paleolith

Anything that depends on sticky isn't going to hold for long. Edward

My town is organizing a "Super Clean Sweep" event this Saturday -- lots of outdoor cleanup activities all over town. Many neighborhoods, including mine, are participating. I'm concerned (mildly) that this level of attention to details in a wooded park area has the potential to compromise the caches in the park. What approaches have others used in this situation? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? I don't recall noticing any trash near any of the caches, so perhaps the areas near them won't get much attention anyway. I've considered disabling the more vulnerable caches and removing them for the day. I've also considered adding highly visible ID for the day. There are ten caches listed in the chain of parks in my neighborhood. I own seven, and I maintain three placed by the city's Parks and Recreation department. One of the latter is currently missing and disabled anyway -- I'm letting it cool down before replacing it. Of the nine in place, I have minimal concern about three -- they are hidden in places that trash-seekers just aren't likely to look. Of the other six, three are ammo cans, two of them (mine) chained to trees and all with good ID on the outside. (The city P&R caches have their own custom stickers, though they are rather understated compared with the GS stickers.) The other three (mine) are micros -- camo-ed matchsafes in two cases -- with ID inside. Thoughts? Edward

I'll be the party pooper. I used NiMH batteries for a while and gave up on them. I had Maha batteries and charger, which are supposed to be good. I treated them according to directions. But within a couple of years, they wouldn't take enough of a charge to turn on the GPSr, and a GPSr tends to be one of the more low-voltage-tolerant devices. Also, although my GPSr is tolerant of the lower voltage of NiMH cells (1.2V instead of the 1.5V-1.6V of alkaline cells), some other devices are not so tolerant. Lighting devices tend to put out less light at the lower voltage. I had one medical device which just flat out refused to use the rechargeable, though I blame the maker of the device rather than the batteries. I'm back to alkalines and happy. If I look around and exercise a little patience, I can find AA batteries for 20 cents apiece. (Lowe's sells a box of 100 AA batteries for $20, though I've had trouble with my local store being out of stock.) They work in my GPSr, both my cameras, and a couple of other devices I can't remember at the moment. As for "batteries running out", a pair of spare alkalines costs about 50 cents, and a six-pack about $3 -- what's the comparable cost for NiMH? AA alkaline cells are light enough that I don't mind carrying several spares when I'm hiking. They contain no hazardous materials, and nothing valuable except the energy. Some places claim to recycle them, but the last time I looked there was no market and they probably went to the landfill anyway -- where they are one of the less dangerous items tossed. Many communities tell you just to put them in the garbage. Lithium ion batteries may eventually convert me. But you can't substitute a lithium ion battery for an alkaline or NiMH. In the mean time, I find alkaline batteries far more convenient. I don't have to remember to charge them or worry about when to charge them. If one goes bad, I toss it and forget it. Less hassle. For me, obviously many find the opposite. Edward

Not to mention that Google has been one of the largest providers of Free Stuff on the net, if not the largest. And they've done it by serving up relatively unobtrusive ads that don't disrupt my experience on the web. I too don't agree with all their practices and I have a lot of concern about the effects of the near-monopoly situation, yet greedy isn't the word that comes to my mind when I think of Google. Edward

And as has been repeatedly pointed out in this thread, that's quite inconvenient. Generally I want to look at the road map first and then maybe switch to see the imagery. When I've got the imagery, I usually want to check where the other caches in the area are. So yes, there are workarounds. But geocaching is a game. Force us into a lot of workarounds and it's no longer fun. Edward

[...] The popularity of location-based utilities (like the geocaching website) and mobile apps (tablets and smart phones) is really, really bad news for us all. [...] One by one, every free map service has been utterly crushed into non-existence by user demand. [...] The "everything free all the time" model is not sustainable. It never was. Thanks for the followup and additional info. I'm not surprised that I was predicting what was already happening. Such a prediction wasn't exactly rocket science. Still, it's always reassuring to find one's predictions verified so quickly. I've always disliked the "everything free" model. Of course it was never free, it was mostly advertising-supported, the few exceptions being small sites supported by one or two people, Wikipedia supported by donations, some subscription sites, and the like. Even free software is skewed by this. It's not quite so obvious that the browser you are reading this in is advertising-supported, but it is -- every time you send a search to Google via the search box/function in the browser, the browser's producer gets a kickback from Google (or whichever other search engine you used). Is it any accident that in most browsers it's difficult to disable the moving images, flash, etc which are mostly used for advertising? In how many even more subtle ways is the browser operation affected by the fact that it's advertising-supported? (And yes, even the Firefox project, while open source, rakes in a lot of money from the kickbacks.) As to the nature of the news of the crunch on location-based utilities ... well, I'd say it's good news and bad news. Yes, it's bad news because we have to change and might even have to pay an additional $10/year over the $30/year that we've been paying for, what, well, longer than the five years I've been paying it. (Assumptions regarding this $10 calculation were in my previous post.) The good news, though, is that the services are charging for what they provide and thus can build out their infrastructure to meet demand. Or to put it another way, when we didn't pay anything, we were getting more than we paid for, but often less than we wanted or needed. Now we have a chance to get what we pay for, and possibly what we want and need, in a market where competition works pretty well (which isn't true in all markets). So please, providers of all sorts: CHARGE ME for what I use. And then provide what I need and want. Edward

I just tried looking at a cache that was published this morning. It's next to a lake, so I definitely wanted the aerial view. About half the view loaded before it gave up at three minutes. I reloaded and tried again, and this time got about 2/3 of the map loaded in aerial view. Six minutes and I still don't have a single complete aerial view. I don't like to throw around the phrases "totally unacceptable" and "totally unusable", but the current situation does warrant those descriptions. Groundspeak, you investigated the alternatives. That's good. What was your after-implementation monitoring plan? What was your fallback plan in case the new maps proved unusable, as has turned out to be the case for many of us? Edward

MUCH poorer image quality on aerial photos. Only half the zoom, and even at that point not even close in quality. I'd say the resolution is barely a tenth of the GM images, certainly not more than a fifth, in each dimension. This is very serious for the places I go caching. And those much poorer images are loading very slowly and unreliably. So while I wouldn't call the maps overall horrid, I think that horrid is a pretty accurate description of the aerial images. While I'm glad GS investigated, I personally would rather pay an additional $10/year for better aerials. (I'm assuming 300,000 PMs and the calculated cost of $3 million in new costs. We of course don't actually know how many PMs there are.) There's also the question of how long these other services will be free. They aren't selling any advertising on the GS pages. I'm certain that Google knows it has competitors, and I expect they priced their service to undercut anyone else who is charging enough to make a living. And with Google charging for map loads, the other services will be hit with all the freeloaders like GS dumping Google for the next free service in line. How long before GS has to change again anyway, running away from paying for services? My guess is that within a year or two, there won't be any free service for this purpose which even comes close to being acceptable. GS has gone to all this work only to postpone the inevitable. Servers and bandwidth cost a lot of money, and someone pays for them or they go dark. Edward

Three Native American women are sitting on animal skins on the ground. The first is sitting on a deer skin. She has a son who weighs 140 pounds. The second is sitting on a buffalo skin. She has a son who weighs 160 pounds. The third is sitting on a hippopotamus skin. She weighs 300 pounds. This is an example of the well known fact from geometry, that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides. Edward (yes, was a math major)

It's also possible to write a rather positive NA log, something like: This is a great spot and I'll be delighted if the owner gets it up and running again. However, since there's been no cache to find for at least seven years, I think it's time to start the clock running. The only objection I've ever received to a NA log was from a hider whose cache "log" was an old wrecked automobile along a trail, and who had provided the implements for the graffiti. The CO didn't like being told this violated guidelines. Apparently the reviewer was satisfied with a log book being added even though it was obvious that the graffiti materials were still present. I haven't had a chance to go back and look. Edward

I suspect that this is intentional. As has been discussed ad nauseum, GS is very reluctant to make it easier to obtain coordinates for archived caches, since many times they were archived due to land owner/manager request. Unpaid members can get LOC files whereas GPX is only for paid members, so GS can at least say the information is restricted to members about whom they have more contact information. Perhaps it would be more productive to look for other ways to achieve your goal, since I think you're tilting at windmills asking for GS to make it easier to get info on archived caches. For example, would it be possible to compile a list of all the eligible caches into a GSAK database? How many caches are eligible? Once that's done, you could add caches as necessary one at a time, generally because someone posted a list containing archived caches. Over time, your list would include most of the archived caches. You can "get recent logs" using GSAK direct access with no limits on total number (just throttled), so you can update the logs for your DB as often as you need to. A GSAK macro could then run and determine eligibility. In fact, it could even tell you who is eligible and probably doesn't even know it. Edward

I think most of us find that having the log date carry from one log to the next is helpful. This has long worked at least as long as the browser isn't closed. I haven't logged any finds in a couple of weeks; perhaps the mechanism has been expanded, perhaps by making the cookie more persistent? Just guessing. I certainly would be unhappy if every time I opened the log post page, it reverted to the current date. NM logs are always forced to the current date. Edward

All sounds like good moves at first glance. I'd still be interested in hearing a bit more of the reasons. Edward

I've read a lot of posts complaining about a perceived intent to restrict cache placement by new guidelines on safety. I think this concern is misplaced for at least two reasons. First, the best suggestion made has been to facilitate user-to-user communication via a safety forum. This would be explicitly for the purpose of educating and helping one another on safety issues, not (at least as I perceive it) to advocate for rules. Second, I find it highly unlikely that GS would implement any safety rules. Ironically, such rules could expose them to more liability. As it stands, GS says that the CO owns the cache and is fully responsible for it. If GS added safety rules, they could be liable for any lapse in the application of those rules. I'vw read a lot of posts about how an alert cacher (often the writer) would have foreseen the danger in this cache. Yet all of these constitute 20/20 hindsight. In fact the CO and thirty-some seekers didn't foresee the danger. These included cachers with a lot of experience. Why the discrepancy? Is it totally being misled by hindsight? That's a strong phenomenon, but it's also true that some people have a much better ability to predict what's up ahead, some naturally, some by training, some both. How do those with that ability share it with others? How do we persuade others to listen, and then what techniques do we use to share those abilities? How do we turn hindsight into foresight? The experience of safety experts says that's a very difficult task. Those complex sorts of questions are why I continue to think Snoogans' proposal is worth a shot. It's a proposal for an open and cooperative system, based on education and sharing rather than on rules and guidelines. Discussion can involve talk about trade-offs: what risks do we take to enjoy life, and why? I've taken many risks, the most serious involving being alone in isolated places. What were the risks? What were the benefits? Benefits can include having fun, better health, less stress, and probably others that I haven't thought of. Discussion safety involves discussing risks, benefits, probabilities, trade-offs, balancing of risks. Safety begins at home. Safety begins with the individual understanding the nature of risks and benefits. Rules don't convey that understanding. Communication is the only way to get there. Communication, personal knowledge, and understanding do help decrease danger while increasing benefits at the same time. Edward

So sad. I do like Snoogans' idea of a place to discuss safety. Would it attain critical mass -- enough to keep discussions snowballing instead of dying out? I don't know, but it seems worth a try. (And Snoogans has made some of the most cogent and informed posts in this thread.) I'm far more leery of t3.5 urban caches than of t3.5 backwoods caches, because the t3.5 tends to mean something different. I've found many t3.5+ caches, and only a couple had any exposure at all. One of them I probably shouldn't have done, at least not by the direct route. Even that one probably wouldn't have killed me if I'd fallen, unless I'd hit my head on a rock, of which there were plenty. Backwoods t3.5+ caches are usually rated thus because reaching them requires a strenuous hike. (Or in the case of 4x4 caches, a difficult drive.) Urban t3.5+ caches either require a short but difficult move, or include exposure. This one at first appeared to be in the last category, though the images posted later indicate that there wasn't really much exposure except for the missing piece of grille which one was supposed to stop short of, and that quite possibly it was overrated at t3.5 -- and yet the exposure was significant because of the missing grille. I could suggest a separate attribure or rating for exposure. But for the reasons other have presented, I don't think it would add much. I think a cache with significant exposure should make that very clear in the description, and I have to say that I don't think the description of this cache made that clear. But would that have made any difference? Would it have made this death any less likely? I don't know. Can't say. Still, I do think the CO should have described the exposure, since the terrain rating alone isn't that specific, but I'm not willing to say the lack of that description contributed to the tragic death. It would be great if coordinates were only revealed to those who understand any dangers involved. I don't see any way to do that, nor do I think it would have much effect. And where would you draw the line? Would risk of contracting poison ivy/oak count? Only risk of death? If so, would risk of death from heart attack on a strenuous hike count? Recently someone posted about being attacked by yellowjackets while seeking one of my caches. I added a boldface note at the top of the description. I suppose I could have disabled it for a while, but yellowjackets are fickle and may never attack again. Some twelve years ago, I took several hikes in the Arc Dome Wilderness. After that trip, I wrote Suppose I'd made the wrong choice, and suppose I'd slipped. And suppose I'd been geocaching ... in fact, the spot I describe is only a few meters from the Arc Dome cache. Would that have been called a death while geocaching? I need to go back and find that cache ... This seriously understates the effort required. A few hours of analysis and more than a few hours locating everything that's affected, which includes page layouts as well as database code. A few hours of coding. At least a few dozen hours of testing. Notifying the developers of all geocaching applications, most of which have to be modified -- with additional time from all those developers. (Some time ago GS tried to change "Found it" to "Found It" and had to back off because it broke so many things.) Then manage that coordination and track progress until it's deemed OK to implement the change. Write documentation and monitor comments on the forum. Monitor results after implementation. All in all you are talking a few hundred hours. I express no opinion on whether it should be done or is worth the cost, but this comment very seriously underestimates the cost. Edward

It's totally up to you. Two people finding a cache together and logging it separately does not look "fake" in any way. Happens constantly, both with couples and friends. It sounds like the two of you enjoy writing your own logs, as do many couples, so go with the two accounts (as I see you've decided to do). The cases where it's appropriate to use a single account is when two people (whether a couple or not) always cache together -- neither ever finds a cache without the other -- and at least one doesn't enjoy the logging part and would rather leave it to the other. There are couples who find a few caches separately and log them all in the joint account, which is also totally OK. You already said it's not about the cost, but those who worry about the cost but still want two accounts can have one premium and one regular account. The premium account does the PQs and other things requiring PM status. They find caches together and log them separately. There's a GS-approved workaround for non-premium members to log PMO caches. Edward

GSAK offers a number of printing options. Before I got a PDA, I used the "condensed HTML" output from GSAK. No photos, but a lot less paper than just carrying the cache page printouts. I haven't printed anything in quite a while, so I'm not sure what GSAK offers in the way of printouts with photos. Edward

Also note that there are many kinds of puzzle caches. Clearly what you are looking for is something you can work out at your desk. Many of these are just the traditional kinds of puzzles you'll find in puzzle books or cryptography games. Others involve information hidden on the web page or in images. Still others require you to work them out in the field. Why does "he" want you to provide him with the coordinates after you solve the puzzle? (Is he by any chance having trouble solving this puzzle himself? ) If geocaching is what you're interested in, the usual way to start is by finding some traditional caches rather than puzzle caches. To log a find on a puzzle cache, you still have to find the physical cache and sign the log after solving the puzzle. Edward

I'm been preaching this for some time: yes, there should be a minimum number of finds to hide, but the minimum number should be one. Someone who has found even one cache is a lot more likely to have figured out what a geocache is. (And per examples given in this thread, there should be a way to appeal to the reviewer for a zero-find hide, in cases such as experienced cachers hiding under/behind a group account. If someone knows the process well enough to appeal to the reviewer, let them hide.) I don't know that it needs to be ascribed to ulterior motives. It's just that someone who hasn't found a cache sometimes doesn't understand what a cache is. They have an idea for hiding something and they bend their understand of a geocache to their preconceived notion instead of the other way around. I've seen a three-part cache listed as a multi by a no-find hider. (On NPS land, but a one-find rule would not stop that.) Coordinates in the middle of a beach or in thick chaparral -- a one-find rule would not eliminate that but would cut way down on the ones I've seen. Hiders who never check back with gc.com and apparently gave spurious or one-time-use email addresses -- far more common with zero-find hiders than with single-digit-find hiders. It's not perfect but it would cut down on a certain type of problem. I agree that there's no good reason to believe that a minimum larger than one would help on the average. Edward

One reason this is a conflict is because gc.com has no way to distinguish hider from current owner, much less to keep links to all historical owners. (I know of one cache which is on its fourth owner, although in that case all adopters found it before adopting it.) So you hide a cache, it's a good one and a lot of people like it, you move and have someone else adopt it. It no longer shows up in your profile -- if you let it be archived then it's still in your profile, but if you try to keep it going by adopting it out then you lose all links to it! So one way logging a find is a way to keep a link from your record to a cache which you hid. Edward

Nalgene bottles are polycarbonate (PC), which will hold up in sunlight. Some others, like the Fuel Belt pictured in one of the posts, are low density polyethylene (LDPE) and will deteriorate in sunlight. The caps on Nalgene bottles are PE but seem to be very high density PE and appear to hold up. Only use bottles with a screw top AND a flexible gasket. (OK, a wire bail and a gasket, like ammo cans have, is OK too but I've never seen a water bottle with that feature. Good old Triomphe jar! Too bad no one makes Triomphe-style jars in PC ... they would be great containers.) Without pressure on the gasket, changing air pressure and temperature forces air in and out, and enough moisture gets in that the cache ends up wet inside. I think that all metal water bottles are rust-proof -- either stainless steel or aluminum. Edward

Even most PMs are still capable of learning. Changing the page layout based on something like PM status is confusing. In IT jargon, it's modal. So you'd get things like you try to help someone else and describe something on the screen, like the third tab from the left, and it's not the same on your screen as on theirs. Or someone new decides immediately to sign up for PM status (after all, $30 is just dinner for a lot of people), and the Learn tab disappears just when they need it most. Or you start to get annoyed that the learn tab has reappeared and it takes you a while to figure out that's because you aren't logged in -- the problem there being only the annoyance. So I don't think it should be dropped based on PM status. Perhaps there's a better way to organize the tabs, but making it modal isn't a good idea. Edward

After a recent release, I posted the custom style sheet I use to condense the logs. In the latest release, GS decided to double-space everything -- well, 1-1/2 space, but lots of wasted space. I've updated my style sheet. This version overrides the extra spacing. It also makes text default to black instead of gray. See comments in the code for details. With Opera, you can specify the style sheet as a site preference. In Chrome, you save it in a specific location; it applies to all sites. For the most part the names used by GS mean it will cause no conflicts on other sites. However, the code to make text default to black instead of gray will affect all sites. But if you don't like gray text on gc.com, you probably don't like it anywhere. You can probably do this in FF and IE but I can't tell you how. Edward # CSS for geocaching.com /* Make avatars on logs just totally vanish. I don't know whether this prevents the download. */ .logOwnerAvatar {display:none !important} /* Tighten up the spacing in the log. Readability is not reduced at all, due to the alternating background colors and the bold log type. */ .LogDisplayRight .LogText {min-height: 0 !important; padding-top: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0 !important} /* Try to stop the View Log from taking up a whole line all for itself. This occasionally (perhaps 1 log in 10) causes the View Log to overlap a bit of the log text. If this bothers you, remove this line. The only cost of removing it is a bit of extra space at the bottom of most logs. */ .LogText + .AlignRight {margin-top: -20px !important} /* I also don't care whether the logger is a premium member, and showing that sometimes forces an extra line in the log entry, so don't show it. This is optional and independent of the other specs. */ .logOwnerBadge {display:none !important} /* All the smily faces in the left column confuse me because it's the same image as for the Found It log, so don't show it. But then the counts need to be bolder. This is optional and independent of the other specs. */ .logOwnerStats img {display:none !important} .logOwnerStats {font-weight: bold !important; color:#000000 !important} /* All the following adjustments to text size and color are optional and independent of the other specs. */ /* Make the log date display larger and bolder. */ .LogDate {font-weight: bold !important; font-size: 100% !important; color: #000000 !important} /* Move the log date closer to the log type. */ .LogType {width:20% !important} .LogType + div {width:76% !important; text-align:left !important} /* Well, now it's obvious that the log type is not black either. I'm a man, I can fix that. http://emmanuelfonte.posterous.com/im-a-man-i-can-fix-that */ .LogType {color: #000000 !important} /* and the log text too ... */ .LogText {color: black !important} /* In Dec 2011, gc.com decided to double-space everything. Just say no. */ body {line-height:normal !important} /* Make the text black everywhere a color isn't needed, and especially in short and long description and hint. The fashionable gray text now found all over the web is hard on aging eyes. */ body {color:black !important}

The solution for you is to host the image somewhere else, where you can control exactly what is stored and served. This means not on gc.com, not on Flickr, not on any free service or any place whose primary purpose is to present photos. Your ISP may provide you with a small amount of web space; this would be a good place. While serving your particular image exactly as-is might be reasonable, in general GS has to deal with a huge variety of images, and in the majority of cases the uploader knows little or nothing about optimizing the image for the web. And at least 99.99% of the time, sending the EXIF data to the browser is a waste of bandwidth. So I expect GS to continuing modifying images automatically. Edward

I recently rode my bicycle 70 miles to find one cache. Yeah, that was a good way to run up big numbers. The numbers would be even larger if the US went metric. Edward