Too Busy...

We've been insanely busy with "real" life so geocaching was temporarily put on hold.  But as a reward for getting alot of work done today, we are taking the rest of the afternoon to go find a few caches here in town.  Yay!

Our Geocaching Kit

I have officially gotten tired of disorganization in caching - I want to be able to grab our stuff and run out to find a cache whenever we feel like it instead of having to search the house for all the miscellaneous pieces of "equipment."  So, we put together our own little Geocaching Kit.

Our Geocaching Kit is made up of:

1. My old (I'm talking vintage 1986) fanny pack
2. Miscellaneous goodies for trading
3. Scrap paper for taking notes, doing math, etc. (multi- and puzzle-caches)
4. Pens for making notes / signing logs / trading
5. Our own custom-printed log signature labels
6. Flash light for night caching
7. GPS
8. iPhone for cache descriptions and logging field notes

EASTER WEEKEND FINDS

	4/4/2010	Barry's and Bertha's I-20 Travel Bug Hotel	Louisiana	Visit Log
	4/4/2010	Trucks And Travelers Galore #5	Louisiana	Visit Log
	4/3/2010	Back of Beyond	Louisiana	Visit Log
	4/3/2010	109 on the Wall	Louisiana	Visit Log
	4/2/2010	And 1,2,3.	Louisiana	Visit Log
	4/2/2010	North Bossier Park - Life Verse	Louisiana	Visit Log

QR Codes & #Geocaching

What in the world is that thing???

I was only introduced to QR Codes a couple of days ago, but already my mind is running with possibilities.  I'm a graphic designer by education and the marketing possibilities for this little jewels is staggering to thing about!

For now, I'm exploring the options for QR Codes and geocaching.  At present, I've run into several challenges along the journey to create amazingly awesome caches with QR Codes... here they are, outlined for your viewing pleasure and to enable my OCD tendencies:

1. QR Readers on iPhone are not all created equal - Starting this journey in QR Codes was a bit like building a piece of furniture without reading the directions.  I figured out the very basic bits of info (find a code, scan a code, see what it does) and launched!  During my initial excitement about (and total ignorance of) QR Codes, I downloaded the first free QR Reader returned in my App Search results.  When it did NOT work, I got pretty frustrated.  It took me about 8 scanner apps to find a few that worked most of the time.  Here are my recommendations (sorry, these are only for iPhone, unless the designer offers them in other formats, too):  Barcodes (aka ZXing for other phones), QR app, I-Nigma.  QR App has about 75% reliability, but it was still better than most of the others I tried and I liked it simplicity.  Ultimately, I deleted it from my machine though and kept Barcodes as a backup to I-Nigma.  Man, I-Nigma's scan detector is a beast!!!  Why is this important:  Since not all apps are created equal, and not all phones have the same apps, implementing the use of QR Codes in the field could be a bit tricky... how can we be sure their phone and their QR Scanner app will work with our Code?  Not to mention, what if someone gets 2 stages into my multi and doesn't have the capability of scanning the QR Code.
2. QR Readers on iPhone cannot create ready-to-send SMS - It took me hours of frustrating tests of QR Codes created by dozens of generators on the web in all 8 of the scanners I downloaded to finally find one kind soul who included a note in the description of their scanner (not even for an iPhone QR scanner app) that explained that the iPhone OS does not allow for SMS forwarding and, therefore, the message coded into the QR would not be transferred to the SMS screen along with the phone number.  It requires manual entry = LAME!  Now I need to find out how to complain to Apple so this feature will be allowed in the next OS release.  But first I have to figure out what it even means!!!  Anyway, why is this important?  I want to hide a multi-cache and one of the stages brings you to a QR Code that, when scanned, sends a text to a service I use that will in turn send a response text with clues, etc. for the next stage. It won't work if they finder has to enter the exact right bit of text to get his/her clue... wait, maybe it would!!! 
3. Geocaching.com does not send comments (including hashtags) from Field Notes to Twitter - So heres the scenario:  I use Textmarks to send Field Notes to my geocaching.com account.  My geocaching.com account is "forwarded" to my Twitter account.  So everytime I send a FN to my cache account, I get a tweet that reads something like:  "xaashley:  Just found GCXXXX "Fill in the Blank" Cache (link to cache)"  Pretty sweet!  Since I also push my Twitter account to Facebook, that becomes my new status.  Also pretty sweet!  Now for the not-so-sweet part:  Textmarks allows you to include "additional notes" in your FN updates... which are sent beautifully to my cache account.  However, geocaching.com is NOT sending those notes to Twitter.  Why is this important?  Because I want to add the "#geocaching" hashtag to all my Tweets so I can filter them into an RSS feed for this blog!  What does this have to do with QR Codes?  Apparently, nothing, but I discovered this problem while I was exploring QR Codes yesterday so it's stuck in my brain in connection with them... sorry about that!

As (hopefully not IF) we are able to work through these challenges, I'll post solutions here, too.  Although, my main focus at this point is the transferring of comments from my FN to Twitter.  Wish us luck!

GoGeocaching!