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Letterboxing
September 08th, 2017
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My friends got into letterboxing a few years back. It's a hobby that
combines treasure hunting with crafting. If you're familiar with
geocaching, it's the same thing but without a GPS. For those not familiar,
you follow clues like a scavenger hunt in order to locate a hidden box
somewhere which contains a stamp and logbook. You stamp your own logbook
with the one in the box and you stamp the box's logbook with your own
stamp to claim that you found it. It's a nice little hobby, and something
I will introduce my son to in the near future as a way to add a bit of
activity to hiking.

I want to develop a series of letterboxes based around historic
cryptographic techniques like rotation cyphers to straddling checkerboards
and the VIC cypher. My plan is to carve individual stamps that need to be
layered on top of one another to reveal a QR code once you have found them
all. The QR code could then lead to a final hunt for a master box, or
maybe some other special treat.

As I tell the developers on my team and the jr folks around the company,
a good idea is only worth 1%. It's the dedication and follow through that
make up the other 99% of any endeavor. I don't know if I'll ever get
around to building my crypto-box series or not. If you read this and do it
instead, more power to you. Let me know so I can attempt to find the
letterboxes myself.
.