I’ve recently changed team at work, so my new team and I have gotten together – from the UK, France, Poland, India and South Africa – here in Amsterdam to meet up in person and do some work “together” for a change: normally we work entirely
distributed. After our day of work we did an escape room together, then on our way to dinner I dragged them out of their way a bit to find this geocache.
Quick easy find, TFTC! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and from many other corners of the
world, courtesy of Team Desire from Automattic!).
Even on a Monday morning the muggles are lining up to hold the trolley. Not me. As an actual magician, I’ve no
need for such frivolities. Instead, as I’m passing anyway on my way to a train to an entirely different magical land (The Netherlands), I just snapped a selfie with the sign visible in
the background. Easy peasy. TFTC.
QEF while out hunting for some breakfast this morning between trains on my journey from Oxford to Amsterdam for a work meetup. Lovely thematic cache container in a great spot. FP awarded. TFTC.
1 This being my 100th post relies on you using non-pedant counting, that is: allowing
“checkins” like this to count as fully-fledged blog posts. There’s more thought given to
this question in my blog post about Kev Quirk’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, but the short answer seems to be that the challenge’s
creator would count this as my 100th post of the year, so perhaps you should too. If you don’t, though, then I’ve so-far published 74 posts this year and – thanks to Bloganuary and a general renewed focus on blogging I’m probably still on-track to make 100. And if I remember to
do so I’ll post a footnote for you pedants when I do.
FTF! Can’t remember the last time I got one of those; it’s been a while. I woke up this morning thinking about an errand I need to run
today that would take me near Standlake when I saw the notification that new cache had appeared.
Spurred into action, I opted to do my chore first thing… and find this geocache while on the way there. Parked up at the village hall and quickly found the sign and all the requisite
numbers. Spent a little while looking at the wrong host before spotting the other likely candidate, after which the cache was in hand.
Didn’t bring tweezers in my haste to leave the house, and I trimmed my nails just the other day, so retrieving the log book was a bit of a challenge. Eventually I was successful; log
signed and retrieved. So nice to see an empty logbook for once! I’m usually beaten to these things by (CO) muddy legs or Go Catch!
The younger child and I had an initially fruitless search in, under and around the nearby bridge before we had the sense to insert our babel fishes, after which the hint item became
clear to us. A short search later the cache was in hand. SL, TNLN, TFTC!
The second of two caches found on a morning walk from the nearby Cambridge Belfry Hotel, where some fellow volunteers and I met yesterday for a meeting. This cache looked so close, but
being on the other side of the A428 meant that my route to get from one to the other side of the trunk road necessitated a long and circuitous route around half a dozen (ill-maintained)
pegasus crossings around the perimeter of two large roundabouts! Thankfully traffic was quiet at this point if a Saturday morning.
Cache itself was worth the effort though. Feels like it’s increasingly rare to find a large, appropriately-camouflaged, well looked-after cache in a nice location, so FP awarded. TFTC!
Even early on a Saturday morning, after a volunteering event the previous day at the hotel across the road, this highly-exposed GZ made me
feel vulnerable! It’s not as though anybody were actually watching me as I stood around nonchalantly at the GZ waiting for an opportunity
to make a search: a couple of shop workers setting up, maybe, and a handful of drivers going past… but what got me was that every time I looked up from my rummaging I spotted, in the
corner of my eye, a police officer standing to attention just on the other side of the car park, staring intently in my direction!
The copper in question, of course, was nothing more than a cardboard cut-out designed to spook shoplifters, but man that’s a chilling thing to spot in your peripheral vision when you’re
rooting around in the bushes for a concealed container in a quiet car park!
Signed the log and took a selfie with my law enforcement friend (attached) before getting back to my day. TFTC!
The elder child and I are staying nearby and couldn’t resist coming to a nearby cache with so many FPs. The name gave us a bit of a clue what we would be looking for but nothing could
have prepared us for for this imaginative and unusual container! FP awarded. Attached is very non-spoiler photo of us with our very own Incy
Wincies. Greetings from Oxfordshire!
I thought it might be fun to try to map the limits of my geocaching/geohashing. That is, to draw the smallest possible convex polygon that surrounds all of the
geocaches I’ve found and geohashpoints I’ve successfully visited.
Mathematically, such a shape is a convex hull – the smallest polygon encircling a set of points without concavity. Here’s how I made it:
1. Extract all the longitude/latitude pairs for every successful geocaching find and geohashpoint expedition.I keep them in my blog database, so I was able to use some SQL to
fetch them:
SELECTDISTINCT coord_lon.meta_value lon, coord_lat.meta_value lat
FROM wp_posts
LEFTJOIN wp_postmeta expedition_result ON wp_posts.ID = expedition_result.post_id AND expedition_result.meta_key ='checkin_type'LEFTJOIN wp_postmeta coord_lat ON wp_posts.ID = coord_lat.post_id AND coord_lat.meta_key ='checkin_latitude'LEFTJOIN wp_postmeta coord_lon ON wp_posts.ID = coord_lon.post_id AND coord_lon.meta_key ='checkin_longitude'LEFTJOIN wp_term_relationships ON wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id
LEFTJOIN wp_term_taxonomy ON wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
LEFTJOIN wp_terms ON wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id
WHERE wp_posts.post_type ='post'AND wp_posts.post_status ='publish'AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy ='kind'AND wp_terms.slug ='checkin'AND expedition_result.meta_value IN ('Found it', 'found', 'coordinates reached', 'Attended');
2. Next, I determine the convex hull of these points. There are an interesting variety of
algorithms for this so I adapted the Monotone Chain approach (there are
convenient implementations in many languages). The algorithm seems pretty efficient, although that doesn’t matter much to me because I’m caching the results for a fortnight.
I watched way too many animations of different convex hull algorithms before selecting this one… pretty-much arbitrarily.
An up-to-date (well, no-more than two weeks outdated) version of the map appears on my geo* stats page. I don’t often get to go caching/hashing
outside the bounds already-depicted, but I’m excited to try to find opportunities to push the boundaries outwards as I continue to explore the world!
(I could, I suppose, try to draw a second larger area of places I’ve visited: the difference between the smaller and larger areas would represent all of the opportunities I’d missed to
find a hashpoint!)
I was contacted this week by a geocacher called Dominik who, like me, loves geocaching…. but hates it when the coordinates for a cache are hidden behind a virtual jigsaw puzzle.
A popular online jigsaw tool used by lazy geocache owners is Jigidi: I’ve come up with severaltechniques for bypassing their puzzles or at least making
them easier.
Not just any puzzle; the geocache used an ~1000 piece puzzle! Ugh!
I experimented with a few ways to work-around the jigsaw, e.g. dramatically increasing the “snap range” so dragging a piece any distance would result in it jumping to a
neighbour, and extracting original image URLs from localStorage. All were good, but none were
perfect.
For a while, making pieces “snap” at any range seemed to be the best hacky workaround.
Then I realised that – unlike Jigidi, where there can be a congratulatory “completion message” (with e.g. geocache coordinates in) – in JigsawExplorer the prize is seeing the
completed jigsaw.
You can click a button to see the “box” of a jigsaw, but this can be disabled by the image uploader.
Let’s work on attacking that bit of functionality. After all: if we can bypass the “added challenge” we’ll be able to see the finished jigsaw and, therefore, the geocache
coordinates. Like this:
Hackaround
Here’s how it’s done. Or keep reading if you just want to follow the instructions!
Open a jigsaw and try the “box cover” button at the top. If you get the message “This puzzle’s box top preview is disabled for added challenge.”, carry on.
Open your browser’s debug tools (F12) and navigate to the Sources tab.
Find the jigex-prog.js file. Right-click and select Override Content (or Add Script Override).
In the overridden version of the file, search for the string – e&&e.customMystery?tt.msgbox("This puzzle's box top preview is disabled for added challenge."): –
this code checks if the puzzle has the “custom mystery” setting switched on and if so shows the message, otherwise (after the :) shows the box cover.
Carefully delete that entire string. It’ll probably appear twice.
Reload the page. Now the “box cover” button will work.
The moral, as always, might be: don’t put functionality into the client-side JavaScript if you don’t want the user to be able to bypass it.
Or maybe the moral is: if you’re going to make a puzzle geocache, put some work in and do something clever, original, and ideally with fieldwork rather than yet another low-effort
“upload a picture and choose the highest number of jigsaw pieces to cut it into from the dropdown”.
Found by the geohound and I after a brief battle with the first stinging nettles of the season. Owie! She and I came over from Stanton Harcourt this morning – from which we see plenty
of Brize Nortons’ Hercules! – because many of our favourite local walks are waterlogged. Things are somewhat drier underfoot here, but after our walk through the fields the pup and I
are still rather muddy! TFTC.
The pup and I unearthed a few likely hiding places without success here. Not sure what we’ve missed: feels like we lifted every hint item in the vicinity!
QEF for the geopup and I on this strangely springlike morning. Cache container is damaged almost beyond recognition, as others have
observed, and is desperately in need of replacement. TFTC.
My very first “ski-o-cache” was 9 years ago, down in La Tania: this was my second! Found the host easily at the
coordinates and found the cache in the third hiding place I tried. It’s quite stiff and hard to extract right now! Needed to wait to return it while some other skiers took pictures of
one another at the GZ, but got there in the end. Salutations d’Oxford, en Angleterre. MPLC!
Found after trying a few different hosts while out on an expedition to try and reach the 2024-02-10 51 -1 geohashpoint with the 7-year-old and the dog. The path to the hashpoint is really waterlogged and the little
man said his wellies were leaking so we doubled back and retrieved this cache. Extracting the log was a bit of a challenge owing to tune container shape but we managed in the end.
TFTC.
