deercreekth

That's a good question. I was looking for the same thing when I decided on the Fuse for the scissors and pliers. You can supplement by carrying the Micra as well for the tweezers, but it would be nice to have all three together.

I carry a Leatherman Fuse in the leather belt case it came with. I chose it because it has pliers and decent scissors. Before I got it I carried a Leatherman Micra, and I used to still carry it for the tweezers. That reminds me, I need to figure out where I put it and start carrying it again. I've used the end of the pliers and the can opener to remove tricky logs. I've used the screwdrivers to open special containers. I've used multiple tools on it to try to free a match container from a block of ice. I also have the added bonus that a lot of people I work with carry them, so it has come in handy when I've had to make adjustments to equipment.

If there was a cache near the Ypsilanti water tower, it would be one of my favorites. http://en.wikipedia...._Tower_2011.JPG Nope, no caches there. Ypsilanti is short on geocaches. They do have the "World Famous" Melon Festival tomorrow though. I was there for the Summer Beer Festival and it saddened me that the Melon Festival couldn't be the same weekend.

If there was a cache near the Ypsilanti water tower, it would be one of my favorites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ypsilanti_Water_Tower_2011.JPG

Please explain how this application gets its data to operate in real time without violating that section of the TOS. c:geo is a scrapper, pure and simple, and therefore violates the TOS. There is no other way for live map to function. Of course it is not the author that has the problem, you the user do. Once the API is released I almost bet that if c:geo is fixed in it's present form there will be some really unhappy folks. The problem is far more than icons. I don't think you mean c:geo scraps the data. :-) I don't know exactly how c:geo works, but I know a little about client/server operation. The gc.com is a server that serves data to a client. The client can be a browser, which parses the data and converts the data to display data. The browser get a small html file with lots of links to images and text. The browser then GETs the image data and displays everything. Most of the work is off loaded to the client. c;geo is a client gets the html and parses it, too. Scraping is just a derogatory term GS uses for parsing(the person who claims to be programmer and calls it scraping, shame on you). c:geo doesn't need the images so it uses less bandwidth than the browser. Android is based on client/servers internally. The server is called a provider. c:geo asks for a provider to display waypoints on a map and the Google map provider displays them. The "live map" as you call it is off loaded to Google Maps. Google Maps calls the location provider which calls the GPS or phone to get the current location and the map moves. The waypoints are redisplayed from the list c:geo provided. No new search of gc.com is needed. I have no idea how c:geo determines if the location has moved outside the current list area. All I know is that if c:geo does multiple searches every time it moves, gc.com would detect this and give the error that you are a computer and not human. c:geo has to do more than just make one call to geocaching.com for the data. The first call would return a list of search results. From there you would have to parse out the individual cache links and follow each one of them to be able to parse out the coordinates. Then it has the data needed to display a map. It has to go out and do this all over again each time it wants to refresh the map. If there's an API call that can return the needed data in one shot, that would be more efficient than the 21+ web page requests it has to make now.

I haven't used c:geo in awhile. The first time I picked up an Android phone in a store, I searched the Market for geocaching and it was the first result (this was before the official app was released). The Live Map feature and arrows that pointed toward the cache location in search results were the two big features I preferred. I wonder if the Live Map is possible with the soon to be semi-public API, or if there are query limits that could interfere with it.

Wow, based on the logs there's been a tent there for over 5 years! I don't know what I'd do. There have been at least three caches in the spot of a historic cemetery in Terre Haute where the graves had been moved out long ago. There was a business nearby that closed down leaving the area pretty isolated. People have lived there, but in that case the area was pretty nasty. There were bags of trash with weird things like Testers model glue left there and large pieces of cardboard that were probably used as beds. Indiana State University has since bought the area and the ISU police ran someone off who was looking for the most recent cache there that ended up being archived before it was found. I don't know why, but this feels different. It doesn't sound like the area's being trashed. It's a tent instead of someone sleeping on trash. It's weed instead of glue sniffers. I still wouldn't feel too comfortable looking for a cache near there. There's a log from 4/19 where a cacher ran into someone who might have been the tent owner: "As i approached the final coordinates and was looking around for the best approach, a guy came to me and said : "Are you one of these GPS guys ? I´ve seen many of them here, but whatever you´re looking for, it´s long gone. Does this thing you´re doing have any kind of feedback system ? Please let them know there´s nothing here !" If that is the tent owner, he sounds pretty with it. Maybe this is his weekend getaway place where he goes to be one with the Earth. The more I think about it, the more I think I may need to set me up a tent somewhere. It will have to be somewhere with electricity so I can have a fridge full of craft beer, though.

I'm back from my visit to paradise. The weather was awesome this year as it was a little cooler most days and we didn't get any rain. I never did find the cache in the palm cave, but I had fun finding the ones I did. I'm hoping to visit again next year, but part of my family is pushing for Wisconsin Dels, even though they did that for this year and we still ended up in Florida. There's no ocean in Wisconsin! Now I'm back to reality. It rained here a bunch last week and it's looking gloomy today. Yay.

This is a micro, so that may be it.

The geocache is hidden in the palm cave and is not at my level.

I've got a Florida caching question. What's a palm cave? I've got my ideas but I thought I'd ask the experts.

I found one near a cache once. Luckily it had the owner information set, and had enough battery life left to power it up a couple of times so I could write down the address. It turns out the address was on my way home, so I dropped it off. That's the day I finally took the time to setup the owner information in my own GPS. That reminds me, I haven't done that with my new one yet.

I think that may be a tough one since these forums use different software than a lot of the ones that are covered by apps. The nice thing about even the stock Android browser is this forum seems to work well in either the mobile version or the full site version.

Congrats on the first year. But why did you had to go and bring up Rabbit Hole Revenge? That cache used to give me nightmares. I'm saddened by this since you've put out some nice caches during a time when there haven't been a lot of new ones published, but I understand. I don't know if I'll ever find the courage to attempt Don't Look Down, and while my puzzle solving mojo has grown stronger lately I've not figured out Campus Highlighter #2.01. But if you wanted to put some of them up for adoption next year rather than archiving them, I'd be interested in some and maybe others in the area would be interested as well. I'm sure the farewell cache would be well taken care of. I know I'll be stuck in Terre Haute unless my kids move away when they grow up and my wife decides we should follow them. Even then, we're talking another 15-20 years... gulp.

There's probably not much point in the way he posted notes on the cache pages. Someone who doesn't bother to write a log probably isn't going to bother to revisit the cache page or put a cache on their watchlist, so they'll never see the note. You've definitely got legitimate points.

So how'd it go?

When geocaching, I use my DeLorme PN-40 for both. It would be nice to have voice directions, but beeping when I need to look at the screen to know what I'm about to have to do works. There have been a few times when it's come up with creative driving directions, but the same can be said for my TomTom that sometimes wants me to go the wrong way down one way streets.

Those tricks work for most smartphones (Android) but not iPhone. Getting USB host mode working is just part of the issue. Having the phone actually be able to do something useful with the device is something else entirely. I've heard of people using USB keyboards and such with Android phones, but you would have to have a custom kernel with USB mass storage drivers to be able to access a USB drive. What I'd like to be able to do is download GPX files to an Android device, and then connect my GPSr as a USB drive and copy the files over. There was a cheap Android tablet at CVS that can supposedly do this, but I haven't seen custom kernels for phones that do this. To me, that's the gap that needs to be bridged for me to no longer need a desktop computer for home use. Once you can connect your phone to USB hard drives, printers, and DVD burners, I'm there.

Maybe it can qualify as one of the Big Things Waymarks since it is 8x the size of other homes in the area.

Uploading the Field Notes doesn't automatically post them as logs. You still can go in individually and type up and post each log. I didn't use Field Notes at first because I thought it would work that way too. If you connect your PN-40 to a PC, go into the menu (on the PN-40) from the Geocaches list and choose Upload Field Notes. This should make the PN-40 available as a drive you can get to from your PC. From there you can delete the FieldNotes.txt file. I used to use Cache Register, but I stopped using it once I moved to the previous firmware version (2.7) that would allow me to directly copy GPX files to the PN-40. So I manually upload Field Notes and delete the file when I'm done. Sometimes I will rename the FieldNotes.txt file to something else if I typed in any notes that I want to save.

I pick up rare earth magnets at Harbor Freight Tools.

I'll be headed back to Paradise in June. It's good to see there's a few new Sanibel Island caches placed since I was there last year. This time I'm definitely going to visit the Big John statue that's not far.

This sounds like fun. As an added bonus, it looks like Portland is really close to DeLorme's headquarters. I'd like to see Eartha(the large globe, not the geocacher) up close.

I agree with this. I was at MOGA and cachers logging caches they didn't find definitely annoyed and effected me. I wouldn't have wasted my time trying the "kayak" one but I looked at the log ahead of time and several people found it without mentioning an issue so we drove to it but quickly realized it was next to impossible to find. At the time I was amazed at how dedicated cachers were to brave the water. Now I realize they were just lazy cheaters. Just one example of how it could affect others. SapaFamily wasted their time and gas thanks to the bogus logs. What if one or two of the real caches were missing. Cachers unaware of this event and/or the phony logs might see a ton of logs and think that the cache is there and waste their time and money going after it. What if the bogus logs all mentioned easy terrain for the cache because they were referring to the terrain around the punch card, but in reality the cache was hidden on difficult terrain. That could entice someone unprepared for the realities of the cache. These phony logs can (and in the case of the SapaFamily have) effect others. The entire thing is not only beyond silly, it is inconsiderate and selfish. That cache has a difficulty and terrain rating of 3. The map clearly shows it in the water. When everything was dry last year and probably even up until a few weeks ago I bet the water was manageable. There were 10 finds logged and a boatload of DNFs logged before TheSapaFamily logged a DNF. When I went looking for it there had been only one find logged. This was one of the 30 near parking caches that were published before the event. There was a cache just off of a parking area near this one. The 100 other permanent caches were not published until the day after the event because of rules put in place by the ACoE. So there was an element of not knowing what was in store until either early registration on Friday or Saturday morning. Unless there was something my GPSr didn't like about the GPX file, there were no descriptions given, only hints and D/T ratings. Other than one hint that mentioned hard bushwhacking, there wasn't anything I saw to dissuade the non-bushwhacking crowd before they went after a cache. I enjoyed the bushwhacking to a point. Once the freezing rain picked up on Saturday and everything was wet, and I had been wet from head to toe for long enough, I went back to the near parking area caches. Some of those were pretty easy, but some(like the kayak one)... not so much.

If the cache you find and the cache you log is by the same owner, and they allow it, have fun.