Riding the WAZE!

Ooh, AstroEricJ showed us a neat new app – perfect for Geocaching roadtrips!

WAZE is a GPS, Maps & Social Traffic app available for iPhones and Androids.  During our Chicago trip, we drove into a major rainstorm – you could barely see the hood of the car. Eric pulled out the app and saw other drivers (called Wazers) had posted trouble spots such as cars parked along the highway due to weather and lanes undrivable due to flooding.  He could also see construction, accidents, slow downs, closed roads, and policemen (FTF, anyone?)

I think this app might replace several I already have on my phone.

Yellow Pages: You can enter your search criteria and it will direct you.  It also has a Gas Finder feature.

Glympse: You can send friends notification of your arrival and connect with friends via the app.

Google Maps: On my phone GM is unresponsive.  WAZE does an excellent job updating as you drive.  Nice maps, too.

On the downside, it doesn't navigate to coordinates like a geocaching app.  It will suggest nearby addresses for selection.  So, if you are on an FTF run, it will get you as close as possible (while avoiding construction, slow downs, and possibly policemen—not that we ever speed, right?).

Smart Phone / Hidden Text Puzzle Tip

BSW2010 showed me a nifty trick.  He asked several of us why we hadn't solved one of his new puzzles (FTF was waiting!).  In answer to our "we think it's white text on the cache page and we can't solve it via smart phone", he said we were wrong.  There's any easy fix for this.

Today, while TaGeez and I were at a puzzle 'final', we found a container with a note stating the 'puzzle' on the cache page was a red herring and the true final was hidden somewhere else on the page.  Harrumph!  In the past I would've driven home to solve it on my desktop, but home was 15 miles away.  So I tried BSW's trick....

Go to the cache page where the suspected "hidden text" is located and copy all the text.

Then open up a blank email or your notepad or Evernote and paste the text.  When you copy/paste from a webpage to a word document, hidden or "white" text pastes as black text (see below). It worked!  We were able to plug in the "new final" and make the find!

And, oh... if you were wondering about BSW's puzzle.... it wasn't hidden text after all. The brat led us onto another wild goose chase!