Learned Gerbil

I have tried following the links in this thread but despite my password etc being accepted and my last login details being correct etc, I get a "you do not have sufficient privileges or your account may have been disabled." messages.

I am one of those that simply got bored by the huge number of poorly thought out micros stuffed all over the place with no real reason. It became harder and harder to find the motivation to look for them until I just stopped. I used to always check out caches in an area I was visiting on work or whatever, but after so many such searches just bringing up lists of boring looking nano and micros I just don't even do that any more.

There is free plugins available for some devices/versions of software that allows offroad use. http://www.webazar.org/tomtom/offroad.php?lang=uk

I am on the "something has been lost" side. I rarely cache these days, when once I would jump in the car and drive 25 miles or more for a FTF. The reason, that cache was probably the only unfound one within that distance. I can't say it is different because it has become somehow less esoteric, it is because as the numbers have gone up, the quality has gone down. These days there is nothing special about the majority of caches. Now caching takes you to nowhere special, and takes you to a small container with no interesting contents. I have nothing against micros, but don't understand why they have become the norm. Caching desperately needs a means of gauging quality. We used to have that in the UK, but unfortunately it has gone.

There would not be ambiguity if it said "Greater London" Everyone (other than the pedants) would know what that means.

I share your disappointment - I am one of those who use postcodes for searches but after several years of satisfactory searches I find the current situation makes postcode searches completely useless.

In my part of Greater London new caches seem to appear with "South East England" selected instead of London, even where the location has a London post code. It might be clearer if "London" was "Greater London" assuming that this is the correct border. can't be sure (and i guess neither can anyone else) as the map in this thread doesn't show London clearly and I can't run Google Earth due to security restrictions on this machine.

A fourth - British Library was also disabled by TPTB. This looks like being the original problem cache.

I can't get it to respond - I have entered coordinates and either the bot check graphic never appears, or if it does, I end up with a blank page when I hit the submit button.

Many visitor attractions which are closed in winter (usually places near mainly seaside resorts open at Easter or the weekend before. Also note that some parts of the country have strange closing times. The Isle of Wight seems to close all day on Fridays for example. Surrey is pretty much open all the time being one green hilly London suburb.

On one caching trip I had a car full of chavs pelt me with food as it drove by. About par for the course in Mitcham these days.

So the footpaths have now been closed - a very recent change - they were still open yesterday lunchtime as the BBC had a camera team showing the paths. Our reviewers had the sense to anticipate the CVO's decision five days earlier!

But the paths are not closed in the protected area - people can move around freely unless the path actually crosses a farm where there is a confirmed or suspected outbreak. This is a matter of some concern in the farming community. There is no shortage of other caches, so to my mind, disabling seems a sensible signal that people should think about caching elsewhere for the time being.

The zone has now been extended to the NE to include Pirbright. At least two large animal feed distributors are now within the 3km zone.

Can we have the coordinates for the nearest bay in central London that actually has spaces? Far more useful!

Whilst being very impressed with the OS maps, I like the way the Yahoo map is replaced by a Google map showing nearby caches when you click on it!

SE England - definitely keep an eye on the W/E split!

Create a circular route round the area you want. Just keep on clicking for new waypoints until you end up where you started and doubleclick. Once you have this circular route, which can of course be any shape you like, right click on the route, and one of the options is to export the enclosed area as a map section.

But that is the point - it doesn't work like that. Most non-MS devices will simply overwrite the device with the backup to put things back as they were, but MS expect you to manually change certain settings, including region and time zone to the same as the backup file or it unhelpfully claims you are trying to restore to a different device, which of course you are not.

I had to hard reset my IPAQ. I have tried to restore but Activesync keep on telling me the backup file was created from a "different type of device" whatever that means. Only this one device has ever been connected to this computer and it is the right backup file. Why won't it restore? What can I do about it? I have restored without problems before. [Now solved - apparently the idiot programmers at the great Microsoft don't know the meaning of "Restore". Any change in the timezone setting or nationality settings means that Activesync thinks it is a different device! Why do PPCs make everything more complex than it needs to be?]

Technically it is all the council's. My dad, when he worked for NUPE in the 70's was always negotiating totting rights for bin men so they didn't get into trouble taking stuff they wanted that people threw out. Councils don't make much money from disposing of stuff. Some scrap is worth something, but in practice the council ends up paying to get stuff recycled, landfilled etc. So, as long as it isn't dangerous, and doesn't create some other issue, councils are happy for people to undertake their own local recycling activites, if you are polite about it.

It is a big place - we will cope!

I only mentioned the DDA thing because it is the sort of thing people worry about.

BTW, as this was brought up as a question about reasonable adjustments, it is worth pointing out that a defence under the DDA for not making a reasonable adjustment when providing a service is an honestly held belief that "Making an adjustment would fundamentally alter the nature of the service, trade, profession or business." What this means is that whilst one should consider how to make caches accessible to disabled people, that doesn't mean a cache that involves complex puzzles has to be adjusted for people with learning difficulties, or that caches that are meant to involve crossing difficult terrain should be made accessible to people with mobility problems. Probably the best way of ensuring the duties under the act are met is to provide as far as possible a wide variety of caches that can be done by a large range of people whatever their disabilities. I seriously doubt any court would find that the duty was breached becasue a single cache, series or group of caches were inaccessible given the huge number of alternatives. What might be considered a breach of duty would be a failure to provide appropriate information on accessibility etc so that things were not made impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people to take advantage of cache listings in selecting appropriate caches.

I have not had any since 4 April, including some that were run on 3rd, but not run again until 5th. The size is well under my ISP's attachment limit. I suspect it is a database issue, but it is alarming if a PQ won't run at all i na day even i it has not been run for several days.