ariwa
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Posts
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Posts posted by ariwa
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Probably.
I wouldn't recommend bidding on any of these auctions but instead going straight to www.tumonz.co.nz and ordering a copy of TUMONZ. It's faster and easier to use than NZmapped and vector-based maps are the bomb compared to scans!
Steve
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Fair enough.. What sort of prices can Steve and Tony supply for 2nd hand entry level GPS units then?
Seeing as we're unlikely to ever get the government to subsidize GPS units for a new sport, the next best thing we can do is make costs as low as possible - and sure, if this means 2nd hand units then that's one more reason to get into Geocaching.
I know how hard it is to live off a tight budget, I just bought a house!!!
Steve
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I don't think we'll ever be able to give GPSrs away but perhaps we could open an account as a non-profit organisation with a local (unlikely) or foreign (more likely) disty of entry level GPSrs (eg. Garmin eTrex) and set up a simple e-com site (perhaps on geocaching.co.nz?) that lets people buy them direct through us. We could price them at cost plus perhaps a tiny little extra to cover the basics (website maintance, etc) with the sole intention of getting people hooked on Geocaching.
The probable outcome though would be that the distributor would say no if they already have arrangements with other NZ resellers who charge full list and we come along to undercut them; in which case we'd have to go with a possible sponsership arrangment with a local reseller who'd give us a discount in exchange for advertising.
At the end of the day, assuming we had a local geocaching website in place with a direct order e-com system in place (ie, little overheads) we'ld still be able to achieve our goal of selling GPSrs at a discount to new entrants into the sport and the reseller would still win with a limited margin.
Steve
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Hunting for Aukland stash in the central city? Mwahahaha!
Actually I wonder what happened to Glenn (the guy that hid Aukland stash).. I used to talk to him occasionally and he even planted another cache that was in a cupboard by his front door step, but that was removed I assume since he moved.
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Hi Neil
A year? pfft! As a matter of fact I "celebrated" my second year of Geocaching on Oct 16. My first find was Aukland Stash (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=75) which I fondly remember as the only cache I bothered to find without a GPSr - and was the reason why I bought my first GPSr! :-) It was a bastard to find with nothing but a roadmap and a printout from Mapblast and the clues!
Aukland Stash is now the second oldest NZ Geocache. There were one or two others before it that have been long plundered.
One point to note is that while I've been Geocaching twice as long as you Neil, you've found nearly twice as many caches as me.. how do you find the time ?!?!
It would be interesting to hear from people how they heard about Geocaching. I personally discovered it while looking at Slashdot one day - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/25/2030252&mode=thread&tid=99
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Might play some catchup tommorow, unless it rains again!
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quote:
i figured it would be very important for the GPSr to have an idea of the time. It needs to know what the correct GMT offset would be so it could match that to the almanac. For your unit to know how far it is from a satelite it would need to know exactly what time that signal was sent... wouldn't it? it's a GPSr not a GPS_transmitter... so it doesn't bounce a signal there and back.
I don't disagree - it is vital for a GPSr to know the time. But it does not need to know the GMT offset (ie the country that you're in) as all the satellites transmit a common time.. Without any research on the matter, AFAIK, the almanac is only really used to speed up a fix after power-on - which is why it takes an eTrex about 10 seconds or so to get its first fix, but when it comes new out of its box it has to build an almanac from scratch of the satelites overhead.
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Very cool!!!!
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Since we're all on the bandwagon I have a really really old digital camera that I bought, like, in 1998 for about $800.
It is a megapixel but I'm not sure how many, I think 1.2. It's very basic by todays standards but hey it still goes (just) even after my thrashing of it! Taken about 3100 photos.
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Since we're all on the bandwagon I have a really really old digital camera that I bought, like, in 1998 for about $800.
It is a megapixel but I'm not sure how many, I think 1.2. It's very basic by todays standards but hey it still goes (just) even after my thrashing of it! Taken about 3100 photos.
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Hey THG - Make that 6 finds.. or is it 7? I'm losing count.
My eTrex was being a ***** yesterday. I was looking for a cache and it kept swaying really bad. I assumed to begin with that it might have something to do with daylight savings - but AFAIK GPSr's have no concept of local time..? I would have thought they'd go with GMT or something and the output can be set as an offset for local time?
Besides.. I haven't adjusted the time in it for ages.. which I should probably do come to think of it :-)
Paying for Geocaching - get real. I can't see the costs of hosting geocaching.com being THAT high. I dunno what his traffic stats are, nor do I know how much he's paying for data (doesn't Jeremy run it from his employer's site?) but I can't see why he can't get by with donations or something.
If it were to go any more commercial than it is now I'd be happy to donate my time to help get www.geocaching.co.nz running (along with extra functionality such as regional drill downs and stuff that Geocaching.com just doesn't have). I'm not a web design guru by any means but I know PHP and MySQL and Apache reasonably well!
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Hey THG - Make that 6 finds.. or is it 7? I'm losing count.
My eTrex was being a ***** yesterday. I was looking for a cache and it kept swaying really bad. I assumed to begin with that it might have something to do with daylight savings - but AFAIK GPSr's have no concept of local time..? I would have thought they'd go with GMT or something and the output can be set as an offset for local time?
Besides.. I haven't adjusted the time in it for ages.. which I should probably do come to think of it :-)
Paying for Geocaching - get real. I can't see the costs of hosting geocaching.com being THAT high. I dunno what his traffic stats are, nor do I know how much he's paying for data (doesn't Jeremy run it from his employer's site?) but I can't see why he can't get by with donations or something.
If it were to go any more commercial than it is now I'd be happy to donate my time to help get www.geocaching.co.nz running (along with extra functionality such as regional drill downs and stuff that Geocaching.com just doesn't have). I'm not a web design guru by any means but I know PHP and MySQL and Apache reasonably well!
Geocaching Gear
in New Zealand
Posted
Don't worry Neill I'm like that too whenever I get one of those dadgum yellow tags. Only problem is that I never go to my PO box when the PO's open so there's never anyone there and the parcel tends to sit for quite some time waiting for me to pick it up.
It frustrates me when I go there on the odd occasion - out of my way - to pickup my parcel and get told it was put there in error..
I've come to the conclusion the people that do the PO Boxes are illiterate. If i get one yellow card every month in error, and there's about 2000 boxes at the PO box, that means there's 2000 cards a month on average in error.
Then there's all the misdirected mail. I constantly get mail for PO Box xxxx but for a different branch, all because these people are sending mail to AUCKLAND 1036. On top of all the mail destined for PO Box 3456 which gets put in box 3426 or something. They just can't read!!