Today, I went out to find a mystery cache for the #geocaching Pi Day souvenir. The easiest one to find was at the New Castle Court House Museum. The last time I attempted this cache, the museum was closed. Had no trouble this afternoon. The museum is a historic attraction in this area and there are hourly tours of the court house.

After the museum visit, I still had a lot of daylight left so I decided to go for 2 more mystery caches to get the next tier of the Pi Day souvenir. I headed over to the northern part of Middletown, where there were two easy mystery caches within a mile of each other. All in all, it was an enjoyable Sunday excursion.

I finished Advent of Code 2025 earlier this month. I probably did not have to start working on each day's puzzle right when it came out but it was fun staying up to midnight to see if I could solve the puzzle before I fell asleep.

I thought most of the puzzles had fairly straightforward solutions but maybe I had the advantage of extensive experience at Codewars, another website with programming challenges / puzzles. The exception was Part Two of Day 10. I tried several approaches but that one stumped me. I set it aside. An hour later, I got the idea of reframing the problem as a system of linear equations. Then I dug around in the numpy & scipy documentation for a suitable algorithm and came up with a one-library-call solution that, of course, was simple and obvious in hindsight.

The year that was:

Attended 12 geocaching events and 3 Munzee events in 2025. That's more than I did in 2024. It's nice that there is a thriving local community and more nearby events for these games.

No Flagstack events because unfortunately, that game had been dying for a while and ended in April. But the concept of outdoor GPS games lives on.

Om the personal projects side, I finally found the time to learn Jetpack Compose and rewrite the Flutter app that I had been using on my tablet. There had been a 6-year gap in development, long enough to make it quite outdated and generate warnings every time I reinstalled it. Can't open source it yet for reasons but maybe in the future.

Since Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS was recently released, I decided to boot into that from a USB flash drive to see if the new COSMIC desktop is good enough for me to upgrade my daily driver laptop.

It appears to already work pretty well with my hardware and peripherals. Customization options are decent. The only reason I would wait a while before upgrading is within 15 minutes after I started to use it, the Applications menu stopped working. Not a showstopper because I use the Launcher more anyway, but there's no hurry to jump into this.

Realized today that I am within the age range for which the shingles vaccination is recommended, so I went and got the first dose this afternoon. Also figured I might as well use the health insurance while I still have that going.

It's been an hour and I didn't turn into a shingle yet. So far so good. LOL

It was a good weekend.

Friday was the first day the geocaching Adventure Day 2025 souvenir was available. To get the souvenir, one had to log 5 Adventure Lab locations. Conveniently, there was a set of 5 new lab locations near the Wilmington Airport only a few miles from home. I stopped at the Dash In across the road from the airport, answered 5 questions, and got the souvenir.

On Saturday, I attended the "Halloween in NJ" munzee event ( https://calendar.munzee.com/event1759499743 ) in Woodstown. It wasn't a big event -- only 6 attendees -- but still, there were a lot of Munzees to capture, including an event trail and 2 bouncing virtual gardens.

I'm sad that the owners of Codewars have decided to start selling our kata solutions to AI labs for use as training data. I've been on Codewars for 11 years (although I did leave the site for a few years along the way because of reasons) and it seemed like one of the more reliable / well-moderated platforms for coding puzzles. But okay, I accept that was bound to happen given the current state of the software industry and I had fun while it lasted.

https://www.codewars.com/post/the-future-of-codewars-a-message-from-our-ceo