Dan Q

Dan Q found GC9BYME WAG 5a

This checkin to GC9BYME WAG 5a reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geopup struggles to understand why I sometimes insist on stopping our walks to go and poke around in the nearby trees, and this time was no exception. The hint could refer to one of several hiding places, and like a previous cacher I worried for a moment that the hiding place might have been destroyed by some recent logging work in this area, but nope: it’s still here! It was a little more-challenging to retreieve than it perhaps was originally, though, as a pile of branches has been placed between the path and the hiding place, but we found it in the end then pushed on across the road, waving to some friendly cyclists as we did so.

Dan Q found GC8C4TE WAG 5 – Battle

This checkin to GC8C4TE WAG 5 - Battle reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Another excellent bit of camoflage here, on what has so-far appeared to be a well-loved but well-maintained series. The geopup and I went back and forth a few times before we found the correct host, but soon had the cache in hand. TFTC.

Dan Q found GC54DD8 WAG 4 – Chiltern Way Extension

This checkin to GC54DD8 WAG 4 - Chiltern Way Extension reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Unfortunately, my dedicated GPSr had been left turned-on after my last geocaching/geohashing/whatever expedition, and I hadn’t realised until I was just setting off this morning. I tried to charge it in the car but it didn’t take on enough battery to make it worthwhile to bring it out, so I was working from my phone (whose GPSr is… adequate… usually), and my watch (whose GPSr is good, but whose user interface for caching is pretty pants).

But luckily for this cache at least my geosense brought me to exactly the right spot, and I quickly saw something that looked out of place. Imagine my delight when I pulled on it and the cache was in my hand. Fantastic stuff, TFTC.

Dan Q found GC54DB8 WAG 3 – Cleeve Corner

This checkin to GC54DB8 WAG 3 - Cleeve Corner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The time before last that I was in Goring – the first of my now-three visits – was for a birthday/garden party on 24 June 2018. My eldest – then only four years old – was getting a little bored of the grown-up conversations going on and I provided a distraction by taking her out to find GLW5FKG9 and GLW5EFV2 (the latter of which has since been archived).

I enjoyed the camoflage on this cache, but little did I know that it would be a theme throughout many of the caches in this series! FP awarded anyway, because it delighted me at the time. TFTC.

Dan Q found GC54DAM WAG 2 – Cow Hill

This checkin to GC54DAM WAG 2 - Cow Hill reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The last time I was in Goring was on 9 June 2022, when I cycled here via Eynsham, Abingdon, and Didcot. I enjoyed a meal at at Whale Inn in Streatley, then meandered down into Goring in order to catch a tran part of the way home (I was feeling lazy). Another easy find here. TFTC.

Dan Q found GC54D9K WAG 1 – See the light

This checkin to GC54D9K WAG 1 - See the light reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Ignoring times that I’ve passed-through, I’ve only ever visited Goring twice before. It’s time to rectify that! This morning, the dog and I drove down from Stanton Harcourt (near Witney), parked up, and begun our attempts at the first half of the WAG trail (along with a couple of others along the way).

Starting as we mean to continue, this was a very quick first find. TFTC.

Watch Together with WhatsApp on the side

A virtual party

This weekend, I threw a Virtual Free Fringe party for some friends. The party was under-attended, but it’s fine because I got to experiment with some tech that I’d been meaning to try.

The Abnibbers and I have experimented with watching things together, but apart, before, but this is the first time we’ve watched stand-up comedy this way.

If you ever want to run something like this yourself¹, here’s how I did it.

My goals were:

A web page at which any attendee could “watch together” a streaming video²,
A “chat” overlay, powered by a WhatsApp group³ (the friend group I was inviting were all using WhatsApp anyway, so this was an obvious choice), and
To do all the above cheaply or for free.

Selfie photograph of Dan, in a bar with a rooftop view of daylight out the windows in the background, looks concerned as he stares at the a frothy, bubbling flask of yellow liquid he's holding. — I’m a big fan of experiments. Contrary to this picture, though, they’re usually *software* experiments.

There were two parts to this project:

Setting up a streaming server that everybody can connect to, and
Decorating the stream with a WhatsApp channel

Setting up a streaming server

Linode offers a free trial of $100 of hosting credit over 60 days and has a ready-to-go recipe for installing Owncast, an open-source streaming server I’ve used before, so I used their recipe, opting for a 4GB dedicated server in their London datacentre: at $36/mo, there’d be no risk of running out of my free trial credit even if I failed to shut down and delete the virtual machine in good time. If you prefer the command-line, here’s the API call for that:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
-X POST -d '{
    "authorized_users": [
        "[YOUR LINODE USERNAME]"
    ],
    "backups_enabled": false,
    "booted": true,
    "image": "linode/debian10",
    "label": "owncast-eu-west",
    "private_ip": false,
    "region": "eu-west",
    "root_pass": "[YOUR ROOT PASSWORD]",
    "stackscript_data": {
        "server_hostname": "[YOUR DOMAIN NAME]",
        "email_address": "[YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS]"
    },
    "stackscript_id": 804172,
    "tags": [],
    "type": "g6-dedicated-2"
}' https://api.linode.com/v4/linode/instances

The IP address got assigned before the machine finished booting, so I had time to copy that into my DNS configuration so the domain was already pointing to the machine before it was fully running. This enabled it to get its SSL certificate set up rightaway (if not, I’d have had to finish waiting for the DNS change to propogate and then reboot it).

Out of the box, Owncast is insecure-by-default, so I wanted to jump in and change some passwords. For some reason you’re initially only able to correct this over unencrypted HTTP! I opted to take the risk on this server (which would only be alive for a few hours) and just configure it with this limitation, logging in at http://mydomain:8080/admin with the default username and password (admin / abc123), changing the credentials to something more-secure. I also tweaked the configuration in general: setting the service name, URL, disabling chat features, and so on, and generating a new stream key to replace the default one.

Now I was ready to configure OBS Studio to stream video to my new Owncast server, which would distribute it to anybody who tuned-in.

Next up, we need to make WhatsApp appear on the stream with a little bit of CSS hackery.

Decorating the stream

I configured OBS Studio with a “Custom…” stream service with server rtmp://mydomain:1935/live and the stream key I chose when configuring Owncast and kicked off a test stream to ensure that I could access it via https://mydomain. I added a VLC source⁴ to OBS and fed it a playlist of videos, and added some branding.

With that all working, I now needed a way to display the WhatsApp chat superimposed over the video.For this, I added a Window Capture source and pointed it at a Firefox window that was showing a WhatsApp Web view of the relevant channel. I added a Crop/Pad filter to trim off the unnecessary chrome.

Next, I used the Firefox debugger “Style Editor” to inject some extra CSS into WhatsApp Web. The class names vary frequently, so there’s no point we re-documenting all of them here, but the essence of the changes were:

Changing the chat background to a solid bright color (I used red) that can then be removed/made transparent using OBS’s Chroma Key filter. Because you have a good solid color you can turn the Similarity and Smoothness way down.
Making all messages appear the same (rather than making my messages appear different from everybody else’s). To do this, I added:
- .message-in, .message-out { align-items: flex-start !important; } to align them all to the left
- [aria-label="You:"]::after { content: "Dan Q"; height: 15px !important; display: block; color: #00f !important; padding: 8px 0 0 8px; } to force my name to appear even on my own messages
- [aria-label^="Open chat details for "] { display: none; } to remove people’s avatars
- [data-testid="msg-meta"] { display: none !important; } to remove message metadata
- A hacky bit of CSS to make the backgrounds all white and to remove the speech bubble “tails”
Removing all the sending/received/read etc. icons with [data-icon] { display: none; }

I aimed where possible to exploit selectors that probably won’t change frequently, like [aria-label]s; this improves the chance that I can use the same code next time. I also manually removed “old” messages from the channel that didn’t need to be displayed on the big screen. I wasn’t able to consistently remove “X new messages” notifications, but I’ll probably try again another time, perhaps with the help of an injected userscript.

A little bit of a shame that more people didn’t get to see the results of this experiment, but I’m sure I’ll use the techniques I’ve learned on another ocassion.

Footnotes

¹ Or, let’s be honest, if you’re Future Dan and you’re trying to remember how you did it in last time.

² We were to watch a show by one of my favourite comedians Peter Buckley Hill, the man behind the Free Fringe. I’ve written about him previously… here, there, also several times in 2012 when I also helped make an official digital map of Free Fringe venues. I was especially delighted to have my photo taken with him in 2006. I might be a bit of a fanboy.

³ This could probably be adapted for any other chat system that has a web interface, so if you prefer Telegram or Slack or whatever ever, that’s fine.

⁴ OBS’s VLC source is just amazing: not only can you give it files, but you can give it URLs, meaning that you can set up a playlist of YouTube videos, or RTSP security camera feeds, or pretty much anything else you feel like (and have the codecs for).

Double-Bluetooth

The problem of “needing to be able to hear from two Bluetooth sources at once” is so real for me that I came up with a solution that I genuinely use all the time. You’re not going to like it, though.

Solution in video (no audio needed; no need to fix your headphones first!):

Originally sent as a Mastodon reply to @NireBryce@hachyderm.io.

Paul Labyrinth

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Jim Kang

Known Leaders is an open-source program that combines WikiData with a random generator to come up with almost-invariably inaccurate but sometimes hilarious facts. Jim Kang came up with it during Recurse Center‘s Never Graduate Week. Go have a play, or read more about how and why he made it.

Are Geocache Logs Getting Shorter?

Background and hypothesis

When geocachers find a geocache, they typically “log” their find both in the cache’s paper logbook and on one of the online listing sites on which the cache’s coordinates can be found.¹

Photograph showing a medium-sized geocache container with its contents laid-out around it: various pieces of swag for trade, plus a notebook. — A typical geocacher can find their cache container, logbook, swag, toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, and most-importantly towel. Hang on, I’ve got my geekeries crossed again. Photo courtesy cachemania, used under a CC BY-SA license.

I’ve been finding and hiding geocaches for… a long while, so I’ve seen lots of log entries from people who’ve found my caches (and those of others). And it feels to me like the average length of a geocaching log entry is getting shorter.

Screenshot of a digital log entry from Geocaching.com, titled "MagicV77 found Grove Farm" on 22 August 2023. The entirety of the log entry itself is a thumbs-up emoji. — A single emoji is probably the shortest log entry I’ve ever seen. I’m not claiming that its cache *deserves* a longer log (it’s far from my best work!): just using it as an example of a wider trend towards shorter logs.

“It feels to me like…” isn’t very scientific, though. Let’s see if we can do better.

Getting the data

To test my hypothesis, I needed a decade or so of logs. I didn’t want to compare old caches to new caches (in case people are biased by the logs before them) so I used Geocaching.com’s own search to open the pages for the 500 caches closest to me that are each at least 10 years old.

My browser hates me right now.

I hacked together a quick userscript to save all of the logs in a way that was easier than copy-pasting each of them but still didn’t involve hitting Geocaching.com’s API or automating bulk-scraping (which would violate their terms of service). Clicking each of several hundred tabs once every few minutes in the background while I got on with other things wasn’t as much of an ordeal as you might think… but it did take a while.

Needless to say I only had to go through the cycle a couple of times before I set up a keyboard shortcut.

I mashed that together into a CSV file and for the first time looked at the size of my sample data: ~134,000 log entries, spanning 20 years. I filtered out everything over 10 years old (because some of the caches might have no logs that old) and stripped out everything that wasn’t a “found it” or “didn’t find it” log.

That gave me a far more-reasonable ~80,000 records with which I could make Excel cry.²

Results

It looks like my hunch is right. The wordcount of “found” logs on traditional and multi-stage caches has generally decreased over time:

“Did not find” logs, which can be really helpful for cache owners to diagnose problems with their caches, have an even more-pronounced dip:

When I first saw that deep dip on the average length of “did not find” logs, my first thought was to wonder whether the sample might not be representative because the did-not-find rate itself might have fallen over time. But no: the opposite is true:

Strangely, the only place that the trend is reversed is in “found” logs of virtual caches, which have seen a slight increase in verbosity.

Conclusion

Within the limitations of my research (80,000 logs from 500 caches each 10+ years old, near me), there are a handful of clear trends over the last decade:

Geocachers are leaving increasingly concise logs when they find geocaches.
That phenomenon is even more-pronounced when they don’t find them.
And they’re failing-to-find caches and giving up with significantly greater frequency.

Are these trends a sign of shortening attention spans? Increased use of mobile phones for logging? Use of emoji and acronyms to pack more detail into shorter messages? I don’t know.

I’d love to see some wider research, perhaps by somebody at Geocaching.com HQ (who has database access and is thus able to easily extract enough data for a wider analysis!). I’m also very interested in whether the identity of the cache finder has an impact on log length: is it impacted by how long ago they started ‘caching? Whether or not they have hidden caches of their own? How many caches they’ve found?

But personally, I’m just pleased to have been able to have a question in the back of my mind and – through a little bit of code and a little bit of data-mashing – have a pretty good go at answering it.

Footnotes

¹ I have a dream that someday cache logging could be powered by Webmentions or ActivityPub or some similar decentralised-Web technology, so that cachers can log their finds on any site on which a cache is listed or even on their own site and have all the dots joined-up… but that’s pretty far-fetched I’m afraid. It’s not stopping some of us from experimenting with possible future standards, though…

² Just for fun, try asking Excel to extrapolate a second-order polynomial trendline across 80,000 pairs of datapoints. Just don’t do it if you’re hoping to use your computer for anything in the next quarter hour.

³ With stricter guidelines on how a “virtual rewards” virtual caches should work than existed for original pre-2005 virtuals, these new virtuals are more-likely than their predecessor to encourage or require longer logs.

Inclusivity

Max credit to garry (@repeattofade) for the original toot. All I did was adapt it into a motivational poster.

The thing I’m wondering is whether that bus lane is one that a bi-cyclist like me can use? 😂

.well-known/feeds

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> is fine, but I feel like there should be a standard for a site, not a page, to share a “list of feeds associated with a site”.

Last night, I dreamed about a way to achieve that: ./well-known/feeds as an OPML document. Here’s mine, and here’s a draft spec.

Interested to hear what Dave Winer thinks…

Batman’s World

I do not claim to have a good explanation nor excuse. See also this terrible idea from 21 years ago.

Dan Q posted a note for GC3D6J8 The Leap Year Club

This checkin to GC3D6J8 The Leap Year Club reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Enjoyed solving this puzzle, although possibly not 100% in the way the author intended (I spotted some mathematical quirks that gave me a shortcut/cut down the number of possibilities for matching first and surnames!). Now I just need to find an excuse to get over to the GZ and find it! (No idea how soon that’ll be, though!)

Solving this puzzle cache was inspired by a conversation on the Geoleaks forum.

Dan Q couldn’t find GC7Z2J6 Pinsley Wood by Olivia and Jessica

This checkin to GC7Z2J6 Pinsley Wood by Olivia and Jessica reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

No luck here this morning for the geopup and I. The undergrowth has come through incredibly thick your summer, and we had to work hard to hunt in likely locations. (The hint didn’t help much, as it wasn’t entirely clear which direction it assumed we were coming from, but the GPSr good looked good so I figure we were on the right spot.) Strangely, we did find a bauble (pictured) – did somebody decorate these woods for Christmas, I wonder?