Geostick

A geostick is a usb pen used as a cache item while geocaching. It basic idea has been concieved during a geocaching trip by Roelf en Jen founders of Team Cache Dwellers on the 2 mai 2009. Who found a geocoin that triggered the idea.
History.
The idea of a geostick was born thanks to the existence of the currently used geocoins. Although very neat from the idea, it is mostly a commercial by-product of geocaching that in our humble opinion does not do right to the liberal idea of GeoCaching.
Problem.
Being a team sport as much as an individual sport, the individual has less ways to expose him/herself then a team does. Most cache items are therefore either commercial or only produced in a team effort. F.i. the geocoin does not allow for any personal creativity and the idea behind it is commited to a propitiatory system. What we want is a system that offers a great amount of freedom and joy to the individual 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 any more. 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. Therefore we would like to propose the some guidelines.
Guidelines.
The geostick format should consist of a normal fat16 or fat32, which is the current standard for most sticks. It should contain a directory hierarchy 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 and can be followed by a country code like uk for English as in *README.uk*.
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.

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