Geocaching me.
My boss is a geocacher... it's a sort of GPS-driven treasure hunt. People hide stuff and invite others to find it by providing coordinates. It's very organized... the website linked above provides a database of caches and lets you log your finds.
Often, the cache is a weather-proof box full of trinkets... take a trinket, leave a trinket. Some of the trinkets include "Travel Bugs" or other items with unique tracking numbers. Find a trackable trinket and you can claim it on the website and then log when you leave it in another cache. Many of them are trying to get somewhere, which is kind of cool.
Anyway, I've never tried it because I wasn't going to spring for a GPS receiver. And it hadn't occurred to me that with the accuracy of aerial photography maps, I didn't need one... there are geocachers who have found thousands of caches without the use of GPS. So I decided it sounded kind of neat and put it out of my mind.
Until this week, when I was given an Nokia N810 internet tablet as part of a pilot program at work. We're deploying these to our salesmen, and the more the IS department knows about them, the better we can support them... and I got one. And it has a built-in GPS receiver.
Now this is the interesting thing... GPS receivers with color screens and downloadable maps are fairly expensive. You can spend more on one of those than you can the N810, which is barely over $400. So this is really different from the entry-level, $100 experience... for $100, you get a B&W screen that shows street maps without much detail, which you might be able to upgrade/keep-up-to-date for a price. With the N810, I can get Google street maps and aerial photography for free. (It runs Maemo Linux, which has a free, open-source mapping application.)
So my seven-year-old son and I went out this afternoon to see what we could find. And it was a lot of fun... he really got into it, especially when the third cache we found was an Army surplus ammo box full of all kinds of goodies. (The first two were good training, but a little boring... both magnetic key boxes with nothing but a strip of paper to log your visit.)
The GPS is mediocre... first, it takes forever to get a 3d position fix. It looks like this may be a software bug and fixable with a simple upgrade, but for now, it takes as long as fifteen minutes to start working (though I hear that's not terribly uncommon in lower-priced GPS receivers). Once it gets a fix, it's pretty reliable about keeping it (some report that it's more reliable than a lot of dedicated GPS receivers). But it's accuracy is... weird. It seems to be most accurate when it's moving, but stop moving and the position indicator starts wandering around. One time that I stopped walking and held it still, and the position indicator make a full circle around the waypoint (destination) I had programmed in... about a 12-foot circle with me on one edge of it. Now, they say you can only trust a GPS to within about 20 feet, but I really didn't expect it to think I was moving when I was standing still. But all in all, I did find it pretty helpful in finding the exact location of all three caches... it got me to within a five feet every time.
Those were pretty simple ones down by the river-walk and in a park... I never got more than a couple miles from my house! Turns out there are quite a few along the river and around town, but I'm going to look for some more remote ones as well. I did a fair amount of walking, so it's good exercise and a fun way to spend time with my son. Can't beat that.