potshot

Isn't that QR coding game a lot like tagging? I know tagging got popular in the 80's originally by surfers and skateboarders. Tagging crews would have stickers made up and stick them to lampposts and other infrastructure in their areas. Then commercial tags started popping up for garage bands and businesses that catered to teens and gave away stickers for them to put up. Then of course the riff raff started doing their version by forming tagging crews and using spray paint which would evolve into criminal gangs. Now placing stickers is lumped right in there as the same kind of vandalism at least here in So. Cal. I'm surprised the authorities haven't been getting nasty about it. Then again I suppose geocaching could be considered as littering by some.

Just a good paint job on a an Altoids tin would be an improvement and keep it from rusting particularly if your going to put it where it is out of direct contact with rain and sprinklers like under a lamp post skirt or a beam. Being able to survive water tight after being submerged is probably over kill. My Ghost Mall container is an Altoids like tin that's hidden under a beam. All I did was paint that one and silicone the hinges and it's held up so far. I didn't bother with making a gasket.

I had one that lasted quite awhile in direct exposure to the elements. You seem to be a tinkerer and on the right track with the water proofing. Mine lasted a couple of years until it got stolen. Here's what I did. First I lightly sanded the the container inside and out then sprayed it with a good auto body primer. When that was dry I spray painted it the color of my choice with a good spray paint that was designed for outdoor patio furniture or auto body use. I did the silicone on the hinge holes too but I oiled the moving part of the hinge with a Q tip first to keep the silicone from sticking to that part and possibly tearing away. The next trick was to oil the lip of the container with a Q tip then put a bead of silicone all the way around inside the edge of the lid. I let it sit for an hour until the silicone got tacky then closed the lid. The oil kept the silicone from sticking to the lip and prevented the container from getting glued shut. I let it sit undisturbed for 24 hrs. The silicone bead custom formed to the lip of the container and made a nice gasket. Would still advise putting the log in a little zip lock baggie. I hope this helps. Happy Hunting!

So maybe Groundspeak should require a college education and a particular income level to get a membership? Seriously, financial status and knowledge level are hardly factors that make or break a good geocacher. The idea that expensive GPS units kept out the riffraff implies that good cachers are financially well-off and bad cachers are poor. Not to mention that the least expensive unit is the Geomate Jr. at $70+--that's hardly pocket change. Or maybe I'm poor and don't realize it. The real issue is education! Brochures or small books explaining geocaching should be included with the pre-loaded GPS units so people understand the game. I live in a major city and there are no local caching groups and no caching events. We need to work together to help others instead of excluding them. There are people out there that have no interest in following rules and who's idea of having fun is spoiling the fun for everyone else. That's the RIFFRAFF I'm referring to! If you don't believe those people exist then you've been living under a rock. The ones I've had to deal with come in all packages but they typically are dumb, lazy and cheap! Not necessarily poor. If ruining someones fun doesn't require too much thought, effort or spending their own money they'll do it. Here's some examples of some riffraff killjoys who have destroyed my ability to enjoy some of my previous hobbies and are working on destroying some of my current ones. People who hate and want to regulate or eliminate: Motorcycle enthusiasts. Gun owners. Hunters. Fisherman. Mountain bikers. Skate boarders. (Now that I'm getting too old do it myself they annoy me too but I leave them alone.) Off roaders. Hikers. Campers. That's just to name a few. No matter what you do to have fun if too many people get involved in it or know that it is going on some jerkoff is going to come out of the woodworks and try to screw it up. That's why I keep my fun on the down low, try to avoid as many people as possible while I'm recreating and be selective on whom I invite to join me. That's what originally attracted me to geocaching because the sport was a sneaky one and very few people knew about it. My fear is that this hobby will be dead in a few years. Either inundated by muggles, regulated to the point that it's no fun anymore or outlawed completely. By the way. I'm poor! The only reason I'm engaging in this in this conversation today is because I've been stuck at home all day on the computer selling everything I can get by without on the internet just to insure I can make rent this month. If work doesn't pick up I'm out on my a** by November. Hey maybe I can pass out some geocaching pamphlets at the homeless shelter while I'm there!

I don't care if it gets derailed. It's getting interesting.

I don't think I'd be stashing my dope anywhere except in my own home, and certainly not in a stolen geocache. It would probably be in a hollowed out copy of Huck Finn on the 3rd shelf of the bookcase in my spare bedroom. I can particularly related to your lament about the increasing popularity of what was once a "secret" activity. It looks like we both joined at about the same time (just near the tail end of the "secret" part). But there's a lot more than the Geomate, Jr. behind that popularity. You can also blame the smart phones, the REI, Jeep, and other marketing schemes, the news stories that result from bomb scares and geocachers (not to mention geocaching organizations!) that feel they are doing the activity a favor by popularizing it. I'm sitting around today with my tinfoil hat on and and seriously thinking that this hobby is about peak here shortly then rapidly decline. Too many muggles, poor quality hides becoming the norm, more careless cachers popping up that like to trespass for shortcuts and damage landscape, more local and federal government restrictions and so on. Already caching has been prohibited on some public lands or requires a permit. One of my long time recreation areas is getting cache saturated now and it I thought it was a cool for awhile but now I'm noticing the geo trails popping up and I'm afraid things like that might get the place shut down to the public.

While I tend to agree with much of what you say, you have not presented one bit of evidence that the Geomate Jr. has anything at all to do with your muggling problems. How do you make that connection? I'm just venting. I'm not saying it did but if you read my post carefully I did say. "Selectively parted out for the cammo." There's no reason for the typical muggle to do that. They would take the whole thing or destroy it. An unregistered name in the logbook between the last two finds? Plus this cache is hard to just bumble into unless you know it is there. Once you do know it's there you don't even need a GPS to find it though. It becomes one of those "Duh" type of finds. I've had this happen several times and some other problems that I was able to correct quickly since I bike through there almost every day and check on it. For instance one time someone was too cheap to spend 50 cents on a magnet and too lazy to flatten out a soup can lid and paint it so they just had to pry my magnet out of the base and pry off the soup can lid which I had glued into my plastic container to make it stick to the magnet then shim my container back into the base with a tissue. Not something a muggle would do and I would hate to accuse a registered member of geocaching.com of doing that. Things like this make me suspect an amateur cacher of some sort is involved. Someone who likes to find them but is not really into the spirit of the game and may see an opportunity to use my cache parts to maybe make something weird of their own out of? AFAIK, you need to have a Geocaching.com account to hide caches. Here you're accusing someone of stealing your magnet and the attachment mechanism. Seems that if is a geocacher, the person would be doing it to use in a cache they are going to hide. Someone with a pre-loaded GPS who doesn't have an account isn't hiding caches. I'd suspect however, that you cache was stumbled on by a homeless person who took the soup can lid and magnet to add the shopping cart of cans they were taking to the recycling center. Actually you don't need an account with geocaching.com to hide a cache. Particularly if your going to use that cache to stash your dope in. You probably wouldn't want to publish it anyway. So far the only one accusing another geocacher of anything is you and you may be right. I'm trying come up with alternate theories. Maybe that's burying my head in the sand. Chances are a homeless person would not notice this particular hide unless they are running an I Phone app or have one of those preloaded GPSs to play with. It looks like city infrastructure and appears to require tools to dismantle and the mount does require tools to remove which I figure most punks don't make a habit carrying around all the time and that's most likely why it has survived.

While I tend to agree with much of what you say, you have not presented one bit of evidence that the Geomate Jr. has anything at all to do with your muggling problems. How do you make that connection? I'm just venting. I'm not saying it did but if you read my post carefully I did say. "Selectively parted out for the cammo." There's no reason for the typical muggle to do that. They would take the whole thing or destroy it. An unregistered name in the logbook between the last two finds? Plus this cache is hard to just bumble into unless you know it is there. Once you do know it's there you don't even need a GPS to find it though. It becomes one of those "Duh" type of finds. I've had this happen several times and some other problems that I was able to correct quickly since I bike through there almost every day and check on it. For instance one time someone was too cheap to spend 50 cents on a magnet and too lazy to flatten out a soup can lid and paint it so they just had to pry my magnet out of the base and pry off the soup can lid which I had glued into my plastic container to make it stick to the magnet then shim my container back into the base with a tissue. Not something a muggle would do and I would hate to accuse a registered member of geocaching.com of doing that. Things like this make me suspect an amateur cacher of some sort is involved. Someone who likes to find them but is not really into the spirit of the game and may see an opportunity to use my cache parts to maybe make something weird of their own out of? Another point I'm trying to make is my leeriness of the mass marketing of our hobby to just anyone. I liked it better when it was a semi secret nerd sport that you got into by being invited by another geocacher which is how I heard about it. Also the equipment costs and the knowledge needed to use it kept a lot of people out that might prove to be a problem. Now I see those preloaded GPSs for sale everywhere even at the swap meets. Anyone with $10 can download an I Phone app. A lot of the homeless in my neighborhood have I Phones and I Pods now surprisingly. I'm not bagging on the homeless I may me in that predicament too here shortly but that is an example of how easily anyone can get into our hobby and of coarse that opens the door for problems. More is usually not the merrier.

I feel those things are drawing riffraff into our hobby since they can be purchased preloaded by anyone and not require them to sign up on the site. I only have a couple of active caches out but one in particular keeps getting selectively parted out for it's cammo. A typical muggle would take or trash the whole thing so that makes me suspect a "quasi" geocacher is involved particularly when I find a non registered signature in the logbook that is between the last two legit cacher's posts the one that found it intact and the one that found and reported it needed maintenance. I have to shell out a few bucks and an hour or two of my time to repair and replace it so it's not too big a deal but it is annoying and I may have to shut the hide down. I don't like just tossing a Tupperware container in the bushes for a hide I like to make cool little gizmos that I can hide in plain site or make for an interesting find but I may have to give it up if jerks are going to come along and steal parts off of them. I'm going switch them to premium user caches and see what happens but I doubt that will get them off of any lists for preloaded GPS's in the future. By the way I keep our hobby pretty much on the down low to begin with. I've only invited a couple of select people into it over the years. Every hobby I get into if it gets too popular some group or government starts sticking their paw out wanting money and then they start regulating it and eventually make it into more of a hassle than a worthwhile recreation. Just talk to any off roader for an example.

For giggles go to an office supply store and buy a typewriter eraser. If they tell you it is extinct then try an electronics store. It's a pencil with eraser material in place of the lead and a brush in place of the eraser. Use it to shine up the contacts on your battery,sd card,usb connection and all the contacts they connect to. Be careful some of these connectors are delicate. That gets rid of a lot of the bugs in my 600. Particularly if I'm not getting a usb connection to my pc. SD card and the contacts in the sd slot are usually the culprits since I have direct soldered my own usb connector to the unit in place of the crappy connection Magellan provides. The battery has a smart chip in it also which has to communicate with the unit. When the contacts get dirty the gps sometimes get whacky.

If it is a long way out and you have a cellphone with coverage just use it. You can also give the 911 people your coordinates from your GPS. Keep the victim still and comfortable. Do the belt trick at the next highest joint. If you have something to use for a blanket cover them up. This helps prevent going into shock even in hot weather. Mostly a psychological ploy but it works. Then wait for help to arrive. If there is no cell coverage and the victim is not panicking do the first aid,leave the victim with some water,mark your coordinates and go for help or a high spot for a cellular signal yourself. Unless there is some other immediate danger to your buddy in the area I would say this would be your best bet. If you're in really good shape and better rescue spot is near then "Fireman's Carry" them out. I've had lots of encounters with snakes and typically they just split when they detect you. It's when you surprise them or deliberately mess with them that gets you into trouble. When plowing through brush always make noise "heavy foot falls" since snakes mostly detect ground vibrations and probe ahead of you with a long walking stick. Rattlers are pretty nice about rattling long before you get to them as long as they know your coming. Other snakes just split before you even see them. Happy Hunting!

The tastiest thing I've gorged on while caching in So. Cal is the prickly pears. I take a cheap bent wire style set of tongs with me to pick them and a self igniting propane pocket torch like the crackheads use to burn off the prickers before I bag them or try to eat them. If you don't remove the prickers before you bag them they'll destroy each other in transit. They're kind of out of season now and most are too ripe but they are best to pick in early summer. Beware of the purple tongue syn drone that might last a day or more. Cook them down into a jam and eat it on toast and they don't stain your tongue as bad. Happy Hunting!

I remember when I was a kid in South East Texas there was this plant that we called stinging weed. As I recall it was a low to the ground dandelion looking thing and if you stepped on it barefoot it had a single thorn in it that would hurt like hell and cause swelling and aching for a few hours. I never noticed it growing knee high or even ankle high though. It always seemed to pop up in regularly mowed lawns where you wouldn't be expecting it. Happy Hunting!

I just got into some this weekend. My trick is to immediately wash all of my affected clothes with some diluted bleach added to the wash and wipe down any of my gear that the bleach won't destroy. I do this before I wash myself so I don't to get more of it on me later. Then I get in the shower and wipe myself down with bleach everywhere except the face and sensitive parts then bath as normal. Bleach breaks down the oil that causes the reaction. I'm sure some experts out there won't like this idea but it works for me. I also have some 20 year old prescription salve that still works really good called Lindex cream if blisters pop up. I think they banned it. Brain damage in monkeys or something. It is some kind of bleaching agent as well. It'll fade a good tan. Good luck. Happy Hunting!

Aside from the legal matters. Do you want strangers poking around your mailbox? Do your neighbors like this idea? In my neighborhood mail and ID theft is common. I have my mail sent to a private P.O. box just in case but other tenants in my building have had problems. Occasionally while emptying the junk mail that builds up in my box I find all the boxes opened and obviously rummaged through. Cachers wouldn't be a problem but who knows who is a cacher or not? If I see a stranger messing with mine or the other tenants boxes the least I will do is call the cops. The worst I would do might occur if there were no witnesses around and they were obviously up to something. I'd say hide it somewhere else. You'll most likely get more finds that way. I wouldn't search for it if it was on a private mailbox. You never know some joker might set up a shill account and publish a hide on someones box just to annoy the box owner and maybe get a cacher in trouble. Happy Hunting!

I like weird pins and buttons that aren't politically motivated. I usually leave small toys for kids in exchange. I just found a cool swag item or at least I like it. I just ordered a case of 144 of them on the web to use as trade items. You'll have to follow me around for awhile to find out what it is. Happy Hunting!

You could get a cheap generic cell phone holder and the top plate for an adjustable mounting post and screw the plate to the holder with the band of a hose clamp underneath it then wrap it around the handlebar and tighten it up.. That would most likely do the trick for under ten bucks. Maybe check out a local cellular shop. Schmooze the installer a bit and he will most likely have a whole box of junk posts with top plates to dig through and maybe he'll give you one . I used to be one of those installers by the way. The screw patterns of all those holders and plates are identical. Here is a setup I made for my motorcycle. The holder and the adjustable post with an improvised steering stem mount. This type of holder and the top plate of this post and a hose clamp would work fine for a bicycle. Happy Hunting!

I know most of the state land in So. Cal. is pretty much off limits unless the state has a means of charging you for entry and or policing your visit. BLM boundaries change frequently. The Feds have been quietly selling off parcels cheap to left wing orgs like The Wilderness Conservancy and other foundations that promise to preserve the land by keeping people off of it of coarse. Keeps the government from having to deal with litigation by those who want it closed for crackpot reasons and those who want it opened back up for public use like hunters and off roaders that are paying for licenses and green sticker fees. You can go to any BLM office and pay for a map book that shows their boundaries or look at their wall maps for free but they are probably not up to date. BLM also sets up booths at gun and motorcycle shows. They have some online resources and maps just do a Google search but none of it is by coordinates that I've found. Good luck. Happy Hunting!

I'm always nibbling on stuff here in So. Cal. when I'm caching like the prickly pears,wild fennel,mustard flowers,wild parsnips,mescal flowers the occasional black berries and nasturtiums. Unfortunately I would be afraid to place a cache where these plants grow encouraging anyone to forage simply because those tasty plants typically grow right next to nasty ones like castor beans,jimsonweed,hemlock,oleander etc. I wouldn't want someone to get confused eat the wrong plant. As long as you carefully spell it out and supply some pictures you should be safe. Cachers seem to be a smarter breed of bi-peds than the rest but I'm still leery of putting out those type of caches even though I was thinking about doing one awhile back. Happy Hunting!

I've got two of the 600's. I'm not too thrilled with either but I got them cheap on Fleabay and I have a connection in the business that can get me spare parts for them cheap. I soldered my own external power connector to the one I use the most because of the flimsy and cumbersome cord. It is always showing ground zero about 20ft east of the actual spot. Sometimes it goes whacko on me and I have to power cycle it. It gives me trouble connecting to my PC sometimes and I have to shut it off,take out the battery and let it sit for about ten minutes then try it again. The menus are cumbersome and it takes awhile to get used to it. I hate the double clicking you have to do in order to get to do something if it sits idle for awhile. It is limited to 200 caches per file which ticks me off. I have to create multiple pocket queries to cover the areas I want to explore. I do like the base map even though it is not up to date and most likely will never be updated. Magellan used to be cool. I worked as an installer of their mobile products (Formerly Rockwell GPS.)when they bought Rockwell's design from Boeing. I was the only authorized So. Cal. installer for a few years. The product was a bit flaky back then but their engineers were very receptive to any suggestions for improvements and modifications that I had to offer. Then they fired all their US employees and farmed everything out to Canada and Asian manufactures. Thats when customer service went down the tubes and engineering cutoff all feedback from the public. I wouldn't encourage anyone to pay full retail for their products but if you see one for sale dirt cheap snag it. Happy Hunting!

Ace Hardware stores in California sell Krylon camouflage spray paint. It works pretty good. I haven't used it on any cache containers but I've slowly been painting my truck and some other camping utensils with it. I've been seeing some cool tins in the offices of the building I've been working in lately. OLN sports magnetic toy containers. They come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. I'm going to have to shop around for them. The ones I saw gave me some good ideas. Happy Hunting!

A stash hidden like that is obviously some bum's stash. I find them all the time and just leave them alone. Bums have been caching long before we got into it and they get annoyed as much as we do when their cache gets muggled. Sometimes it is a survival issue to them but most of the time they are just losing their dope or paraphernalia. Poking around in them is likely to get you stuck by a needle,finding something gross or causing a confrontation by it's owner. If something definitely looks suspicious as in "could be a bomb" and is placed strategically where it can do some serious damage then report it immediately but don't fiddle with it. Happy Hunting!

You will most likely find that the USB/power cord combo is a piece of crap when used in everyday driving. Despite being an annoying amount of wire hanging around it quickly frays at the screw on connector and fails. I modified mine significantly and made my own power connector. Somewhat Mickey Mouse but works a hell of a lot better and is easier to use it on my motorcycle. You just can't hook up the USB connector anymore and have to program your SD card remotely. Soldering skills required and I wouldn't suggest doing it it unless you have extra units for parts in case you screw up. I bought 3 units off Fleabay brand new in the box for $500. I wasn't willing to spend full pop on a Magellan 600. I used to deal in their products and I know how flaky they are. Cool in features but they suck in overall engineering,customer service,support,improvements and good luck on warranty repairs regardless of how much you've modified it. If anyones interested I'll post details. Here is a link to one of my posts with some pictures. They don't show the details of the mod but you can see my connector. http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=167771 Happy Hunting! P.S. I should have read the thread a little better. You can purchase a DC cig adapter that plugs into the USB/power/charging cable. That's what I did but it makes for a lot of spaghetti hanging around in your vehicle. That's why I did the mod.

I did some work at a civilian quarry near there. Was trying to figure out how to get them some reliable and cost effective communications. Me and a co-worker were roaming around the desert with a directional antenna hooked to a service monitor on a dolly connected to a power inverter and car battery. We were monitoring cellular tower strengths from the various carriers that got signal near there so we could find a spot to build an active repeater. Even thought we were on private property we got the shakedown from the MIB guys. They let us continue our work once we fully explained ourselves but we still had many flyovers by the Predator drone over the next few days just checking us out. Once we got the solar powered active repeater site constructed and operational it kept getting vandalized. The quarry owner eventually bit the bullet and payed for an expensive satellite link. We suspect it was the "tinfoil hat crowd" that was trashing our repeater based on some of the graffiti we found applied to the equipment container. Probably paranoid that it was a some kind of "brain scanner" or something similar. Happy Hunting!

My bike. My GPS in it's mount. Another angle. Made my mount from some surplus cellular junk that I had laying around from my previous career. The trick is machining a nut that fits whatever post you choose down to a diameter that is about 1 100th of an inch over the diameter of the steering stem opening. Then freezing it with some Dust Off and quickly pound it into the stem with a hammer and wooden dowel. I used a clamp style cradle for a Motorola Razor phone to hold the Magellan but I wrap a lanyard around the post just in case it vibrates loose. Modified the Magellan a bit too since the power connector for it is a piece of junk. I ride,off road and camp quite a bit around Arrowhead,Cajon Pass and Hesperia. I've gotten quite a few caches in the area and a few off the bike. Will head up there again as soon as I get some time off. I don't like riding on the weekends very much due to the roadragers that like to tear up the area. Been thinking about a Kings Canyon ride before the summer is out. Might tell the boss to to shove it and take a week off. Maybe take a collapsible fishing pole with me too. Happy Hunting!