Cairngorm

Today I've seen four different logs so far, one on a rarely-found mystery cache, all mentioning hints or cheats from the same website (which doesn't open here). Each of them has around a hundred finds today all over the globe. One of the users is your friend progc, which is an anagram of the website name. All the others have four digits at the ends of their names. It looks like some kind of automated attack on GC. But where's the fun in that?

I run the Geobeagle app on my S3 and it's as accurate as my Garmin and easier to use. Now if they could just fix the battery life...

This is excellent, because I remember one or other of the two lead presenters being disparaging about geocaching a couple of years ago.

are you sure? to my knowledge, any "update coordinates" log will send info to the reviewers somehow. or what is "tiny" in your book? http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...=y&decrypt= (see entries on June 25)

See post #28 above.

Thank goodness. I was starting to think I was the only person here who likes to hike alone but has someone that cares about them. It's a real issue and SPOT addresses it.

I was inspired to get SPOT after reading a cacher's rescue story. I can't find his log right now but there's a summary posted 2/2/09 on this page: http://satellite-messenger.com/en/spotnews..._mcal_year=2009 . The lesson of Ed's experience is that you can get into serious difficulties very close to civilization. Where the mountain is makes no difference to the fact that it's a mountain. And the helicopter plan costs something like US$7 a year.

There are a lot of puzzle caches that hide information about a cache, usually coordinates, in the image data (it's called steganography). If the geocaching Web site automatically resized cache page images, this information would be lost for many of of these puzzles. --Larry No, it wouldn't. HTML resizing doesn't change the image data, just the display of it. When you right-click to download an embedded sized image you get the full size. GC does resize cache page images. Try uploading a picture to one of your caches and you're told "The site will resize your image once it has finished uploading" and "If your original image is under 125k or 600 pixels wide, the largest image will not be resized... Final images will always be converted to jpg." My experience is that even on small images GC does some reworking, including stripping the comment field from a jpg file. Maybe this is a new thing and doesn't affect older caches. But I know that on one steganographic hide I've been working on, I've had no choice but to host the image file elsewhere (yes, that's a hint).

Michael's arts and crafts store. Or $5 / roll over here. I got fast delivery of good tape from them. That was back in the gold old days - March, or so - when you could buy a roll of camo tape and have change out of $4.

I don't type exact coords until I can measure them in the field. So I have ten unpublished caches with identical x.000 coords. They don't seem to block each other.

1. 12 months. 2. 9 months, and then Garmin replaced it with a shiny new machine because of the rubber. That's a good supplier in my book. 3. zero.

If it has a usb socket, you can probably use this? ---> http://www8.garmin.com/support/agree.jsp?id=591 And if you have a mini-usb cable lying around, it'll probably fit. My camera cable does. I'm not responsible if these ideas break everything. I'd enjoy hearing about it, though.

from your profile where it shows the logs click on "geocaches" How about that. After a year on the game. Thanks t4e.

Okay, I'll bite. Where is this DNF list that y'all are talking about?

Get used to double... err, "checking"... that little box. It's the one thing that will trip you up every time. It will always be checked when you don't want the reviewer to see your cache, and unchecked when you're in a hurry to publish.

Thanks BlueDeuce - a perfect reply with the info I'd been searching for.

So I grabbed this bug from my wife in California and took it to Scotland, and its page shows that I picked it up at the same place where I dropped it. More than that, I know for sure that L.A.Woman has never been at For You A-Muse-Ment. A clue might be that that cache where she did find it has been archived. Edit: while I'm figuring out why my screenshot doesn't display, here's the actual page TBKPBP

As a newcomer to the game (and, too, a recovering Brit in the US also) may I be among the first to say welcome back? No? Okay, never mind.

I confirm this. My Vista is ten months old and as soon as I asked about the rubber strip, Garmin immediately said they would exchange for a refurb. And they did it by email on the weekend when the support phone lines were closed. I'm very pleased and would... y'know... recommend Garmin to my friends, and all. I hope it works out. If you don't hear from me again, it did. Okay, it did work out, and you're hearing from me again anyway. I mailed in the old unit, scuffed and battered as it was, Monday morning. A shiny, working, refurb machine arrived by UPS Friday afternoon. They quote 7-10 days, but that's an untruth. I haven't missed a single weekend of use. I'm delighted with Garmin's service. This will guide my future GPS purchases.

I confirm this. My Vista is ten months old and as soon as I asked about the rubber strip, Garmin immediately said they would exchange for a refurb. And they did it by email on the weekend when the support phone lines were closed. I'm very pleased and would... y'know... recommend Garmin to my friends, and all. I hope it works out. If you don't hear from me again, it did.

You can if you want to. Very few bother. It's certainly not seen as a responsibility that the cache owner has. I just tonight met a cacher with 147 hides, who had read my recent log on an urban hide and said he checks on that cache every day.

That's how it works now or did I miss a memo? I think currently the ones which have not run recently take priority? I'm suggesting the opposite. [edit:]Wait . . . no, I'm not. Boy, I've been back and forward on this logic all morning. I need to make a chart. But I have to go do my US taxes instead.

How about letting weekly scheduled PQs run later in the day (because nobody's impatiently waiting for them) and letting new or manual requests run immediately? I realize this is a reversal of current policy but wouldn't it lighten the server load?

First, thanks drewburlingame for asking us this, even though you didn't say anything is happening. Answering for myself, I use PQs to keep my GSAK up to date. Most run weekly, some twice, a few three times. Sure, I'd like them to be perfect, but the fact is I never sit waiting for them and sometimes they don't get loaded into my system for quite a while. And then I use GSAK as a backdrop to the live data - when I'm using it to plan a day, I hit f4, look at the live web pages and put the caches on my watchlist. So it makes no difference to my life if you cache them every thirty minutes. I'd feel more comfortable if you just ran the PQs later in the day, but it makes no real difference. But one day in the next year or two I will follow the trend and become paperless, and then my answer will be different. Then - I guess - my answer will be "sure, cache most of it but I'd like to be totally up to date in regard to publication, archival, enabling and disabling". [edit to remove a proposal which - when I thought about it - was what GS already does ]

I was under the impression that doing so would be a TOU violation, covered under "thou shalt not share thy data." And (if we're taking this idea seriously) for thirty bucks a year anyone can get another 40 of their very own. We weren't taking this idea seriously. It was a joke. I've never been much of an emoticon guy, but it looks like I'll need find the "I'm joking" emoticon. Are you serious?