Hello, I haven’t written here in a very long time, but I was contacted recently with information on an iPhone App that some of you might find interesting.
You might have heard about GeoCaching and wondered what that is? In short some people describe it as “high-tech trasure hunting activity”, or to quote my good friend and colleague Beth “I Use Multi-Million Dollar Satellites to Find Tupperware in the Woods. What’s Your Hobby?”
The idea is simple, someone goes and hides a container somewhere in nature or even in the middle of a town, then determines the exact position (using his GPS) and then goes to GeoCaching.com and provides the Cache Details for others to use.
A GeoCacher, like myself, would then go and look up those cache details, print a copy of the description, add the coordinates to his own GPS and then off he is – to have lots of fun.
Those caches can be really big, like an old ammunition box, or really tiny. How tiny? Well here is a link to an image of something really tiny I found near a park bench in Cambridge, UK last summer.
In my opinion the biggest hurdle is the dedicated GPS unit. Unless you know you love to hike and could use one anyway, even a used GPS unit might be a bit to dear for comfort. Still it is a great family hobby.
Last year, when I visited the German island of Rügen I saw a mother with her two little boys do the caching and those kids loved it, despite the rather mean mathematical riddle they had to solve to get to the next location.
There are currently 700,000 Caches in the GeoCaching.org databases and the new iPhone App lets you link into it. You can find a full description of the App by visiting GeoCaching.com
To be fair, from juding form the reviews on the German AppStore, the App seems to have some issues, but it is a promising start. Check it out and if you want to know about GeoCaching, let me know.
I am willing to bet that a number of MyMac.com staff are GeoCachers, themselves.
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