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So, where are all the tiles? Who knows, but it sounds like a fun thing to geocache for. :)

The greatest thing a geek who likes the outdoors can do is go Geocaching!

You go to the website, enter a ZIP code, or city, or similar, and you'll get a list of hidden "geocaches." You put some coordinates into your GPSr, print out a map (and sometimes some hints) from the website, and see if you can find one. From experience, I can tell you that it's pretty easy to get within 10 feet of the cache . . . it's those last 10 feet that are tough. :-)

It's incredibly fun, and here in my hometown of Los Angeles there is a geocache at Cal Tech, so you can take out two geeky birds with one stone. (It's easy to spot the geeky birds -- they have tape on their beaks.)

My father and I use GPS receivers as often as possible. We are both Geocachers.

For those of you that don't know what Geocaching is, here is a quote from the geocaching.com FAQ:

"What is Geocaching?

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache. "

Nothing relieves stress, and tests skills like long distance shooting!

If you want to really go extreme, check out the boomershoot!
No matter how you cut it, 700 Meters is a long shot. (The target was a 1 litrecontainer),
and this makes a really big explosion.

Of course if a $1200 USD rifle and $1.70 USD per shot is too much. You can also geocache!

I recently bought a GPS unit. Unless you are flying, boating or crossing a trackless waste, these are not so much useful as cool.

It is a toy. I admit it. However, I am using this toy for Geocaching. This may or may not be your cup of tea, but it certainly isn't sedentary. (Geocachers seem to love putting the cach on the top of all the highest hills they can find.)

Thanks, but the crash I was asking about doesn't show up in google. The others sound interesting, but Peaks of Otter is a mere hour from me and better for day trips.

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx? ID=11878

Here is a B-52 crash site in Maine that I planted a geocache at last year:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx? ID=33462

That sometimes means digging up the ground

The rules prohibit buried caches. If it was clear from the supplied description that a cache needed digging, it would not be approved. It it were approved, but the administrators later learned that it was buried, it would be deleted. So, if you're actually finding buried caches, then you should report them to the admins for the benefit of the sport.

If you're just talking about caches hidden under loose cover (twigs, leaves, rocks, etc.), then that is normal, but the finder should be restoring the cover after finding the cache, so that it looks natural. This both preserves the appearance of the park, and camoflages the cache.

Virtually all of the problems that piss off land management people result from violations of the rules. Banning geocaching on account of the few rule-breakers is as stupid as banning hiking on account of rule-breakers--people who litter, cut switchbacks, and so forth.

I suspect that geocaching.com might do a better job of educating people as to what's appropriate for a cache (ie, balloons = bad for the most part).

Look around the geocaching.com website sometime, and you'll see that they do have a faq that mentions what shouldn't be left in a cache.

There are definitely caches that use riddles and the like. Some are very tricky and involve traveling to several destinations (not within walking distance). Others require a bit of research on the web or books to complete. One that comes to mind is Raiders of the Lost Geocache, oh and N'la Azar Kna Naa.

There are definitely caches that use riddles and the like. Some are very tricky and involve traveling to several destinations (not within walking distance). Others require a bit of research on the web or books to complete. One that comes to mind is Raiders of the Lost Geocache, oh and N'la Azar Kna Naa.

Here is is.

This has happened. Read the log. And this one's not alone.

An example of a great Geocache (called a 'Virtual Geocache') that encourages visits to a park on already traveled paths is Garden in the Woods in my area. Nothing harmed at all there.

I personally would much rather find caches located in the middle of nowhere, where it's not often people are trampling over precious groundcover. One of the caches I placed is in a rather huge container that weighed at least 80 lbs.. I lugged that sucker over two miles into the woods where it won't bother anyone or anything.

Also, what's next -- banning letterboxing?

I personally would much rather find caches located in the middle of nowhere, where it's not often people are trampling over precious groundcover. One of the caches I placed is in a rather huge container that weighed at least 80 lbs.. I lugged that sucker over two miles into the woods where it won't bother anyone or anything.

Also, what's next -- banning letterboxing?

...from Geocaching.com/faq.asp"
What is Geocaching?

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

There is a saying with geocachers called "Cache In - Trash Out". Basically, it means that whenever you go geocaching, you're supposed to leave the park better than when you came (ie. picking up trash). There is even a day for this.

I know some parks in my area that have become usuable because of this. This guy needs to get a clue and figure out that geocaching is not ruining parks.

Yep just like the first one I found.

There was the one that was buried in the middle of a national forrest. It was a good idea since there was all of the fires that year.

:wq

There's a type of cache that's becoming very popular, called a "virtual cache." Nothing is stored on the site, it's just a coordinate, and a clue as to what you're supposed to find there. I'd like to see them ban that. What are they going to do, ban GPS units?

There have been a few cases of serious damage caused by cachers. In one instance, a cache was placed within 10 feet of a teepee ring, which is considered a sensitive archaeological site. If you've seen how the ground gets trampled around a cache, you'd see how this could be a problem. I can certainly understand the park officers being upset that someone posted a "please trample the grass" sign on such a site.

I do think it's a BIT hypocritical though; the public parks are always aching to increase flow through the park to keep their budgets, but apparently they just want people to come in the gate, get the headcount, eat a picnic out of their trunk and leave. When those people start exploring, they get upset.

OTOH, I have seen geocachers that have no interest in exploring. They beeline straight to the coordinates, tramping anything in the way, do their logging, and tromp straight out. But many of us spend an afternoon checking out the trails while we're there, which is exactly why the parks are (supposed to be) there.

Maybe the former types of cachers should take up benchmark hunting instead.

I do a lot of geocaching, and thus have become pretty adept with my GPS. Although the articles contain official statements along the lines of "nothing more than miles traveled would be tallied etc" it would, as you know, require little effort to also transmit paths/routes that the vehicle drove in.

Certainly X gas corporation would be demographically interested in learning (buying data) detailing which gas stations drivers frequently skip in order to fill up at a competetor's station etc, for example. In my opinion the whole thing is quite scary, and I am not usually one of those Big Brother is watching you types.

Loomis

Here in Sydney, there are concentrations of geeks at North Sydney, St Leonards, Lane Cove West, and North Ryde, just for starters, and there are concentrations of geocaches in those places too :-)

Here in Sydney, there are concentrations of geeks at North Sydney, St Leonards, Lane Cove West, and North Ryde, just for starters, and there are concentrations of geocaches in those places too :-)

Here in Sydney, there are concentrations of geeks at North Sydney, St Leonards, Lane Cove West, and North Ryde, just for starters, and there are concentrations of geocaches in those places too :-)

Here in Sydney, there are concentrations of geeks at North Sydney, St Leonards, Lane Cove West, and North Ryde, just for starters, and there are concentrations of geocaches in those places too :-)

Here in Sydney, there are concentrations of geeks at North Sydney, St Leonards, Lane Cove West, and North Ryde, just for starters, and there are concentrations of geocaches in those places too :-)

The challenge now is to figure out how to best use those location-aware technologies, and some of the things that can be done with the technology.

While the subset of people that need high accuracy maybe small, that doesn't mean they're not economically significant

One, to ask the honest question of why would Joe/Jane Average need 5cm accuracy from a GPS device. I must confess ignorance on this. (Although I am learning, I have been refered to geochaching twice now.) While Selective Availability might be problematic for that, it is certainly not the end of the world.

And two, to state that people that require accuracy will not be affected by the reinstatement of Selective Availablity. WAAS, the Coast Gaurd, and others provide differential signals to get GPS recievers into the sub-meter accuracy range, and since these systems were created under SA in the first place, they should be unaffected. Indeed, as I saw on this link (I think) that was posted with the comments on the original story, there are methods of using the military's own encrypted differential signals to increase accuracy, and I doubt the military is going to fool with their differential signals anytime soon. I suppose I should turn off the blockquote now...

You've obviously never tried to find a geocache hidden in a field of boulders and rocks. Look for an hour or so and you get pretty mad.

It's not like most people are letting their GPS device drive their vehicles or something.

No, but they let Microsoft Streets do it for them. And it's really annoying when your car symbol jumps from one street to a parallel one.

Anyway, check out Geocaching. It's awesome, but an accurate GPS helps out a lot. You go around finding boxes of prizes with only a GPS coordinate and a couple of clues. It's great for excercise, and it's fun! You hear me, geeks? FUN EXCERCISE!

Well, suddenly my favourite past-time appears like it's going to be a lot more difficult.

"How can the cache be 100 meters to the east? I'm already standing knee deep in the Atlantic Ocean!"

I'd see some geocaches along the trip. Not only are they fun, they often bring you to cool places to see that only locals would know about.

TerraServer explicitly allows access to their USGS map database from programs like ExpertGPS. They even have a webpage with step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

ExpertGPS could just as easily grab its maps from sites like TopoZone and deprive them of ad revenue. Other programs have actually done that, and caused the nice guys at TopoZone a lot of hassle and lost revenue. The guys at Geocaching.com spend lots of time dealing with database scrapers who mine the site continually, chewing up bandwidth.

The moral of the story - play nicely. If a website like TerraServer is generous enough to offer you a way to scrape their data, say thank you. If a website asks that you refrain from using automated scripts, either work out a licensing agreement with them, or start your own website and learn how it feels to be on the other end of the scraper.

GPS. GPS! For God's sake! When was the last time you got so lost that you needed friggin' GPS to pinpoint your location to the nearest ten feet...

When I go GeoCaching. Plus the ability to download a ton of waypoints and not have to input them into my GPS would simply rock.

The price isn't all that bad, considering that you're getting most of the features of a PocketPC, and a GPS, in addition to Palm stability.

Only thing is, I wonder what the battery life is like with the color screen. I understand people liking color for the "cool" factor. But greyscale is almost as functional and has much better batter life.

Why would someone really want to build one of these things? GPS's are great. They've come way down in price and now can be used for Geocaching ...which is a fun activity and get's the geeks out of the house and into the real outside. Are we really that paranoid that we need GPS jammers? For jamming civilian GPS systems? Come on...

There's some new geocaches in my area that I'm hoping to check out. The lack of tree cover reduces signal loss on the GPSR, and the winter weather kills off much of the undergrowth.

I always needed a "reason" to buy a GPS receiver... this hobby provided me with it!

Geek toys and outdoor activity! What a great combo!

For the geek you want to get outdoors, get a basic Garmin eTrex GPS unit for around $100, then point them to geocaching.com. It's a fun geek activity, but maybe not suited to all geeks during the winter months. I'd be caching this weekend, except that I live in NH and it's about 10 degrees outside. (No, I'm not a New England native.) During the summer and fall, I had a great time hunting caches.

Even if they don't want to cache, it's still a neat geek toy.

I use mine for schedule, contacts, e-books, and directions. I have also saved my marriage with it. My wife likes to hit the hay by 10:30 and I don't. I read all kinds of info from AvantGo to e-books after she turns off the lights.

We also use it to carry the Geocaching data points and letterboxing directions when we're off roving the countryside. The whole family gets in on that one.

My wife also is a dedicated Handspring PDA user. I helped wean her from her Franklin Planner and chuck all of the slips of useless paper she carried around with her. She is much happier with it and even has an up-to-date commuter rail schedule on her Visor.

Why bother buying CDs when there are so many other worthwhile things to do? I'd rather go hiking in the woods www.geocaching.com, read a book or listen to live local music anyway. I'm sick and tired of the media, their pandering to politicians and politicians pandering to them. I'm sick of them trying to create a world that is bland, pointless and fake.

I'm tired of corporations trying to replace what is real with what is artificial. I'm going to go find things that are real: adventure, creativity and the building of my body and mind.

The music industry can eat my ass.

This seems to just be Where's George for books.

Neat idea though. Now, if they could combine GeoCaching with this I think we'd have something: exercise, travel, and good literature!

Wardriving,
Warwalking
Warchalking...

Warhopscotch
Warsitting
Wardrinking (If there's a glass with a coaster on top of it on the bar, there's an open WLAN)
WarSegwaying
Wargeocaching

Send him here, here, here, or here.

To make a real gift basket out of it, add sunscreen, insect repellant, calamine lotion, and bottled water.
If he really takes to it, next year get him an 8-pack of travel bugs.

Send him here, here, here, or here.

To make a real gift basket out of it, add sunscreen, insect repellant, calamine lotion, and bottled water.
If he really takes to it, next year get him an 8-pack of travel bugs.

Great idea! Combine this with a geo-caching type idea (record the GPS coords of the antennae) to make it easy to find and aim your equipment.

Book Crossing lets you set your unwanted books loose in the wild, with a tracking number in case someone finds it. Basically like Where's George or PhotoTag crossed with GeoCaching.

And nobody makes a buck. Is that any better?

Ok, so I've gotten into this geocaching thing lately, and while working on a cache to be hidden in about 60 feet of water off the coast, it occured to me that a blinking LED might make it easier for divers to spot. No problem, whip up a blinker circuit with an LM3909 and a super-bright green LED and we're set. But what about power? Sure, four D-cells would let it run for close to a decade, but where's the fun in that? The undersea environment is quite dynamic, and there's got to be some power down there that can be harnessed. What I need are some ideas on how to do that.

We keep seeing stories here about tidal power, and that's cool, but I don't see how it can be done without a column rising all the way to the surface. So here are the ideas I've got right now. Keep in mind that the device will probably be housed in a length of 4-inch PVC or ABS pipe, and it needs about 0.5 ma at 1.5 volts:

• Surge power. Put a couple of funnels back-to-back with a CPU cooling fan-sized turbine and generator in the middle, and run the output through a rectifier and capacitor. But how reliable will those moving parts be after years underwater?
• Self-winding watch concept. Float the thing tethered to the bottom and install some sort of pendulum inside with a magnet on it, moving through a coil. The moving parts are protected, but will it be enough power?
• Yank the chain. Again, tether it, but use the varying tension on the tether to drive a dynamo of some sort.
• Nukes. Anyone got a spare radioisotope thermoelectric generator? Any idea how many smoke detectors I'd need to cannibalize to get enough Americium-241?
• Magnetohydrodynamic generator. Like the surge power thing, but using the flow of cunductive seawater through a magnetic field to generate a current. I have no idea how much power this would generate, if any, or how to deal with ion accumulation at the electrodes.

The generator need not fit inside the 4-inch cache tube, but it shouldn't be huge, either. It needs to be practical to build, and not terribly expensive. Above all it's got to be reliable and enduring. Any ideas?

This seems to be taking geocaching to the next level. Geocaching is a GPS treasure hunt. People leave little tupperware containers and ammo boxes full of trinkets, disposable cameras and a notepad at specified coordinates then report those coordinates to geocaching.com in order for other people to find them, write down who they are and when they were there and take something from the cache and leave something of their own. It is something to do with your GPS recvr and the family - and its fun :)

A couple weeks ago, I bought an Orinoco Gold access card, downloaded netstumbler, and had my homemade Pringles antenna ready to go.

The wife and I got out last Sunday to see if I could find any access points. We live a few files from Indianapolis, so I figured we would have to go downtown to find any access points. NOT TRUE! Many of the APs we found were on personal home networks. Every time we would pass an apartment complex.. blip!.. an AP or two would show up. Where they encrypted? Heh, no. We made one loop through downtown Indy and came back to our house and we found 40 access points. 5 were encypted.

So, we found one near a Mr. D's (grocery store). We stopped in the parking lot, I set up my Pringles antenna, and browsed the web via someone's @home connection. Really cool!

You can imagine the looks that I received when passersby saw me scanning back and forth with a pringles antenna, wires coming out of it, and a laptop on my lap. Anyway, wardriving is fun for the whole family. It's kinda like Geocaching, but quite a bit easier. :)