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All About Geocaching?
It doesn't come easy wonders: "While surfing the net, I ran across this commentary on Geocaching by Erin Joyce. My wife is keen on trying Geocaching one of these days and I began to wonder if anyone on Slashdot participates in this pastime? If you do, what do you use (equipment-wise) and what's your opinion on the sport?"
I've only done it a few times, but I've enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a decent excuse to get "out" and do something. I've actually learned a lot more about the area I live in so far by going to places I wouldn't think to. It's a good way to find those little 'out of the way' parks and such.
I use a Magellan Meridian Pro. Does a decent job for my purposes.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
For some of us, it's the fun way, the more adventurous way. Go find that path. While you're looking around, you might learn a lot more about the place you're in, whether it be a park, a shopping center parking lot, etc.
Geocaching is a marriage of technology and the real world.
It's treasure hunting. The idea that there are thousands upon thousands of hidden capsules with little pieces of plastic, burned cds full of pictures, half used disposable cameras hidden in urban and rural settings hints towards a magical realm which is only available to those who are willing to look.
The possiblities and types of caches are endless. It is an excuse to explore your outside world is terrific. It will not appeal to everyone, nor should it, but it is a way of exploring the world that does very little harm.
My wife and 3.5 year old son go with me every tuesday to Geocache. It is our family night. We just moved and without Geocaching we would not have seen all the parks and trails in the area.
We use a Magellan SportTrak for our adventures.
I work for a defense contractor that makes GPS units for the military but I haven't taken one of the handheld units out for a test drive yet.
I personally love to go geocaching. I am not into a lot of outdoors-type activities, such as camping, etc., but I have a blast geocaching! Equipment-wise, I use a Garmin eTrex Vista, Palm Tungsten T3, and (on longer caching days) my Acer Aspire 1362LCi laptop.
In terms of software, I use GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife, http://gsak.net/) for the majority of data manipulation and transferal, and Garmin MapSource (with Topographical Maps) to do mapping and routing stuff. On my Palm I use CacheMate (http://www.smittyware.com/palm/cachemate/), which provides a cache-oriented interface, not just an html viewer, although some are satisfied with offline version of the cache description pages.
I do subscribe to the premium service at geocaching.com. The main benefit of this is that you can create specific search queries, and have them emailed to you (on a schedule) in GPX format (too lazy to look up acronym, but it is an XML file) that you can then import into GSAK/MapSource. I have also bought licences for GSAK and Cachemate; as much as the Slashdot community is against spending any money at all, I feel that it is the Right Thing to do. The authors provide wonderful programs, with free demos (fully functional indefinitely, IIRC in the case of GSAK). Also, these people are independent software authors trying to make a living, not $EvilCorporation. I think that nowadays, each of the software products runs $20-30, along with the $3/mo or $30/yr premium membership to GC.com.
I would like to note that you do not *have* to pay/buy anything (other than a GPS device) to have fun Geocaching (contrary to some implications by previous posters). As with most hobbies, you can spend as little ($400 for top of the line GPS, subscriptions, and more) as you want/are able to.
Geocaching is a fun activity for people of all age ranges: I know cachers of ages from 3 to their 70s. I know many families enjoy caching as a family activity; in a medium-sized city, there are bound to be caches that even kids can find.
Final words of advice: Get a good Silva-style compass and learn how to use it. In dense woods, your GPS may become useless within 100 feet of the cache (i.e. your accuracy is so low) that it is sometimes best to stop when the GPS says 100-150 feet, take a bearing on the compass, and use that to try to find the cache.
Oh, and, please please please DON'T leave McDonald's toys as trade items at a cache. Everyone hates them, and they are (mostly) worthless.
Yeah, the parental/ownership attitude about the sport from the Groundspeak folks has cooled my interest a bit. That and the indefinite moratorium on Locationless (Reverse Virtual) caches. I thought they were some of the more interesting things to seek.
Also, they recently launched www.waymarking.com, which I guess is where most of the non-standard caches will go. Right now, only Geocaching.com Premium members can get in for a look. That's fine, but the site doesn't even tell the public ANYTHING about what is going to be there. All pages, including "contact us" link back to the same "check back in a couple of weeks" message. No other explanations.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
Why would you tell me to pick another word?
The name's been used for this since 2000. Even the whois for the domain name reports it was registered July 3rd of that year.
Put "akamai geocaching" into Google. There's nothing about geographically-based content delivery, there, at least not on the front page. Put "geocaching" into the search engine at akamai.com: nothing there, either. And to answer your follow-up post, try "bind geocaching" and "squid geocaching," also. Guess what Webster's says?
If I sound slightly annoyed, it's because I expected someone to do a little more thinking and research before telling me that hundreds of thousands of people are misusing the term. You're a little early for Troll Tuesday.