Making Magic!

Or some kind of crap like that!

Saturday was normal, almost mundane. I went out and got a cache, more specifically a YARN (Yet Another Road to Nowhere). From reading the logs, I thought it was going to be something a little more difficult, but it turned out to be a shotgun shell in a barrier, which is the most common type of YARN out there (at least in Texas). After that, I went out and did some cache maintenance. One of them had been missing for quite a while, but I had forgotten the previous DNFs because they were so long ago. When someone else DNF’d them this week, I headed out to replace it. A different cache of mine was claimed as a find, but the cacher noted that they didn’t actually sign it because there was a wasp’s nest above the the container’s hiding place. I went out there with a can of WD-40 (which is good for taking out wasps and nests for several reasons) and sprayed the nest down and removed it. I then reached back out to the cacher and let them know that I was removing their find log (they didn’t sign it, after all), but that it was safe and wasp-free to return to. They took it in good spirits so I expect them to return to it soon. Normally, I wouldn’t care about a 1.5/1.5, but it has something special to it (the log itself) that makes it worth it.

Sunday I went to a Maker Magic Event. Normally, I think that they’re more about building containers and such, but this one was more forward looking. QR codes were discussed and their integration as stages for Multis and Mysteries and the host was able to use a number of examples from his own caches. He has a number of caches, many of them library caches, where he has used them to great effect. Sidenote: he’s the owner of a library Multi made of a bunch of bisons, but cachers keep adding to it so what started out as 40 bisons has turned into 90-something! But that wasn’t the big thing for me. Someone brought some NFC tags. For those of you not in the know (just like me three days ago), they are RFID chips that can be read by putting your phone next to them, kind of like the way you tap a credit card when you shop or some other kind of contactless payment. Newer phones (less than a decade old it looks like) have readers so that’s not a problem if you have a smartphone. The tags are easily programmable, require no power, and come in multiple physical sizes. There are also multiple types that contain different storage capacities, faster or slower data speeds, and for one type, extended read distance (four of the five types read from 0-4 cm, the fifth type can read at a meter!). I’m already considering possibilities… The future beckons!

That’s all. Go back to your regularly scheduled lives.