wildlifewriter

His professional interests? Hang on a tick - let me see if I've got this right... If I contact you - through the Geocaching message service - about something other than geocaching (forestry, perhaps?) and the enquiry relates to an article I'm working on... ... you would consider that to be spam?

Well, as a freelance journalist (who makes little money from it), all I can say is: there's something very peculiar about all of this...

Right. Sensible answer now, in case anyone's interested.... Unless I want to pay out a small fortune, it's almost certain any sky image I get hold of, won't have been taken with the vehicle (satellite, aircraft, balloon, whatever) directly above the area I'm interested in. This means that the part of the image I want to use will be subject to a form of visual perspective effect. To correct this, we can use digital manipulation to apply a distortion to make it look as if the picture was taken from directly above. Having done that, further tweaking has to be applied (mainly at the edges of the view) to make it look right. This process is a form of "ortho-rectification". Highly-skewed images are difficult to correct - in fact, past an angle of about 15º, things start getting very ugly very fast.

In a word: gardening gloves. Rats!!! That's two words... I knew it was bad advice.

I see. Hmmm... that certainly does explain a whole lot of things that have been going on, recently...

I'm too lazy, as well. Who are all these people, anyway...?

It would take too long to explain. You'll know when it happens to you....

All's well that ends well. These adventures come included with any Fugawi product, at no extra cost... One thing I've managed to do, recently:- an aerial photograph of my local area, ortho-rectified on PaintShop, and calibrated with Fugawi, then loaded into the iQue and used instead of a map with my GPS position (and a few caches) displayed on it. Now that IS cool....

No, that's not it. I even deleted Mathlib on my iQue, then synched a new map segment - and it still worked. It could be lack of main memory on the Palm. I dunno what happens if you try to load a map that's too large - never tried it. Why can't you delete anything from the Palm memory? Does deleting produce any error message?

The obvious option - "Download to GPS" does not work with a Palm device. One of the many bonkers 'features' in Fugawi is that the option to install a map to a PDA is hidden. No kidding - it really is! To make the menu option appear, you first have to highlight a section of the map - or all of it - on your PC screen. At that point (and not before) you can then go: Menu "Edit" > "Export selection to PDA". This will bring up a dialog which shows the map (and any others already chosen) in a queue for the next hotsync. Close all Fugawi and do a hotsync to the Palm. (If the map segment is any appreciable size, you can go and have your dinner at this point.) It seems that the map cannot be loaded directly to a memory card - it loads into main memory and then can be "moved" from within Fugawi on the Palm. (Note: All of this applies to Fugawi Mapping V3. Menu text may vary in other versions, but the principle should be valid.) Hth

Well done!!!

Well,before the topic gets closed. a great big and thoroughly deserved Well done!!! to CT&J for getting all this organised AND keeping it going with such dedication.

Well done - an achievement scarcely comprehensible to mere mortals like the rest of us.

I think you're getting into the realms of fantasy now, Pike...

Concern in Brussels was growing today, after revelations that costs of the notorious EC "cache mountain" topped 160,000,000 euro last year (2003). Officials were noncommittal about the widely-resented payments, which subsidises the hiding of plastic boxes which hardly anyone looks for. French commissioner Jules Bleuagasquet was quoted as saying: "They are a disgrace these geocachers, is it not? So much money it is being wasted on these boxes, when it could be wasted on paying French farmers to do nothing, instead!" Peter Mandelson was unavailable for comment. (Reuters)

Here's a tip: If you upload an image by the normal method, and then do all the above, it will appear in the long description BUT ALSO will be listed (with any captions) at the bottom of the page - before the logs section. I find this a bit untidy, especially if there are several images. To get round it, do the following. 1) Prepare the basic page, then view the result. 2) Log 'Post a note' for the cache yourself, and upload the desired image with the log. Repeat as necessary. 3) Go back in, view the log and select the image. Make sure you drill down to the original, not the thumbnail which might be resized. 4) Get the image properties, to use in Pharisee's method for inclusion above. 5) When satisfied, edit > delete the log entry. The log will disappear, leaving you with a 'clean' new cache page but the image will still be available on the server. I think this is because log images aren't actually deleted, they are "archived".

We thought it was "His N'Hers" congrats topics....

Since the servers are still hosed, I'm currently downloading the UK cache files. Hell, it's only another 143Mb....

Well done, M&J!!

It's even bigger, when everything's installed... 590Mb

Disregarding virtuals, and multis with spoof co-ordinates, the most isolated UK cache might be this one. (33.5 miles) The loneliest cache in mainland Ireland seems to be here (24.2 miles) It's the only one in the county. If you disallow offshore caches in the UK, then working out which... <pauses> I need to get out more.

There are (as always) a number of contributory reasons, I think. In no particular order... 1) Theft. 2) Finder doesn't realise it's a TB. (See also 5) 3) Finder DOES realise but doesn't know how travel bugs work, nor could care less. (See also 4) 4) Universal human stupidity. 5) The bug's tag is missing. 6) The TB was never in the cache in the first place, it was in some other cache. (See also 7) 7) Transient amnesia. 8) The bug isn't really missing, it's just at the bottom of the box covered by a glutinous mixture of brown rainwater, crushed sea shells and upside-down woodlice...

The situation... I'm setting up a sequence of new multis, in a forest area which can get quite busy at weekends. For each cache, I want to use an intermediate - each a small loc/loc holding about 40 cards which have the co-ords of the final cache, and a clue. (The idea being that people can take a card and rehide the box quickly, rather than poring over a single direction sheet, then and there.) But... if the intermediate IS found by muggles (and our muggles here are invariably destructive) then the clue could give away the final cache to them. So: I was thinking of having the clue in ROT13, rather than in clear. The question... is this fair and/or reasonable? How would people feel about having to decode a ROT13 hint, in the field?

It doesn't sound like the items described in the log would have been left by Alice. The White Queen might have some explaining to do, though... Congrats on 200 !

No doubt. We'd just log you, and then... never call, never write... It's always the way.