GeoSticks

				
Geostick by Team Cache Dwellers. v.0.5b - may 3rd 2009

History.

The idea of a geostick was born thanks to the existance of the currently
used geocoins and developed by Roelf en Jen founder memebers of the 
geocache team 'Cache Dwellers' Although very neat from the idea, it is 
a commercial by product of geocaching that in our humble opinion does 
not do right to the liberal idea of GeoCaching.

Problem.

Problem is that the geocoin does not allow for any personal creativity 
and the idea behind it is commited to a propriatory system. What we want
is a system that offers a great amount of freedom and joy to the actual 
cachers. No registration needed and freedom to do anything possible with 
the object is the goal.

Solution.

Therefore we need a object that does not request you to use certain 
predetermined resources to use it. Rather the object itself states it's 
goal and purpose and you placing it our finding it can interact with it 
without intervention of a third party.

We came up with the idea of using a usb stick for this purpose. A usb 
stick is small enough to fit into normal caches and it can actually 
contain all the info we can only place *with restrictions* on the 
GeoCoins system. In fact the GeoStick forms a digital cache that can be 
stored, edited and used.

Usage.

You can use the stick much like a coin, and be honest today the price 
doesn't form a barrier anymore. The 1Gb stick nowadays are available for 
much the same price. But we do admit that there should be some 
regulation in the format used on the stick. Therefor we would like to 
propose the following guidelines.

Guidelines.

The geosticks format should consist of a normal fat16 or fat32, which is 
the current standard for most sticks. It should contain a directory 
hierarchie with the following directories:

	welcome
	text
	img
	cache

The usage of these directories is as follows:

Directory Root.

README file(s) explaining what this stick is and how to use it. At the 
moment I suggest sticking to a text copy op the cache note. To 
facilitate the stickuser the readme file should be named 
README.

Directory welcome. 

This directory should contain the founders information and is only bound 
by his creativity. It should contain a clean ascii text file which 
states the purpose and usage of the stick. There should be also this 
file under the name geostick and a tagfile under the name ident.txt, 
which format is explained below.

Directory text.

Here anybody that finds the stick can put a personal note. We propose 
using a clean ascii text file named with your geocaching.com username 
and the extension .txt.

Directory img.

Here anybody that finds the stick can put a personal image. We propose a 
.jpg with a dimension of 800x600 maximum.

Directory cache

Is a free directory to be used for anything not complying to the other 
directories.


Usage of the ident.txt file.

The ident.txt file is a file made by the initial founder of the 
geostick. This again is a plain ascii textfile with the folowing 
content:

line1  a tag consisting of the owners username folowed by 6 digits 
             forming his birthday yymmdd and 4 four digits forming a 
             serial number that should be incremented with every new 
             stick that the owner creates. So a user John born on 12 
             october 1970 creating his first stick would use 
             john7010120001.txt
line 2  format yymmdd
line 3  use it to give your stick a name or title max 72 chars.
line 4  optional email address of owner.

Usage of the stick for the finder.

In principle the basic process will not differ much of that of a coin 
although much depends on the owners intention. In its most simple form 
anyone who finds the stick takes it out of the cache and places it in 
the next one. He can add a textfile with information he wants to share 
as stated above. And he can add a 1 photo or 1 image he wants to share 
in the img directory of size 800x600 jpg. He is free to use the cache as 
he likes. Put f.i. an mp3 on it or more images. He can remove anything 
from the cache dir to provide space for his own info. He cannot remove 
anything else from the stick.

He should then backup the final result before hiding the stick in a new 
cache. Backing up prevents the loss of a stick, if anybody finds the 
stick missing he can simply ask the last user for his backup and create 
a new one. Tracing of a stick can simply be done by watching the log 
entries on geocache.com as a reference the name on line 1 of the 
ident.txt file can be used.

Disclaimer

Again I like to state that the liberal setup of the stick rules allows 
for great deviation from these basic rules. I like therefor that early 
adopters of the scheme contact me with ideas and input so this document 
maybe edited with changes and aditions so we might end up with a usefull 
standard. I therefor use a revision number for this document. My email 
address is roelfrenkema@gmail.com if you write me please add GEOSTICK 
to the subject of your email for filtering purposes.

Usefull links.