Lil Devil's Geocaching Pages

I haven't written a blog entry in over 4 years, as life has been really busy, and quite frankly, I lost interest. We bought a house with 5 acres, did some redecorating, got some animals, built a barn, and continue to travel a lot. But this story is about our animals. We currently have 14 pygmy goats, 3 horses, 2 chickens, 2 dogs, a cat, and a partridge in a pear tree. Well, maybe not a partridge. But we do have apple trees.

Geocaching.com has a nice Stats Bar which you can put on your own web page to show your geocaching statistics. They even give you a form where you can create your own Stats Bar.

The problem is, the Stat Bar it creates is a "dynamic" image, and some web hosts, such as MySpace and the Groundspeak forums, don't let you show dynamic images. With the form below, we can fake those websites into thinking it's a "static" image.

Have you heard of the California DeLorme Challenge? In a nutshell, its a challenge to find a cache on all 104 pages of the DeLorme Northern California Atlas & Gazetteer. When the challenge first appeared, I already had 37 pages. I completed the challenge on July 13, 2007 at the Gobblers Knob cache on page 65. Read more to see the details.

During our travels, Angel and I have been working on the State Capitol Quest. This involves visiting each state capitol, taking each others pictures, and finding a nearby geocache. Read more to see our progress as of 11/21/06.

We sold our house, sold most of our stuff and put the rest in storage, and are now "full-time" RVers. Yep, we live in our RV. For our first trip, in May 2006 we drove down to Dallas, Texas for GeoWoodstock, an international gathering of geocachers. On the way there we visited family and friends in Arizona, and on the way home we visited family in Oklahoma and friends in Colorado. I'll have to write more about that later.

Around the end of June, we came back to our home area, and planted ourselves in an RV park in Loomis, California. On July 4th, my granddaughter declared her independence from mom and was born at 12:35 am. We hung around for a couple of months to help mom and dad.

In early September, we took off on our next adventure, which is documented in the attached blogs.

A geocaching friend in Virginia created this map of my finds as of December 14, 2005.

Encrypted hints are provided with each of the geocache descriptions given on www.geocaching.com. Software such as GPX Spinner automatically decode the hints for you when the hints are correctly in the "hints" field. But sometimes the encoded hints are included in a way that they are not automatically decoded. That's where Hint Decoder comes in.

Years ago when I started using Pocket Queries from geocaching.com to download geocache data en masse, I needed a way to process those files. I wanted better cache icons for my GPSr. I wanted to put the cache page in my PDA. So I wrote GPX Spinner. Now you too can "spin" your GPX files!

One of the creeds of geocaching is Cache In Trash Out. That means when you go into a park to find a cache, you should pick up and haul out some trash that other park users left behind. To help encourage and remind other cachers to do this, I invented the Trash Can

Here's a template for a micro-cache log sheet. Roll it up and it fits in film canisters and key holders. Open the file in Word or Open Office, add your email address at the bottom, and print it double-sided.