Geocaching is a peculiar hobby since it appeals to individuals who might seem to have very little in common. On one end of the spectrum you’ll find the outdoorsy, wellie boots and pen knife types who enjoy rolling around in the mud, climbing trees and generally get all up-close-and-personal with nature. On the other end of the spectrum you’ll find the computer sorts, the ones who can write apps, be early adopters of new technologies and see the potential for fun in something as dry as the numerical readings of GPS coordinates. My first pair of shoes was a pair of wellies so I think you know which camp I fall into. Having said that, through geocaching I have had to slowly learn little bits of computer-speak here and there. I’ve learnt to tinker with html code when I’m writing new cache pages and I’m sure this is a skill that I’d never have attempted to pick up without the incentive provided by our hobby.
In order to solve these types of puzzles you’ll have to dive into some slightly more technical solving strategies. You might need to get familiar with computers lingo: binary, hexadecimal, octal, html, etc. You might have to get to grips with the full content of a geocache listing, (the CO’s name, cache logs, background, image names, comments, source code and links are all possible hiding places for import information). You might need to dive behind the surface of the webpage to see what’s hiding behind. And the truly evil ones double up the puzzle by making you decode the information you find hiding behind the data. Honestly these caches have literally made my brain ache in the past and I’m still puzzling through my through some of the ones we’ve got here in Taiwan.
For some of these caches it’s clear what you’re dealing with even if you haven’t got the first idea where to start - for example taroh & junwei’s Computer Street (GCPQ22), and for others you’re given almost nothing to work with, (and these ones shouldn’t be spoilt as figuring out what you’re working with is part of the fun).
There are actually quite a few places which deal with this type of puzzle in a more sophisticated way than I could ever hope to and I’ll provide you with some links to them here and here, but if you search online for similar puzzle caches you’ll be able to find quite a few.
None of the puzzles in this series should be too hard to crack since I’m aiming to help people like me paddle around in the shallow waters without going off the deep end.
PUZZLE GYM SERIES
COMPUTER CONUNDRUMS
READ BETWEEN THE LINES
