What is geocaching?

It started with a small head that, to present his pawns, asked everyone to introduce themselves by describing his hobbies. One of the pawns called geocaching as an activity of the weekend. And as we had nothing else to do for 3 days, we started to talk about. Geocaching, it is, as described in Wikipedia, a hobby that is to use the geopositioning (GPS) satellite technology to find or hide a container (called "cache" or "geocache") in various locations around the world. A typical geocache consists of a container to test water and environment including a record of visits and one or several 'treasures', usually worthless trinkets. Hundreds of thousands of geocaches are listed in 222 countries on community Web sites. First considered by a bit silly, the principle began to challenge me when I realized that it was a good opportunity for walks. So, this Saturday, tried, in family. So, I went to the information: as a starting point, the site SwissGeocache allows to learn the basics of the activity. International, the reference site seems be geocaching.com: more than 678'000 hiding listed worldwide. The principle is simple: caches, identified by GPS coordinates, are listed. It comes to find the hiding place, which generally contains a full box of various objects and worthless. Here, we sign a logbook, we can take an object and give another. The game is so much more interesting that the above mentioned sites allow to log this online, and follow the Web activities of the caches. To spice up the whole, caches contain sometimes the "Travel bugs" or the "Geocorners" with one identifier unique: the goal for those who find them is to change cache, with, in some cases, a specific purpose. This one, for example, already has a 7400 km. Icing on the cake, in addition to this online activity, there are the software that goes on my Nokia E66 and its GPS integrated to do live direct Geocaching. So:

  • It's been move
  • It's fun for the kids
  • It's geek-compliant
  • It's very web 2.0
  • It dampens my E66.

Side software on my E66, details will follow in a future post.

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