The Wildleys

Bugger... This just happened to me. Now I'm stuck with "The Wildleys", which no longer makes sense, since (i) now there's just one of me, and (ii) the name is a portmanteau created from both our surnames. Wish I'd known about the May 15 deadline a few months ago, because I could have made the change then. I just didn't think this feature would disappear, so I concentrated on the more important parts of separation first.

We seem to be joining into this discussion a bit late! Well, we had no idea it existed, and neither of us has much time for reading the forums at the moment... Still, it was good to meet everybody! We were actually the last to leave in the end, along with AquaMann and... AquaWife? We've been keeping Shaun in our thoughts this past week, and we're glad to hear he's starting to make a recovery. We hope his progress continues. And sorry we didn't really get to meet you guys before all this happened: we were eating our dinners at the time (Aubergine Stack for the person who asked -- rather nice, I must say). Which leads us on to... Another meeting in January. Why not! We'd certainly do our best to be there again. Simon & Elizabeth The Wildleys (And Lewis the Hedgehog says hi!)

When you drop off a travel bug, when either logging a cache or posting a note, you write your log for the cache page, select the bug(s) to be dropped off, and click "Submit". The problem is that you are never prompted to write a log for the dropped-off travel bug(s). We (The Wildleys) always make sure to return to the TB's log, edit it, and write something interesting for the TB's owner to read. I think we are fairly alone in this respect. It would be nice if, after clicking "Submit" for your cache log, you were prompted to write a log for each of the TBs that you are dropping off. This could be one per page, with a "Next" button, or all on one page. Whatever. The main point is that, at the moment, almost all TB "XXX placed TB in YYY" logs are empty -- and that fulfils only half of the potential fun of owning a bug.

One of the items in the version history for 4.2 is: Added "Log a cache" to default URLs (new install only) I guess it is possible for people who have upgraded an existing version to 4.2 to add this URL to their list of URLs? If so, could you post the string that would need to be added? Thanks!

Let's wait till after the November elections, and then we can reaffirm or reconsider our opinions! ...... Elizabeth, who's not an ex-pat for nothing

I like the idea of teaming up with a local. That sounds like it could be a pretty neat thing. I also support the idea of caches in the vernacular. That is something I love so much about Europe: diverse languages, diverse cultures. Perhaps a solution to the lack of abundant foreign caches is the inverse to English-translation idea: offer main www.geocaching.com pages in "foreign". (Are there corresponding sites to GCUK?) Elizabeth, an American ex-pat

Heh. The whole point, as it were. Reference to the "numbers game" meant for humour's sake, hence the . E

Okay. My next TB shall be a Cadbury's creme egg, and finders can do with it as they see fit. Yes yes, to each his own, no harm done; but it seems MeIsMook and I would be alone in our perspectives. So... remaining curious. Elizabeth (feeling like she's started a fight )

Hey Gang, Does anyone feel similarly to MeIsMook? I tend to agree with those sentiments myself. I think the fun of a bug is leaving it somewhere for another cacher to find. Logging miles via a cache that it can't really go in or stay in seems... vacuous. Giving a bug a little local tour (e.g., Edinburgh) is cool--post pictures, write a log, sure! But miles for the sake of miles... I dunno. Doesn't that just make it "all about the numbers"? (Edit: Elizabeth's opinion. not necessarily Simon's )

You guys might be interested in any replies I might get to this thread.

Are there any GPSrs that offer "profiles"? I'd like a quick (one-button) way to be able to switch between, for example, "Car", "Caching", and "Hiking" profiles, with settings such as: Car - Miles and mph for distance and speed; - OS grid references (British National Grid) for coordinates. Caching - Kilometres and kph for distance and speed; - WGS84 lat/long for coordinates. Hiking - Kilometres and kph for distance and speed; - OS grid references (British National Grid) for coordinates. Even just two profiles would be fine: I could live without the "Caching" hybrid profile. Thanks!

I also noticed this bug some time ago. It would be good to have this fixed! I prefer to use OS grid references for most "normal" caches, and to have my GPSr set to BNG, as it's easy to see exactly where you are on the map.

Well, it seems that you are, in fact, able to use all three of your "special" characters: a with ring above a with diaeresis o with diaeresis I only want a y with circumflex. Is that so much different?

Hello, We recently created a cache (our first!) called "Afternoon Tŷ". That last character is a lower-case 'y' with a circumflex/carat on top. We tried two things, but we couldn't get this to show up correctly in the cache name (the big one at the top of the page). First, we tried entering it as HTML: ŷ ; (without the space before the semi-colon) This didn't work. It showed up as the correct letter on the "edit cache" page, but, when we went to the normal view, it printed the HTML 'code' verbatim. So we edited the page, and copied the character directly into the "nickname" box. When we viewed the page this time, the character was converted to a normal (circumflex-less) 'y', detracting significantly from the cleverness of our name. Is there any way around this? Is there any way to get HTML into the cache name? Thank you!

We particularly liked Write and Mane's "Merthyr Marathon" series: eight caches exploring the industrial past of Merthyr Tydfil and surrounds. Write and Mane put a lot of good research and legwork into designing them. It required a serious time investment on our part, but we got hooked and knocked them off in the space of two months. Elizabeth

The next generation of GPS satellites will be four times as powerful as the current 24.

External. Something like the Silva Expedition 4 is perfect. On top of the direction-pointing abilities provided by your GPSr, a compass like this serves many other purposes, including: Reading grid references off the map using the romer scale; Taking a bearing (to verify your position on the map); Reading a bearing off the map; Triangulating your position (if you're in a sticky situation); Measuring distances on the map; Taking a back bearing; Measuring bearings whilst preparing a route card. I wouldn't go out on the mountains without my compass (and a map)!

On the main cache page, when a cache in the UK has coordinates along the lines of: ST 06653 95011 the leading zero of the eastings is dropped. This would make sense if this were a regular number, but 6653(0) gives a quite different location from 06653! (60 km too far east, to be precise.) (The same occurs with the northings, I presume.) These numbers should always be formatted as five digits, even if there are leading zeros. Actually, for those who aren't familiar with the British National Grid, you can chop off the right-most, least significant numbers and all you lose is accuracy. For example, ST 06653 95011 gives a grid reference to an accuracy of one metre. ST 066 950 is accurate to 100 m. (It identifies the lower-left corner of a 100x100 m square.)

When you open a print-friendly view of a cache page, the following text remains: Click icon to download: This should be gone: it's the part where you can download individual waypoint files, which doesn't exist on the print-friendly pages.

That works! Thanks, Jeremy!

Once, I added a log that I realized should have remained secret. So I immediately went to edit my log and unchecked the waypoint checkbox on the edit page. The waypoint went away, and I said "save changes". But the waypoint was still there! The best I could do was to zero it, which is obviously rather messy. Just now, I added a waypoint to my log, then later realized it better belonged to the image I was uploading than to the log itself. Same problem as before: I'm unable to delete the associated waypoint from my log. (So now I have the ugly "Last edited by..." at the end of my log for no good reason.) I believe this is a bug. I wasn't sure if anybody was aware of it, so I am now making it known. -- Simon

So far as I can tell, this only happens for caches that are yet to be found. All caches have the "Log Your Visit" button in the top-right corner of the cache page. However, caches with no logs also say, at the bottom of the cache page: Logged Visits (No Logs. Found It? Log it!) "Log It!" is a link. "Log Your Visit" is a hyperlink to: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?ID=xxx "Log it!" is a hyperlink to: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_logfind.asp?S=4&ID=xxx where xxx is the cache ID. I think the "Log Your Visit" button used to link to the second URL, too. It has an edit box for the "User's Web Page". I wondered where this had gone! Is it a bug? Why the two pages? Why the different info available to edit on each?

I joined Cubs when I was eight, went up to Scouts when I was 11, then up to Ventures when I was 15. I became a Queen's Scout at the age of 18. (All Scouts in the UK are mixed boys/girls, by the way. [1]) After that, I led a Beaver Colony for a couple of years, whilst at university. I am currently an Explorer Scout Leader, and I got my Wood Badge this summer. And now it's Scout Post time again! [1] That's not quite true. In fact, all new Scout Groups must offer mixed membership [2]; and a Group cannot revert from being mixed to being single-sex. Also, mixed Sections must be continuable up through the remainder of the Sections within that Group. So, if a Group's Cub Section is mixed, so must its Scout Section be; and, if a Group's Beaver Section is mixed, so must its Cub and Scout Sections be. All Explorer Units also offer mixed membership. [2] That's not quite true. There are exceptions in some special situations, such as those where there are specific cultural or religious requirements for single-sex Sections.

I made a similar suggestion some time ago: "single shot" PQs. If I'm about to set off on a day trip/long weekend/holiday to someplace new, then it would be handy if I could enter the details into the PQ description page, then click "generate now" or whatever, and have the results emailed to me without the need to create a new saved PQ. At the moment, I have to create a new query, save it, and then delete it -- which seems like unnecessary hassle. Also, if you already have 5 PQs, then you wouldn't be able to create this new query without deleting an existing one, would you? Hopefully, this "single shot"-type of PQ would not be considered one of your five, since it is transient in nature, never saved as part of your profile.

There are tall buildings along some of the length of the river, but not all of it. At least part of the route should have given fine satellite reception. It was also fine whilst walking along the same stretches of river. I was imagining some of the bus's electronics or some part of the engine interfering with the GPS receiver itself. But I don't know what exactly it would have been. Odd! The weird thing was that it was the device itself that seemed to stop respoding. For example, it would refuse to zoom in or out on the map, even if it was correctly updating the position at that time.