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using "GIMP" to solve picture puzzle caches


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Hi

 

Im trying to solve a puzzle cache, found the picture hidden away and now trying to find the co ordinates within.

 

Ive not used GIMP before and since losing my PSP on my other pc ive ended up downloading GIMP.

 

So far ive right clicked the image and checked the properites, but think that the info i require is buried deeper i.e. the black background might be hiding what im looking for and not the main picture, any suggestions of what i need to try within gimp to get to it?

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A link to the cache might help.

 

Once an image has been exported as jpg or gif it likely has little trace of the layers used to create it.

 

Steganography are means to hide information within pictures, often using bitplanes which are seldom used, though JPEG compression may corrupt the information if it is too finely grained.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

 

Any cache employing this as a puzzle should be 3 stars at a mininum, perhaps rating 5 stars as the knowledge of such tools is rather specialized.

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A link to the cache might help.

 

Once an image has been exported as jpg or gif it likely has little trace of the layers used to create it.

 

Steganography are means to hide information within pictures, often using bitplanes which are seldom used, though JPEG compression may corrupt the information if it is too finely grained.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

 

Any cache employing this as a puzzle should be 3 stars at a mininum, perhaps rating 5 stars as the knowledge of such tools is rather specialized.

 

The 5 star rating due to special equipment and the skill to use it is for the terrain rating. Applying that to a mental puzzle for a cache just doesn't seem right.

 

The other problem that I see of elevating the difficult to the maximum when knowledege on how to use a tool to detect/extract coordinates out of an image which uses steganography is that it provides no distinction between a puzzle cache which may have an image in the description with the coordinates hidden using steganography and a multi-level puzzle that might contain numerous ciphers of different types and an image that uses steganography to hide information that is only part of the solution. I've worked on lots of puzzles that had many levels/stages. Solving a stage or level only gave you the information necessary to identify the next puzzle. With a series of puzzles with a bunch of red herrings thrown in one can create a legitimate five star difficulty puzzle. Equating that with a single image that can have coordinates revealed in less than a minute with the right tool just doesn't seem right.

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As a programmer and part time graphic artist I tend to see the things I know as rather simple.

 

Only when I sit down with people with other skill sets am I reminded that some things are mountains for people to climb in understanding concepts. Just because I can solve it in a few minutes with a computer and a tool I downloaded, because I know a bit about steganography doesn't make it any easier for the uninitiated.

 

I've been collecting data for the past month and it's still confounding to me how utterly useless Windows continues to be when a user needs to transfer files to a CD and write them to the CD. I get blank discs all the time and have to go out to sites to spend 15 seconds at the keyboard and mouse moving the data.

 

These aren't incompetent people, they just don't have the same understanding of technology I do and the shortcomings of the operating system to remind them "HEY, PUT THE DISC BACK IN, YOU HAVEN'T COMMITTED THE FILES TO IT YET!" The semantics of Drag-and-Drop vs. Burning seem abstract, if not highly technical to many users.

 

Now expecting people to just sit down, look at an image and think, "I bet the CO used steganography. I'll get a couple tools, install them and try it out, or maybe load it into Photoshop, which I paid $$$ for and twiddle some bits and see what pops up", is as natural and easy as it goes is assuming a lot. I can stare blankly at a screen with the best of them when the puzzle is out of my sphere of competence. Just because a few of thousands of geocachers will look right at a puzzle, snap their fingers and have the solution in minutes doesn't mean it should be less than five stars.

 

The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :anicute:

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if you think the info is graphically embedded, but not visible with the plain eye, trying playing around with the color levels and color curves. i know at least one puzzle cache where that reveals information.

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Now expecting people to just sit down, look at an image and think, "I bet the CO used steganography. I'll get a couple tools, install them and try it out, or maybe load it into Photoshop, which I paid $$$ for and twiddle some bits and see what pops up", is as natural and easy as it goes is assuming a lot.

 

The personal difficulty in solving a puzzle often is related to how much experience on has solving puzzle caches. Once you've discovered a few puzzles which use images to hold the puzzle it's one of the first things you're going to look at, especially if there doesn't seem to be anything on the cache pages that might contain the puzzle. The more puzzles one solves the more knowledge regarding what tools might be useful are required. Puzzle solving can be quite an educational experience.

 

 

I can stare blankly at a screen with the best of them when the puzzle is out of my sphere of competence. Just because a few of thousands of geocachers will look right at a puzzle, snap their fingers and have the solution in minutes doesn't mean it should be less than five stars.

 

These types puzzles, to me, can be the most difficult to rate. I can stare for hours a puzzle cache an not see where the puzzle is, or be able to get into the mind of the puzzle creator to figure out what they were thinking. Other times I might look at it and see the puzzle right away. I did a 4 star puzzle about a week at that me several days to key in on a certain word in the description that started me down the right path. Once I did, however, it only took me 15 minutes or so to obtain the coordinates. Someone else that solved it saw the "key" right away and solved it quickly after the cache was placed. In this case, competence and special knowledge had nothing to do with the difficulty of the puzzle. You just had to be in the right mind frame to see the puzzle and how to approach it.

 

 

The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :anicute:

 

That would semography (sp?), a form of stenography which uses the formatting or presentation of the text itself as a cipher. In its simplest form one could write a paragraph, capitalizing certain letters, to spell out a phrase. I have also seen it where two spaces instead of one was used in between words and the significance of where two vs. one space was used created a binary code that could subsequently be transformed into characters.

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A trick I've seen a few times is an image with coordinates shown in the image, but in really small text. The C.O. would use PhotoShop or GIMP to prepare the image. The cache seeker can usually use any photo viewing software to zoom way in (like 400% or more, sometimes) and examine the image. I've used GIMP for this but I usually just use Preview on my Mac. I'm sure Windows computers come with some sort of basic image display app.

 

I'm of the opinion that a cache finder should not have to download and install any software to seek a cache. In the first place this could pose a security risk. In the second place, caches are supposed to be available to the general geocaching community. Requiring someone to use a particular piece of software might exclude Mac users, PC users, or people with older computers, depending on what that software might be.

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I'm of the opinion that a cache finder should not have to download and install any software to seek a cache. In the first place this could pose a security risk. In the second place, caches are supposed to be available to the general geocaching community. Requiring someone to use a particular piece of software might exclude Mac users, PC users, or people with older computers, depending on what that software might be.

 

I disagree. Should water caches be discouraged because I don't have a boat?

 

As a puzzle cache devotee I have seen dozens of ways to hide coords in images. Most are simple and just require software to adjust levels and contrast - Photoshop works nicely.

 

The most complex way would be to use true steganography techniques using software such as JPHide. I've seen this hinted at but never actually used for a cache. Please tell me if you know of any caches which do this!

 

The problem with using these advanced techniques to hide cache coordinates is that there are so many software techniques (and even ways to hide the hidden info with passwords and such) that you may know that an image has been manipulated, but unless the cache owner leads you most of the way - telling you what software or algorithm to use you are unlikely to be able to retrieve the info. (Unless you happen to work at NSA, I guess)

 

Slight tangent: The real problem with using these techniques for a cache is that the point of hiding a cache (at least to me) is to have it be found. I've said it before and I'll say it again: A puzzle cache not found within the first year is not a successful puzzle cache.

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When an image is exported to jpg or gif format, the layer information is lost. So the image on the cache page will not show layers.

 

I did once see a puzzle where the layers were used, though. To find them, one had to notice that the image was not hosted on Groundspeak's site. Then one had to navigate to the site where the image was hosted, and notice that there was another file in the same directory with the same name and a different extension... this was the file one could open in GIMP or Photoshop and reveal the layers. The coordinates were in a "text" layer.

 

But there are lots of easier ways to hide coordinates in an image, I'd check those first!

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When an image is exported to jpg or gif format, the layer information is lost. So the image on the cache page will not show layers.

 

I did once see a puzzle where the layers were used, though. To find them, one had to notice that the image was not hosted on Groundspeak's site. Then one had to navigate to the site where the image was hosted, and notice that there was another file in the same directory with the same name and a different extension... this was the file one could open in GIMP or Photoshop and reveal the layers. The coordinates were in a "text" layer.

 

But there are lots of easier ways to hide coordinates in an image, I'd check those first!

 

Another technique I've seen used on a puzzle cache that I solved involved creating a RAR file (RAR is another archive format like ZIP that allows you to put more than one file into one file ) then copying an image (using the windows command line copy command) into it. The RAR file is then renamed such that it has a .jpg extension (i.e. rename photo.rar photo.jpg). When that file is viewed in a browser or an offline image viewer all you will see is the original image. However, if you rename the file such that it has a .rar extension you can open it with the WinRar application and extract the contents of the archive...which, in the case of the one I did contained another image which used a different technique for hiding the coordinates).

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An artist who works in the same building I do had constructed characters or scenes using only numbers and letters. That seems a creative approach. The trick would be finding the right numbers and letters, then having some idea how to order them.

 

I did a fairly simple puzzle (Are You Color Blind?) picking out the particular hues of the most common color blindness. I have this particular form, but it doesn't always happen that I see the colors incorrectly. The particular hues I used for the coordinates are those I have the most difficulty distinguishing. For those who unable to distinguish the hues the solution is somewhere in the page, but it does make the puzzle a little more tricky to resolve.

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The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :blink:

 

Oh, this is just too funny, DragonsWest. I have wanted to create a puzzle based on exactly this...especially since Strunk and White was written by a Cornell Professor and I could place the cache here on Cornell campus! I won't be able to do it now since my neighbor NYPaddleCacher is linked into this discussion (and I think is talking about my own 4 star puzzle above) but I had to chime in given the convergence of topics!

 

ps I will be in your neck of the woods for a year, DW, starting in September (and was FTF on two of your Aptos area caches in Feb).

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The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :blink:

 

Oh, this is just too funny, DragonsWest. I have wanted to create a puzzle based on exactly this...especially since Strunk and White was written by a Cornell Professor and I could place the cache here on Cornell campus! I won't be able to do it now since my neighbor NYPaddleCacher is linked into this discussion (and I think is talking about my own 4 star puzzle above) but I had to chime in given the convergence of topics!

 

ps I will be in your neck of the woods for a year, DW, starting in September (and was FTF on two of your Aptos area caches in Feb).

 

How well I remember. That was the 10 cache placing day which will never be repeated. Too much difficulty in getting so many pages composed and published resulted in the caches being published in a staggered sort of way, which had people running home to log their find and see two more caches suddenly pop up. It was a bit funny, but the aggravation factor now tempers my cache placing.

 

I'm working on a puzzle idea I tinkered with a couple years ago. I Photoshopped together a series of images and posted them on an unrelated forum, inviting the readership to solve the puzzles to see how strong the puzzle concept was. I think it'll do fine and will be placing one in the next day or two. Something FUN for you to look forward to on your visit. :blink:

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The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :blink:

 

Oh, this is just too funny, DragonsWest. I have wanted to create a puzzle based on exactly this...especially since Strunk and White was written by a Cornell Professor and I could place the cache here on Cornell campus! I won't be able to do it now since my neighbor NYPaddleCacher is linked into this discussion (and I think is talking about my own 4 star puzzle above) but I had to chime in given the convergence of topics!

 

ps I will be in your neck of the woods for a year, DW, starting in September (and was FTF on two of your Aptos area caches in Feb).

 

Hi IthacaDoodle,

 

Yes, I was refereing to one of you puzzles in an earlier post. I'm not sure how I would have rated that one myself. It's one of those that I didn[t make the connection right away. If I had it probably would have been rated closer to a 3, but I could have spent a lot more time than I did.

 

Coincidently, both IthacaDoodle and I grew up not too far from DragonWest (I lived in Los Gatos for many years) but only met in Ithaca a few years ago through geocaching. About the time she was getting FTF on those caches in Aptos I had posted a followup here in the forums about a couple of other caches that were placed that day.

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The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :blink:

 

Oh, this is just too funny, DragonsWest. I have wanted to create a puzzle based on exactly this...especially since Strunk and White was written by a Cornell Professor and I could place the cache here on Cornell campus! I won't be able to do it now since my neighbor NYPaddleCacher is linked into this discussion (and I think is talking about my own 4 star puzzle above) but I had to chime in given the convergence of topics!

 

ps I will be in your neck of the woods for a year, DW, starting in September (and was FTF on two of your Aptos area caches in Feb).

 

Hi IthacaDoodle,

 

Yes, I was refereing to one of you puzzles in an earlier post. I'm not sure how I would have rated that one myself. It's one of those that I didn[t make the connection right away. If I had it probably would have been rated closer to a 3, but I could have spent a lot more time than I did.

 

Coincidently, both IthacaDoodle and I grew up not too far from DragonWest (I lived in Los Gatos for many years) but only met in Ithaca a few years ago through geocaching. About the time she was getting FTF on those caches in Aptos I had posted a followup here in the forums about a couple of other caches that were placed that day.

 

I spent most of my youth (and salad, and crouton, and baco-bitz days) in what we affectionately referred to as The Great White North (See attached photo of old licence plate), Michigan having more in common with Canada (eh!) than the other 47 continental states, particularly the snow, the snow, the ice, the snow, the rain and the snow. I see geocaching is alive and well there, but could use a bit of a kick in the pants in my old sledding grounds (more geocaches within 1 mile of where I live than in that entire city.)

 

I'm not too surprised to see visitors rate an FTF as there's a lot of people passing through this area of the Golden State (see: Land of Fruits & Nuts) - far more than ever passed through the alternating snow/humidity/mosquito-infested land of my earlier days. Besides, it's fun to see a local FTF-hound (or two or three) beaten by someone from the East Coast (that chunk of land that on the day the BIG ONE hits will, with all the land EAST of the San Andreas Fault, slide off into the Atlantic.) :blink:

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thanks everyone, the puzzle i was trying to solve had nothing in the pic, found the info elsewhere on the page. However i have learnt a lot so far and hopefully this thread has helped someone else out somewhere too.

 

feel free to continue adding ideas etc to this thread, perhaps in the future it be a good reference tool for other cachers.

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When an image is exported to jpg or gif format, the layer information is lost. So the image on the cache page will not show layers.

 

I did once see a puzzle where the layers were used, though. To find them, one had to notice that the image was not hosted on Groundspeak's site. Then one had to navigate to the site where the image was hosted, and notice that there was another file in the same directory with the same name and a different extension... this was the file one could open in GIMP or Photoshop and reveal the layers. The coordinates were in a "text" layer.

 

But there are lots of easier ways to hide coordinates in an image, I'd check those first!

I'm stuck for one week now on one image puzzle where two sets of coordinates (for decoy containers :) ) have already been identified. I'm trying to find a related file on an external directory, without success ... anyone knows how to get the autor of a flickr stored picture ? (url = farm5.static.flickr.com/XXXX/yyyyyy ... and no, www.flickr.com/photos/XXXX doesn't work :P ).

 

:P

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Some puzzles I have done, have embedded info in the image. Had to download S-tools and usually the cache page would have a key word to use as the password.

 

Hope this helps someone...

 

Do you mind telling me where you downloaded s-tools from? I think I need it. I have googled it but the sites that come up aren't sites that I have used before.

 

Thanks!

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I love picture puzzles and have used GIMP numerous times to solve some of them. I see a lot of folks on here who like these kinds of puzzles, so I'm posting this one because it went over a year without being found and was finally found by a couple of guys who drove hours to log the find. Hans Brinker's Cache is the cache. Please don't post spoilers (that SHOULD go without saying!) but I wanted to give you crazy puzzle geeks something to work on. :ph34r:

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Hi

 

Im trying to solve a puzzle cache, found the picture hidden away and now trying to find the co ordinates within.

 

Sorry, no help with GIMP but I'd like to try the puzzle for myself... link?

 

So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

any help with this puzzle?

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So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

That's an awful puzzle and GIMP and similar tools will not help.

 

I've seen one in my area. It's really, really, really a bad puzzle. Requires specific hardware (not specified in the description) and requires you to open yourself to dangerous behavior on the Internet.

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As a programmer and part time graphic artist I tend to see the things I know as rather simple.

 

Only when I sit down with people with other skill sets am I reminded that some things are mountains for people to climb in understanding concepts. Just because I can solve it in a few minutes with a computer and a tool I downloaded, because I know a bit about steganography doesn't make it any easier for the uninitiated.

 

I've been collecting data for the past month and it's still confounding to me how utterly useless Windows continues to be when a user needs to transfer files to a CD and write them to the CD. I get blank discs all the time and have to go out to sites to spend 15 seconds at the keyboard and mouse moving the data.

 

These aren't incompetent people, they just don't have the same understanding of technology I do and the shortcomings of the operating system to remind them "HEY, PUT THE DISC BACK IN, YOU HAVEN'T COMMITTED THE FILES TO IT YET!" The semantics of Drag-and-Drop vs. Burning seem abstract, if not highly technical to many users.

 

Now expecting people to just sit down, look at an image and think, "I bet the CO used steganography. I'll get a couple tools, install them and try it out, or maybe load it into Photoshop, which I paid $$$ for and twiddle some bits and see what pops up", is as natural and easy as it goes is assuming a lot. I can stare blankly at a screen with the best of them when the puzzle is out of my sphere of competence. Just because a few of thousands of geocachers will look right at a puzzle, snap their fingers and have the solution in minutes doesn't mean it should be less than five stars.

 

The way people write on forums I think an extremely difficult puzzle would be identifying the grammatical flaws and where/how proper punctuation should be used in a paragraph. I'd have to break out Strunk & White and cram to solve something like that. :anicute:

 

I wish that all puzzle gurus understood (like you do) that many intelligent cachers are clueless about many puzzle techniques. Is as if a certified arborist thought that a 30 foot high tree climb was T 1.5 because he can scramble up the tree in less than a minute.

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So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

That's an awful puzzle and GIMP and similar tools will not help.

 

I've seen one in my area. It's really, really, really a bad puzzle. Requires specific hardware (not specified in the description) and requires you to open yourself to dangerous behavior on the Internet.

 

I found a traditional today that exposed me to abuse by sexually frustrated women, the cat calls and whistles were unnerving, we need to ban these kinds of dangerous caches.

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For a lot of hidden info with an image right click and copy the image URL and paste it into -

 

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

 

Then scroll down through the info and if any coordinates are hidden in the reg info it will show here. This could mean that the owner of the puzzle inadvertently included coordinate info when they took the photo of the GZ. If others have taken a photo near the GZ they may also have done the same so run gallery images through it. iPhones and various GPS units have GPS tagging for photos and this can help you find the cache.

 

If that does not work they may have hidden text in the same way and this might pull it out. If not you will see a small blue link called img.ops and you can load it into that straight from Jeffreys. A different website with great tools. For instance if they have added stuff to a photo using some image software the "error" tool will allow you to see it as a bright red or pink area. Coordinates made to look almost the same colour as they sky will allow you to see this quite blatantly and then zoom in on them. It has other cool tools as well.

 

Stego or Stegonography can in our humble experience be a total nightmare. jPS I think is a free programme that helps you find and asses a picture that may have (hidden in the white space) information. Usually a txt file. But you normally need a key word to extract it. Whatever keyword the hider used. This is often the gc code of the cache but could be anything. Another problem we had was that it seems (though I might be wrong) that you need to decode the photo using the same Stego software that the hider used or it could miss it. We had one and to this day though we have blagged the cache from the logs, we have not gotten it to work. Even the Co when staying with us could not get it to work though others have. The CO was able to get it to work from his ole works pc but not on anything of ours. You also have to use the correct photo. He hid it in the enlarged photo not the one on groundspeaks site. You had to click on the image and go to the original photo. But as we never got it to work ... can't be certain. Still got a smiley.

 

Another way to check images is as people have said RAR which is a compression programme like winzip. There was a really good thread that showed you all the links of how to do it all but this tutorial works as we have used it successfully. So have a watch it's very straight forward and to us, brilliantly clever. But we are easily pleased - hope that helps you solve it. Oh no wait here is the link to image hiding -

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/hide-text-inside-image-files/

 

And I think the tutorial is found on there. I videod that and when we need to do it we just follow the vid step by step. Good luck.

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So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

That's an awful puzzle and GIMP and similar tools will not help.

 

I've seen one in my area. It's really, really, really a bad puzzle. Requires specific hardware (not specified in the description) and requires you to open yourself to dangerous behavior on the Internet.

 

So here is another puzzle cache, will gimp work for this one? http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC20NPG_cimsagro4s-golden-mystery

 

Just curious

 

Eyeash

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So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

That's an awful puzzle and GIMP and similar tools will not help.

 

I've seen one in my area. It's really, really, really a bad puzzle. Requires specific hardware (not specified in the description) and requires you to open yourself to dangerous behavior on the Internet.

 

So here is another puzzle cache, will gimp work for this one? http://www.geocachin...-golden-mystery

 

Just curious

 

Eyeash

 

I don't think so. Why not PM the cache owner for a hint?

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So I am having a similar pic puzzle here is my link....http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC51W6N_fizzy

 

That's an awful puzzle and GIMP and similar tools will not help.

 

I've seen one in my area. It's really, really, really a bad puzzle. Requires specific hardware (not specified in the description) and requires you to open yourself to dangerous behavior on the Internet.

 

So here is another puzzle cache, will gimp work for this one? http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC20NPG_cimsagro4s-golden-mystery

 

Just curious

 

Eyeash

 

Nope.

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