TeamHoopz

It's unlikely that the Garmin upload facility will be compatible with your brand of GPSr. Also, the LOC download contains very limited information. The GPX download is much more detailed, and well worth the premium membership if you use it regularly.

My take on the rules is this: -Log as many coins as you like through the regular method. -Enter your details once on the competition page (I don't think it would actually matter too much if you were to enter your details more than once there, as they will have the record of the GC account name, and will probably filter out multiple entries - I wouldn't take the risk though ). I think what they're really looking out for is multiple GC account names registered under the same address. So if you were to set up several new GC usernames and register them on the competition page with the same address, they will disqualify you. I suspect that they will pick a winner from the entries, and then check to see if there are any other usernames with the same address. If there are matching addresses, then the entry will be disqualified, and they will pick another entry. I would therefore recommend that families who have multiple GC accounts (ie one for the dad, one for the mum, one for a child, etc) think twice before each registering there competition entries - particularly if you've convinced your spouse/brother/etc to set up a new account just to enter the competition. Common sense dictates that if the accounts are all very active, then they'll still accept the entry, but who knows!

St. Pauls ran out of coins yesterday. The girl there told me that they weren't sure whether they were getting any more. It's possible that Blacks underestimated the popularity, and perhaps each store will only get one delivery. Maybe the next batch of coins will be released to stores that haven't already received deliveries. It's also possible that she didn't know what she was talking about Annoyingly, they also don't sell the Oregon 300 which is a bit stupid since that's one of the products being promoted.

I'm at St. Pauls again today, so I'll see what I can find out.

At a guess, I would say that London Eye will be out over the next couple of days, followed by Angel of the North a week later. Promotion runs August 7th to September 30th Big Ben - 7th August London Eye - 15th August Angel of the North - 22nd August Clifton Bridge - 28th August Stone Henge - 4th September Leaving just over 3 weeks for the promotion to run after all coins are released. This is all purely a guess, but it makes sense based on the dates they quoted. And as Midnight Ramblers said, the initials are very coincidental, so it's a possibility that may be the order they are releasing.

I can see that Garmin won't be doing something like this again in a hurry. Whatever the rules say, can people not respect the obvious wishes of the organisers - to have these coins released into geocaches. :rant over:

Hi Paul & Ros. I did your Sel-by dates cache a while back - very nice walk! I haven't got a spare one, but did release one on Sunday in Cawood which hopefully you'll be able to get your hands on. I very, very nearly released it into Sel-by dates, but because there's not been much activity there lately, I chose another nearby one. Sorry 'bout that I hope you manage to get one though. Monks Cross I think are on the list of participating stores - have you tried there?

But you do not have to log in when you fill in the competition entry form, just complete your details. This means I could increase my own chances of winning by registering spurious competition entries from everyone else and voiding their genuine entry? Hmmmm.... I think they're looking out for people who set up multiple Geocaching.com usernames (particularly with the same address) in order to register more than one entry. I suspect that there would be no harm in entering multiple times with the same GC username - but I bet you still only get one entry. I'm unsure how they would manage this with members of the same family (with different GC names) registering multiple times. I guess that if there is one entry for a very active account, and another entry (with the same address) for a brand new account that only has activity relating to the coin, then they will void the entries. Not the easiest thing to manage, but would you take the risk after reading the warning? With regards to whether coins should be released. Quite simply, if Garmin release 2000 geocoins, and only 200 of them actually go out in to the wild, then I doubt very much Garmin would do something like this again. I would love to keep mine as a collectors item, but then I would love to see more promotions like this too. As a result, I released mine about 130 miles away from me over the weekend. If it ever travels back to me, I might keep it, but by that time it would have served it's promotional purposes. I just hope I can convince others, so that we can see more things like this in the future.

A USB to Serial converter will act like a serial port. A virtual serial port will be created, and assigned a COM port number. I think mine is COM4, but you'll need to check. Look in device manager: Right click My Computer, click Properties, click Hardware tab, click Device Manager button. Once in Device Manager, expand ports and have a look at the information there. When sending to the GPSr, select Serial, and choose the correct COM port. I haven't used Cachemagnet yet, so don't know exactly how you set it up in there, but just make sure it's serial. Sounds like interesting software, I will defintitely be looking soon. Chad

HTC TyTn II I use it all the time - it's much better than my Garmin for GPS, and saves me a ton of paper You'll need some GPS software for it - I use TomTom Navigator. The only time that's not great is when you're caching near to a road as the TomTom will 'snap' to the road. However, worst case, you can view the GPS coords, and navigate from that.

I'm very new to geocaching, and am not fully aware of what's out there, but here's what I use: Geocaching.com with Premium Membership GSAK on my computer GPXSonar and TomTom Navigator on my HTC TyTn II The tytn2 is a windows mobile PDA (it's actually my work phone). It has a fair sized screen, slideout/tilt keypad, touch screen with stylus, and a very good GPS receiver all built in (it knocks the socks off of my Garmin). Also comes with wireless and bluetooth as standard (well, mine does anyway). Before getting my premium account, GSAK and GPXSonar, I would waste 30 odd sheets of paper on a caching day. Now I just take a small notebook (or scrap of paper) for multicaches/puzzle caches that need me to take notes while I'm out. I could just type them in the phone, but it's not so good if the weather's bad. The only drawback with the device is that it wouldn't survive a dunk in a river - seems to handle light rain OK though

It's possible to stop most robots from crawling your website by creating a file called robots.txt in the root of the site. Using certain command in the file, you can tell the robots what they are/aren't allowed to look at. It's not going to stop all of them, but any that adhere to the robots.txt file (most of the major search engines) will be stopped. I'm sure the web guys already know this, but I thought I'd share with everyone else

Hi all, I did email Groundspeak regarding this, but somebody advised that I might be better off posting here for a quicker resolution. Yesterday evening I purchased a subscription via Paypal and activated it on my account. For at least an hour or two, I was able to use the new premium member features. However, shortly afterwards (probably about 3 or 4 hours after activating it), I found that I no longer had access to any of the premium feature. If I go to My Details -> My Membership Details, I see the following text at the top of the screen: My Membership Details Type: Premium Member Created: Friday, January 04, 2008 Will Renew: Friday, January 04, 2008 PayPal: (The creation and renewal date are the same for some reason) However, if I click on Quick View, then it shows that I am a basic member. I tried to re activate the subscription, but was told that it had already been activated. Any assistance would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. Chad

Cheers - nice to be here! For your media center problem, have you come across thegreenbutton.com - they have a ton of resources related to MCE. I've been having a mess around with registry settings for the plugin (located at HKCU\Software\Garmin) - funnily enough, I've managed to get it to ignore the serial ports, but I can't get it to ignore the removable media. I assume that with some of the more advanced units, there is a media slot that allows you to transfer data between the device and PC via that method, and therefore the removable media drives are valid Garmin devices (technically speaking!). I've also been having a look at the developer pages for the plug in, and it would appear that the plug in has not been utilised to it's full potential. From what I can tell, when clicking Send To GPS (on the popup window), the FindDevices function is called, and the data is then sent to the first device in the list. There doesn't seem to be any utilisation of the SetDeviceNumber function which would allow us to choose which device to send to. I'm not sure whether this was by design, or whether it was a bug that was overlooked due to the fact that it probably only affects a very small number of people. However, I'm with you on the saving to .gpx option - unfortunately, my premium membership seems to have gone belly up. I bought a subscription last night, activated it, checked out all the new features for a couple of hours, and now I'm a basic member again . On the member features page it says I am a premium member, I purchased my membership 4th Jan 2008, and that my membership will auto renew on 4th Jan 2008 . I've emailed Groundspeak, so hopefully they'll fix my account shortly - in the meantime, I'll have to make do with the not so good methods of getting data out The annoying thing is that I'd planned to do a members only cache this weekend, and now can't get the details . I'm very new to Geocaching, but absolutely loving it! In fact, I would say that I am currently obsessed with it - hopefully that will wear off shortly Regards, Chad

I've got the same problem as the original poster. I have a Sony laptop with a memory stick slot and a media slot. If I disable both of these in Device Manager then it works fine. I'm trying to find a work around for this, and will let you know if I can get anywhere - not sure that it's possible though unless Garmin rewrite the dll file to ignore removable media.