The good news is that users who were upgrading from a previous version were not affected. Only one person reported the issue so I hope that means most people who have installed the buggy version were upgrading.

But if you did install CacheStats and couldn’t load your GPX file, my apologies. Please download the new version and give it another try. You can download the update from logicweave.com. The previous version will be automatically uninstalled.

In addition to fixing the bug, this release includes a few minor improvements:

• Added cache type icons for Geocaching HQ Block Party, Geocaching HQ Celebration, and Groundspeak HQ

• Include HQ Block Party, HQ Celebration, and GPS Adventures as events when filtering in the Calendar grid

• Hide Adventure Labs from the Type and Size lists until at least one has been found

• A couple minor cosmetic tweaks

Happy caching!

✨ Support for Adventure Lab Caches

Since the geocaching “My Finds” pocket query doesn’t include Adventure Lab caches, CacheStats now lets you record them yourself. You can:

1. Enter each Lab cache individually, or

2. Enter an overall count if you don’t want to enter them one by one, or

3. Mix the two—enter some individually and keep the rest in the overall count so your total stays accurate (useful if you have too many finds to enter in one sitting).

Lab caches entered in the overall count will count toward your total finds, but won’t appear in date-based stats like your finds-per-year chart or calendar grid.

You can edit your Lab caches anytime from the Statistics / General tab.

📂 Archived Caches in the Caches Tab

When you open a new GPX file, recently archived caches are no longer shown on the Status tab. Instead, you’ll find them in the Caches tab, where you can view full details and reread your old logs. Perfect for when you want to take a trip down memory lane.

🎯 Difficulty/Terrain Grid Search

Ever wonder what caches could fill those stubborn empty squares in your D/T grid? Now, when you hover over an empty cell, you can click to search for nearby caches that match that difficulty/terrain combo.

🔍 Highlighted Search Results

When searching logs or cache descriptions, CacheStats now highlights your search terms. This makes it much easier to scan results and find exactly what you’re looking for.

⏭ Group Navigation Links

When viewing caches grouped by type, size, or other criteria, you’ll now see links to jump to the next or previous group. No more scrolling to find the next group in the list.

📊 “Most Variety in a Day” Stats

CacheStats now shows the most variety you’ve found in a single day—not just by cache type, but also by size, difficulty, and terrain. You’ll find this new tally on the Statistics / Breakdown tab, and it’s also included in your exported stats.

Other Fixes & Enhancements

• 🐦 Twitter posting works again

• 📅 Yearly statistics list: click any column header to sort by that column

• 🌍 Support for the correct spelling of Türkiye

• 📌 Navigating to Most in a Day or Most in a Month now automatically sorts results by largest group

• 🎨 Minor usability and visual enhancements

• 📝 The CacheStats Blog is now hosted on Substack

That’s everything in CacheStats 4.1! As always, thanks for your feedback and suggestions—many of these features came directly from your requests.

You can download the latest from logicweave.com. If you’re upgrading from version 4.0, your previous version will automatically be uninstalled, but all your data, such as your FTFs and custom profile text, will remain intact.

I hope you enjoy the update, and happy caching!

Sadly, the maps at world66.com have been down for several months and the site doesn’t show any signs that it will be coming back. This spurred me to put out a new release which uses a new map provider, maploco.com. But that’s not all. Read on to learn about other new and exciting features added in this release.

There are a few semi-major changes which prompted me to bump the version number from 3.0.11 to 4.0:

1. I updated behind-the-scenes technologies to modern standards. This means Windows XP is no longer supported.).

2. Handling of the data file that holds info like your FTFs has changed. More on this below.

3. This version uses a new installer. If you’re upgrading it won’t uninstall the previous version, but you can manually uninstall it via the Windows Control Panel.

With that out of the way, here are the new features.

Filtering the Calendar and D/T Grid

There are new filters for the Calendar and D/T grids. For the calendar, you can now filter by cache type in addition to the year:

This presents new challenge opportunities, for example try to fill your calendar with finds of a particular cache type. Even if you’re not interested in new challenges, it’s still interesting to apply the filter, for example to see the events you attended for any given year.

The Difficulty / Terrain grid now has two filters, by year, and by cache type. Again, new challenge opportunities come to mind, and you may learn some interesting tidbits. In my case, I noticed I haven't found any difficulty 1 mystery caches, and only one difficulty 5 traditional cache.

Finally, for both the calendar and the D/T grid, there’s a new option to show your year-to-date progress in your geocaching.com profile.

New Data File Handling

As mentioned above, handling of the data file that holds your FTFs, favorites, and profile settings has improved. Previously this file was stored in a hidden folder. Now you choose where to save it. You can even save it in a shared folder such as DropBox or OneDrive so your FTFs etc. are available on multiple computers. Even better, the file is no longer tied to the pocket query name. Previously, if you opened a pocket query that didn’t exactly match the name of the previous one, CacheStats would start fresh, losing all your FTFs in the process.

If you’re upgrading, you’ll be asked to create a new data file. All your previous data will be transferred over to the new one.

Other changes

• The main page was cramped. Reworked the layout to make more room in each tab.

• With the extra room, I was able to add farthest distance between consecutive caches on the same day

• Added new blog options for the news page and removed some that were inactive

• Fixed the news feed for geocaching.com

• Spruced up the profile preview

• Fixed: sometimes clicking a hyperlink used Internet Explorer instead of the default browser

• Giga event caches are recognized

Download the latest from the CacheStats page. Remember, it won’t automatically uninstall your previous version - you’ll need to do that via Windows Control Panel.

As always, let me know if you have ideas for new stats (especially now that the the general stats area has more room!) Happy caching.

Twitter is working again, and Windows 8.1 is now supported. And it adds a few small features: an On this date column in the yearly data table, and calculation of the average D/T of caches per owner. This lets you see who has placed the toughest caches you’ve found.

Average Difficulty / Terrain per owner

You can see the average D/T rating of caches you’ve found on a per owner basis in two places: in your profile summary, and on the Caches tab when you group by Owner or Placed by. To view in the profile summary: click Update My Profile…, make sure Per Owner is checked, then click the Preview button. This will present a table with the top 10 owners of caches you have found with their average D/T. The owner of my most difficult finds is Ranger Boy (which was no surprise to me), with an average difficulty of 3.0, and average terrain 2.0. How does that compare with your toughest cache hider?

On This Date

The second mini-feature is a new column in the Yearly Data table, called On This Date. This shows your number of finds and days cached on today’s date for each year. I like to to see how I’m doing relative to years past, and this makes it easy to see if I’m ahead or behind the pace of any given year.

Finally, one other small change, the hint is now shown in the Cache description. You can download the latest from the CacheStats page. Hope you enjoy the new features and let me know if there are any other features you’d like to see.

P.S. if the numbers in the On This Date column are incorrect, please download and install again. For about a week I had version on the site that had a bug in the calculation. If you’re unsure, click the About button. It should say version 3.0.11, and the build number should be 5510 or greater. If your build number is 5502, then you have the version that has the bug.

• Ability to copy cache info for current cache to clipboard (press Copy button, or Ctrl+C). This is helpful to compile a list of caches to use as verification of completing a challenge.

• Ability to show top 10 cache owners you have found most caches for in HTML output (placed by too*)

• Allow grouping of caches by owner or placed by*

• GCID and cache-type icon are shown in the cache description

• For those of you with lots of FTF’s, it’s easier to mark a cache as FTF – just press F2 (get it? F2-F)

• Ampersand wasn’t showing correctly in cache name

• Fix icon for locationless caches

• “Other states” label was sometimes overwritten

• Average in 1 day didn’t show completely if it was greater than 10 (yes, some people average more than 10 per day!)

• Several fixes for the news feed including:

  • geocaching.com general discussion forums wasn’t showing

  • detect untitled news feeds

  • suppress a script error caused by one of Iowa Admin’s blog posts

  • better handling of embedded YouTube videos

* What’s the difference between owner and placed by, you ask? When creating or editing a cache, you are allowed to specify any name in the placed by field – it doesn’t have to be your geocaching name. There are several reasons placed by might be different than owner, for example if you adopt a cache, you might want to keep the original name of the person who placed the cache. Or you might want to indicate that the cache was placed by a group of people.

Hope you enjoy the update. As usual, just download from the CacheStats page, and install. Your previous version will automatically be uninstalled.

In addition to this fix:

• I fixed the icons displayed for event types (CITO, Mega, Lost and Found (10 year anniversary)), and Wherigo caches.

• Several of you pointed out to me that August actually has 31 days, so I removed the x in the calendar blocking out the date for Aug. 31. (Ooooops, forgot Thirty days hath September…).

• And finally, I added Geocaching.com’s blog, Latitude 47, to the list of blogs that you can choose to display on your Geocaching News page.

As always, the new version is available on the CacheStats website. When you install, your previous version will automatically be uninstalled.

Read on if you’re curious to know why iPhone logs were sometimes incorrect…

When logging a find on the geocaching.com website, the time that you log the find is essentially ignored. The time in the GPX file is always either 07:00, 08:00, 19:00 or 20:00, depending on daylight saving time. (Side note, I’ve never been able to make rhyme or reason out of why it uses 7:00 sometimes and 19:00 other times – if anyone knows, let me know because I’m curious). But when logging with a mobile app, geocaching.com stores the time that the log was entered. That time is represented in the GPX file using the GMT time zone, and as far as I can tell, it represents the time you logged the find, as if you were logging from the Pacific time zone, e.g. if logging at 9:00PM Eastern, the date stored is 9:00PM Pacific, converted to GMT. That actually makes sense, because if it used your local time zone, statistics programs such as CacheStats would have no definitive way of knowing what time zone you logged it from since the time in the GPX file always uses GMT. Bottom line, since CacheStats has been around longer than the iPhone app, it wasn’t doing any time zone translation, but now it is. If you notice any incorrect dates for your logs, please let me know. I think I’ve got it right, but I’ve had to make educated guesses as to what Groundspeak is actually storing for logs via mobile apps.

In this release, I added the ability to send tweets to your Twitter followers, directly from within CacheStats. There are several ways to send a tweet…

First, each time you load a new GPX file, CacheStats presents you with a summary of your activity since your previous My Finds query. To send a tweet with that summary information, just click on the link in CacheStats:

When you click the link, the default message will read something like this:

Over the past 104 days I've cached 7 days and found 25 caches with average D/T = 1.94/2.06. On pace for 74 this year.

CacheStats will let you modify the message before sending it out.

Another way to send a tweet is from the Caches tab where you can send a tweet for an individual cache:

When you click on the link the default message will be “Found Geocache: [name of cache]. [URL of cache]. That in itself is a pretty dull message. I encourage you to add a few words about the cache to promote it. My hope is that people will use this feature to point out interesting caches they’ve found.

Finally, if you just want to send a random tweet, you can click the “Send a tweet” button found at the bottom of the main CacheStats window.

For now, I only added the ability to send tweets, not the ability to read your twitter feed. I’ll wait and see how popular this feature becomes before adding more to it. If you’d like to see more support for Twitter features, be sure to let me know.

Here’s the difficulty/terrain grid. Notice numbers are now underlined indicating they are clickable. When you click on a number, it will take you to the appropriate spot in your cache list on the caches tab.

The calendar grid is similar - click on a specific day to show all caches found on that day. Or click on a month total to see all caches for that month.

Besides the D/T and Calendar grids, many of the lists (such as milestones and geocache size and type) are now navigable too. For example here’s a screenshot of the Cache Type list:

Finally, many of the dates that are shown on the statistics page will take you to the caches for that date:

If you enjoy reviewing your past accomplishments and recalling what happened when, I think you’ll like this new feature. One other feature in this release, you can now sort your location list (i.e. states and countries) by order found, number found, or alphabetically. As usual, to upgrade, just download from the CacheStats website and start the installation. Your previous version will automatically be uninstalled.

Geocaching.com recently made a subtle change to the way dates and times are stored in GPX files. They are now stored using UTC format, or Coordinated Universal Time (the same time zone as Greenwich Mean Time). Because of this change, some of your found dates reported in CacheStats may be off by one day. This update provides a fix for that. But not all users are affected – it actually depends on your time zone. Read on if you want to know the gory details.

Dates and times in the old GPX file format didn’t specify any time zone, so CacheStats simply reported whatever date was saved in the GPX file as the date you found the geocache. But when the log dates changed to the UTC time zone (London for example), CacheStats automatically translated the date and time of the log to your local time zone. OK, so what? Turns out almost all of the log dates stored in a GPX file are either 07:00 or 19:00, not the actual time of day they were logged. So let’s say you live in eastern Australia, which is UTC plus 10 hours. Logs that have a timestamp of 07:00 were translated to 17:00 (07:00 in London = 17:00 in Australia). These logs posed no problem for CacheStats since the date was the same either way. But the logs that have a timestamp of 19:00 were translated to 05:00 the next day. Bottom line, the farther away from London you live, the more likely you are to encounter a problem. If you’re within 7:00 hours west of UTC (most of the United States) or within 5 hours east of UTC, you shouldn’t have any problems and there is no reason for you to download this update (this fix is the only change in the update). As my chemistry teacher used to say, “clear as mud, right?”. If you need the update, you can download it at the CacheStats web page. Simply download and reinstall – the previous version will automatically be uninstalled.

The most notable feature in this release is a calendar grid that shows your number of finds for each day of the year. You can choose to show each year individually or all years combined. Need another excuse to get out geocaching? Probably not, but if you’re one who can't stand those open squares in your grid, you’ll feel an extra tug to get out the door when you see you’ve never been caching on a particular day.

The other features you may notice are a couple of improvements to the difficulty/terrain grid: completed squares are now shaded (using the same color that you choose for your profile), and totals are shown for each row and column. Graphic design is definitely not my strong point, but hopefully this extra splash of color improves the look a little bit.

Other changes in this release include:

1. If your oldest cache found has been archived, it also shows the oldest active cache you've found

2. Fix a problem when counting streaks due to non-standard log dates in the GPX file

3. Increase default height of the main window if the screen resolution supports it

4. Minor cosmetic changes, including fixing a longest streak count which was getting truncated at 3 digits

5. Better support for the Mono environment, which allows CacheStats to run under Mac and Linux (see the FAQ for more information).

To upgrade to this release, download from the CacheStats website and run the installation program. Your previous version will be replaced so there is no need to uninstall it first.

Happy caching!

A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?

OK, it’s not a real puzzle. It’s from the Car Talk website. I can just hear Tom and Ray yuking it up over this one.

But wait! Maybe there really are geocache coordinates hidden here. Maybe I just need to take all the digits mentioned, assign each of those a letter and use that as the key to a Vigenère cipher to decipher the text of the puzzle which will yield a Morse code pattern when spelled out on the buttons of a phone where an odd digit represents a dash and and even represents a dot. Then once I have the Morse code decoded it will tell me to look up all the number one hit singles from 1972 and take the 4th letter from each one. Using those letters...OK, now it’s just getting silly.

Aren’t puzzle caches fun ;-)

"Haven't we been here before?" As I approach my 5th anniversary of geocaching, I find myself asking that as new caches are created to take place of archived caches. Often I have a vague recollection of the area, but can't remember which cache used to be there. It used to be that the maps at geocaching.com would show archived caches, but they removed that feature a couple of years ago. I was sad to see that feature go because I used it to refresh my memory as to when we were previously in that area. This release has a new feature that partially addresses the issue. You can now show all caches (that you have found) that are nearby any given cache, even archived caches. Here's how it works.

First, in the cache list, select the cache you would like to find nearby caches for. For this example, I’ll select a cache called Hospital View:

Then select how far away you want to search, and click Show:

When you click show, the cache list will update to show the caches that are within the given distance of the selected cache, regardless of whether they are archived or not. When you click on those caches, CacheStats displays the distance away from the original cache in the cache description area. In this example, I had previously found a cache (now archived) just 1/10 of a mile away from the Hospital View cache:

When you're done, click Cancel to display the full list again.

This feature can also be used to explore cache density. For example, pick a cache in a cache-rich area and see how many caches you've found within a mile of it.

Remember, your GPX pocket query only contains caches that you've found, so CacheStats can't show you nearby caches that you haven't found yet. Too bad, because the other situation I run into is that caches that I thought were in an area are no longer there when I'm ready to go look for them. I like to know if it got archived recently, and if so, why? Unless you can remember the name, there's no way to know. Hopefully at some point geocaching.com will bring back the capability to show archived caches.

Another new feature in this release which you may have noticed in the first screenshot above: the cache list now shows type icons next to the cache name (e.g. traditional, multi, event, etc.)

Finally, I added a new blogger, TripCyclone, to the list of blogs to choose from on the news and status page. If you know of any bloggers who write frequent articles that are of general interest, let me know and I can include them in the next release.

Hope you enjoy the new feature.

With these settings, I can see whose caches I’ve had to log the most DNFs on (Did Not Find it logs). One caveat about DNFs: geocaching.com only includes the caches you have found in the my finds pocket query. So any caches that you’ve logged a DNF on but haven’t found yet won’t be included. You can easily think of other interesting combinations:

• FTFs (First To Find) grouped by status (see which of your FTFs have been archived)

• DNFs grouped by difficulty

• DNFs grouped by size (any surprise that Micros is at the top of my list?)

In the same manner, you can also combine grouping with search. I previously suggested some interesting items to search on, for example weather-related terms. So if I search on “rain” while grouping by month, guess what? No mentions of rain in December or January, but plenty in the summer months. No big surprise of course. But you might run into a few surprises too. I searched for “bike” and grouped by terrain. The highest terrain that we biked on was a 3.5 believe it or not.

Give it a try, especially if you like to stroll down memory lane. You might find some interesting facts about your finds.

• Weather conditions: rain, pouring, freezing, sunny, beautiful day, windy, cold, hot, humid

• Animals and insects: deer, dog, mosquito, ticks

• Scenery: beautiful, great view, steep

• Cache condition and contents: wet, soaked, open, TB, McToy

• Access mode: bike, hike, jog

So here are some stats from searching our logs. Out of 616 caches found:

• Deer is mentioned 4 times, but mosquito is mentioned 24 times. There are a lot of deer in SE Wisconsin, but the mosquito is the unofficial state bird (as I’m sure it is in many other states as well), so this isn’t surprising.

• Sunny is mentioned 12 times, but rain is mentioned 45 times. But I think most of the mentions of rain are something like “decided to go geocaching after the rain stopped”. (We don’t do much caching in the rain).

• View is mentioned 13 times, dark is mentioned 12 times. I’m guessing that view and dark are never mentioned together in the same log ;-).

• Bike is mentioned 48 times. Geocaching definitely motivates me to get on my bike more than I would otherwise. Jog is mentioned 0 times. I’m clearly not into jogging.

• TFTC is mentioned 483 times. I wonder what it was about the other 133 that we didn’t include it? Oh wait, we mention thanks 79 times, so overall we have thanked almost every cache owner.

So what words or phrases can you think of to search for in your logs? Do your searches reveal anything interesting? Feel free to post your comments here.

General

• New user interface has 3 main tabs: news & status, statistics and caches found list

• News page shows feeds from various geocaching blogs and geocaching forums

• Can now load the zip file from the pocket query (extraction of gpx file isn't required)

• Difficulty/Terrain combinations grid

Cache List Enhancements

• Group by a variety of categories, e.g. show caches grouped by owner, by month found, by difficulty, etc. Sort the groups alphabetically or by size of group.

• Show all logs types (found-it, DNF, note), including the log-type icons (e.g. smiley)

• Search names, logs, description for specific text

• Show cache description as html or plain text

• Move identification of FTFs to cache listing tab to make it a more straightforward process

• Filter cache list to show: FTFs, caches with multiple finds, caches with DNF logs

• Link to Google map showing cache location

• Navigate to owner's profile from cache description

Enhancements when new GPX File is Detected

• Now shows comparison information on the news and status page instead of a new window

• Show caches that were archived (if any) since last pocket query

• Show average difficulty and terrain of caches found since last pocket query

HTML Output Enhancements

• Display non-English characters (e.g. umlaut) correctly

• Show dates for most in day, most in month, etc.

• Ability to open the profile editing page from the copy to clipboard confirmation dialog

• Show Washington D.C. in US map

• Show Canadian provinces in their own section instead of in "other states"

• Show number of finds for each state and country in the locations list

I think that's most of them. There were several features that I wanted to include that didn't make it into this release due to time constraints. Hopefully it won't take me as long to get the next release out. If you've got ideas for new features, feel free to post them here or send an email.