbreviated summary below.

• Souvenirs will be awarded retroactively.
• You can now run your "My Finds" pocket query every 3 days instead of every 7.
• A new Trackable Type has been added for trackable tattoos.
• You can now mass delete caches on your watch list, rather than having to do one at a time.
• Reformatted Coordinate Change Logs for clarity.
• Added a new link on the cache page; "you logged this as found on..." if it is a cache you found.

In addition, there have been a number of bug fixes as well.
And finally, the promise of Stats, Ratings and Maps "coming soon".

And last but not least, the Windows Phone 7 Geocaching Application is now available. You can read more about it and download the application from Groundspeak's Windows Phone 7 Application page.

Cache On!

Badges, Badges Everywhere

I'm starting to think everyone is going badge-crazy. It all started with Foursquare and the nice little badges they add to your profile for your "check-ins". And, with all the different types of badges available, the more likely people are to do things they perhaps wouldn't normally do just to score another badge.

Well, it wasn't long before we started seeing badges infiltrate the geocaching world. One of the most notable examples, yet not the first, was the recent launch of "Souvenirs" on Geocaching.com. Souvenirs are virtual pieces of art that you can discover and display on your gc.com profile page.


As I mentioned, gc.com was not the first site to offer geocaching badges. The statistics generating website, mygeocachingprofile.com, has been providing a variety of "geoachievement badges" since its inception.


But in case you crave way, way more geocaching badges than these two sites currently offer, your prayers have been answered by BadgeGen. BadgeGen is a GSAK add-in (called a macro) that analyzes your databases, and generates badges based on various criteria. Just take a look at all of the different badges available here. This should keep you busy for a while.


Cache On!

Happy Cache-O-Ween

Wishing you all a safe, happy, and cachetastic Halloween. There should be plenty of Halloween-themed caches and events to keep you busy today. A quick search of gc.com of keyword, "Halloween" revealed 578 such caches near me.

Try This Search to see what you come up with for your area.

And if that doesn't generate enough caches for you, try other keywords like, "spooky", "creepy", or "haunted", for example.

Cache On!

OpenCaching

You may have heard or noticed that a new geocaching web service recently launched in the U.S., called Opencaching. According to the site's wiki page,

"The goal is to provide a higher quality cache listing service in a user friendly format with features that members of the geocaching community have requested. The main difference between opencaching and traditional listing sites is that all services are open to the users at no cost. Additionally, Opencaching sites allow users to rate and report on existing geocaches."

You can listen to an interview with Opencaching moderator, Dudley Grant, on both the PodCacher show #289.0, and on the Geocaching Podcast show #174, for a detailed discussion about what the site has to offer.

In my second post ever on this blog (I'm sure you remember), I identified some of the other geocache listing services out there, but explained that this blog would primarily focus on caches from geocaching.com, since that site has the largest database of caches and the most features. I am impressed, however, with the opencaching site (free is good, and the cache search page is excellent), but I think they have an uphill battle on their hands. 

I don't see a lot of people dropping their existing geocaching.com memberships and switching to opencaching, nor does it seem likely that new geocachers would choose opencaching over gc.com, when there are so many geocaches available through the Groundspeak site, and so few on opencaching (or the other sites like Navicache and Terracaching). That's not to say that people can't enjoy both, and initially, you might see cache owners from gc.com list their existing caches on opencaching.com too. But for now and the foreseeable future, gc.com has the advantage by way of sheer numbers:

Cache Listing Site	Inception	Total US Caches	Caches w/in 10-mile Radius of Geojoe HQ
Geocaching.com	2000	1,221,513 (worldwide)	1,645
Opencaching.us	2010	302	0 (3 w/in 100 mi.)
Navicache.com	2001	3,608	6
Terracaching.com	2004	? (see map)	1

One thing worth noting, however, is that Opencaching offers many features that are currently not available or not allowed on geocaching.com, such as virtual caches and a cache rating system. Interestingly, these are some of the features that gc.com is currently considering bringing back and/or adding. Coincidence?

In spite of the relatively few caches currently available on opencaching.us, I did create an account (if, for no other reason, than to secure the user id name, "geojoe"), and will probably list some of my existing gc.com caches on the site just to see what happens. Take a look at the site and see what you think.

Cache On (and Go Giants)!

Garmin Chirp

Garmin released The Chirp yesterday, a wireless beacon device that can communicate with, and be programmed by, any compatible wireless-enabled Garmin handheld (such as the Dakota, Oregon and GPSMAP 62 and 78 series devices). Chirp can be used to store hints, multicache coordinates, count visitors and confirm the cache is nearby. 


Apparently you would use this to load cache hints and/or coordinates for stages of multi-cache, and place it inside your cache container. Then, anyone with a compatible device can access those hints and coordinates when they are within range (32 feet) of the cache. 

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this one, as it raises a number of questions: mainly,  "Why?".  $22.95 seems like a lot of money to pay for a device that will only help a small minority of cachers who own compatible devices to not have to manually type in the coordinate pairs of a multi-cache stage. Also, it would seem that Chirps, or entire caches containing Chirps, would be much more likely to go "missing" from the field. I'd hate to have to continually replace it at 23 bucks a pop.


Maybe there's more to it than I'm seeing at first glance. If you are using a Chirp, or plan to, I'd love to hear from you. GPSFix has a pretty detailed review of the device, and even though they seem to like it, I'm still not convinced. Some of the commenter's on this GPSTracklog review are equally as skeptical. In addition, apparently Groundspeak is not approving any Chirp-only caches due to the exclusivity of the equipment required, which could be problematic for Chirp-owners.


Cache On!