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Geocaching.com

10 years of geocaching.

Well I’ve not personally done 10 years of caching, although I did hear about it some time before I started geocaching. Initially I wasn’t sure whether it would be much fun as I wasn’t sure how accurate gps’s would be. Finally I bumped into someone (Hi David!) who had done geocaching in Canada, showed me his GPS and I knew it would be something I would be interested in. I signed up Nov 28, 2003 and we came over to Dublin, OH for Christmas and I ordered a Magellan Sportrak from Amazon for an early Christmas present and my first cache was found in Dublin a few days later on Dec 3, 2003. This gave me a good start when it came to statistics of miles covered whilst caching as most of my caches were then found back in the UK!

Anyway, Sunday is Geocaching’s 10 year anniversary and lots of events are being planned for this weekend (and this year). The event is Washington (home of the first geocache and Groundspeak) is expected to have over 500 people attend. Here in Ohio, I’ll be attending the 10 Years Columbus event A bonus feature of attending this event will be another new icon for the collection as all 10 year events get a new icon for the cache page.

More information and a place to find the nearest 10 year cache event to you can be found at http://www.geocaching.com/lostandfound

Along with the CacheInTrashOut cache I did earlier this month where we pulled many bags of rubbish by the river front, it’s been a busy month. As usual April has been my most product month of geocaching – It’s a good time of year – not too hot, not too cold. I’m going to try and get every day in May filled next month.

Finds by Found Date
Date
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Jan 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 1 4 1 2 2 7 12 40
Feb 1 7 4 1 1 1 1 1 3 6 X X 26
Mar 1 3 1 11 1 1 3 1 7 2 10 6 2 4 2 10 15 2 82
Apr 21 9 4 2 5 4 6 13 14 1 8 9 10 26 3 10 1 1 7 7 2 1 X 164
May 2 2 2 22 2 2 1 3 2 1 10 4 1 1 4 2 2 2 3 4 1 4 77
Jun 11 1 3 3 4 3 22 9 2 3 2 2 2 17 3 1 8 6 X 102
Jul 1 1 16 2 1 2 16 4 9 1 2 1 1 1 1 10 1 70
Aug 2 3 3 2 1 2 2 3 2 7 2 1 30
Sep 3 8 2 1 1 6 3 7 8 15 1 1 1 X 57
Oct 1 2 14 3 2 4 5 8 12 1 1 2 55
Nov 2 2 1 8 3 11 6 4 1 1 1 6 1 7 4 2 5 1 X 66
Dec 16 1 4 1 1 9 4 2 2 1 6 1 48
24 11 45 36 52 10 28 35 11 32 26 34 32 45 17 28 38 64 9 28 25 26 11 19 25 10 14 37 22 17 6

My Flickr and Geocaching greasemonkey script updated.

I have updated my Geocaching.com to Flickr greasemonkey script to work with the new geocache id’s. To install go to userscripts with a greasemonkey enabled browser to show links to Flickr from the Geocaching website as per the screenshot below.
Screenshot of geocaching.com website showing link to flickr page
For more technical information see my blog postings with the tag geocache2flickr
For those of you who don’t have greasemonkey installed yet, this allows you to download scripts that tweak the layout of normal websites to do various things such as add extra links, remove adverts etc. Greasemonkey can be downloaded from Mozilla addon site

Cacheberry for caching with the blackberry.

Currently I use a 8 or 9 year old Dell Axim for my paperless caching which has served me really well but it’s yet another device that I need to keep charged and carry around with me whilst geocaching. I’m about to go caching for the day today starting with the Pi day Party and then hitting about another 10 or so caches with Team JNle4 – yes, I have dragged him out of retirement too!

Anyway, I wondered if there was a geocaching application for the blackberry (work phone) and discovered Cacheberry which looks like it has an offline database, the ability to export field notes via email and also integration with google and blackberry maps.  So today I’ll be using this app and I’ll let you know how I got on.

Ohio Delorme Challenge

The Ohio Delorme geocache requires a visit to each cache in the Delorme atlas for Ohio but only visits after the cache was placed will count towards the cache find. Once a cache has been found on each page you then get the co-ordinates for the final cache hidden somewhere in Ohio.

With the aid of a KML file, the recent finds pocket query, GSAK and Google earth it is quite easy to work out which pages you need to do.

First download the Ohio Delorme KML file from the main cache page, GCZ554. Next download Google Earth (if you don’t already have it already. Finally  you want a .loc file of all your finds since the 2nd of December 2006 when the cache was placed.  The easiest way to do this is to download your latest finds into GSAK, then using the filters set State=Ohio, Found=Yes, Date=On or After 12/2/2006.  I saved the filter as Delorme so I can run this whenever I need to check my status.

Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_23 PM Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_12 PM Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_16 PMScreenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_47 PM   

In Google earth open the KML file and then open the loc file  to see the caches appear in gridlines for each page. You may want to turn off extra options and layers such as road names, community uploaded content etc. This will give you a cleaner picture. Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_32_03 PM

The picture above shows the gridlines and the picture below shows my found caches so far. I’ve actually found quite a few other pages but unfortunately they were before the cache was placed so they don’t count.

 Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_32_55 PM

So far I’ve found pages 45-48,55-59,65 and 67-69

Meanwhile TeamJNLe4 completed all the pages yesterday and now just has to go for the final cache – congrats Jonathan!

Geocaching greasemonkey scripts

If you have firefox and greasemonkey installed (and if not why not?) then check out the greasemonkey scripts at Locusprime that enhance some of the website pages. There are some really nice enhancements here – I’ll leave you to go search the site and start enhancing your cache viewing.
LilDevil also has a couple of greasemonkey scripts for caching too (some of the scripts overlap each other)

Caching update

I won a Legend C with North america maps on ebay last night which is great – the autorouting should come in very handy for work too – and if the route just so happens to go past a cache – well “I am only following directions gov” 😉
On a slightly similar note, the weekly notification of caches arrived today (the uk cache notification!) but it had the interesting news that you can now get a query of caches along a route. If this works, it’s going to be great news for geocaching. Firstly there will be great rejoicing from the caching community and secondly this seriously reduces the need to horde cache information in gsak. Now I can get live cache data from a route online rather than having to download all of ohio into gsak, export all the caches as streetmaps pushpins, import them into streets and trips, create the route and then show caches within .2 miles.
I

Notification of new caches

At long last, as long as you are a premium member, you can now get notifications of a new cache in your area by signing up at Geocaching – Subscriptions