lordelph

The GPS is my Shepherd; I shall not get lost. It maketh me lie down in muddy pastures: It leadeth me to piles of thine twigs. It runneth down mine batteries It leadeth me in patches of thy brambles for cachings sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of nettles, I will fear no DNF: For thou art with me; Thy arrow and thy distance countdown, they comfort me. Thou preparest a cache before me in the presence of thine muggles; Thou annointest my head with oil; I'll get you for that. Surely muggles and their dogs shall follow me all the hours of thine weekend, only to return, and waiteth for gc.com to load forever. Amen.

Seems to melting in Hertfordshire, but Deefer Dog certainly enjoyed himself this morning. He's a Tibetian Terrier. Probably felt like home

Get a free FON router Connect it to your home network It will create a "public" access point using a proportion of your Internet bandwidth (you decide how much) It will also create a "private" access point for your own home use Now, because you've now become a "fonero" and giving away some of your bandwidth at home, you can now use other foneros bandwidth while you are out and about.

Fon are celebrating their birthday by giving away 2500 routers to UK residents. I've just ordered mine! Only tenuously related to geocaching I know, but you could use it to setup a free access point at your home which might help your fellow cachers or form part of an intriguing puzzle cache...

Frame 20 is my dog Deefer, and frame 21 might be me, it's hard to tell!

OK, here we go.... Announcing the updated GeocachingMapLinker v0.6! This release fixes some problems the older release was having with changes to Firefox and Greasemonkey, and adds a few new groovy features: On gc.com cache pages, adds links to OS maps, Google Maps and Google Earth (see screenshot at start of this thread) When you click the OS map link on a cache page, the OS map indicates the cache position with a red arrow NEW! move the mouse cursor over the OS map and see the WGS84 coordinate for that point in the right hand sidebar NEW! Ctrl+click the map to log a WGS84 coordinate in the sidebar (up to 20 coords can stored) NEW! Download your clicked coordinates as a GPX file This has been tested only in the latest versions of Firefox (2.0.0.1) and Greasemonkey (0.6.6.20061017.0), which you should upgrade to if you haven't already. Installing the new version... Follow this link http://files.dixo.net/GeocachingMapLinker.user.js and GreaseMonkey should kick in and offer to install it for you.

I actually have a tweaked version which did a few extra things like show you WGS84 coords in the OS map viewer, but it needs a few fixes before I can release it. I see what I can rustle up....

Well done on what must have been tricky negotiations. Not entirely sure it's possible to cache in London without raising a little suspicion or engaging in a little furtiveness though. I'll happily explain if challenged, but until it's illegal to be "strange" I'll be clambering under park benches the length and breadth of London Town!

I second the tower suggestion if you can get up that way - you can combine it with "Pitch 1" which takes on you a nice circuit of the woods, and you can do the "In the shadow of the tower" afterwards. Great views from the top when it is open!

To set the unit up for typical geocaching use click the menu button to get the menu (which lists Mark/Waypoints/Tracks/Routes/Games/Setup) Use the arrow keys to highlight "setup" and press OK button In the setup menu, use the arrow keys to highlight "Units" and press OK button Press OK button while on the "Position Frmt" setting and choose H D M.M' (first one in the list) On Map Datum, choose WGS 84 For "Units" choose "Statute" if you like your readouts in miles and feet You are all set, put your desired waypoint in as suggested above and away you go!

Check out Moo - they make these great sub-business-card sized "calling cards" which have a very nice feel to them - they actually feel quite collectable. You can buy a box of 100 and have them all different too, each one has an image from your Flickr photostream on it. Here are some designs I did for Geograph. I'm not connected with them in any way, I just like the product!

If you are into trigpointing, I've added a trig point icon to the set - for a preview and download link, see the first thread in this topic. Thanks for Pharisse for the suggestion.

Alistair, when are we going to hear the bits from your podcast you left on the cutting room floor! 'Twas comedy gold! I have given making a podcast some thought, but I don't think I have enough time to make it as good as it deserves to be. Maybe one day....

Yes, there wasn't much actual caching on show there, but half the fun of events is having a few laughs with like-minded souls Since a few are asking about the techie details, here's the science part. All the caching videos I've published so far were edited with Ulead Videostudio, which is an excellent budget editor. Whenever I've had an idea for a particular edit, I've normally managed to do it with Videostudio one way or another. I've read good reviews of Pinnacle's competing editor, so that's worth a look if Santa brought you a camcorder today. If money and time are no object, the Adobe Premiere and After Effects are full of features aimed at the professional user, but unless you think you'll be editing for broadcast, probably overkill. I use GoldWave for audio processing, e.g. removing background noise or adding effects like making someone sound like they are possessed I normally do the static title frames with Macromedia Fireworks as it's more flexible that VideoStudio's titling features. All the dynamic effects like dissolves and fades are built into VideoStudio. The rest is down to sheer artistic skill Who am I kidding? - if you use lots of short cuts, pick a good soundtrack, and aren't afraid to leave some shots on the cutting room floor, it's suprising how often things just seem to fall into place all on their own!

Charlie Starfish was a pro, hit all his marks and didn't fluff a single line

Time off work has enabled me to catch up on video editing, so here for your christmas viewing pleasure are the exploits of many people at this years "Shrops 2006 - In Search Of The Grail" event in Llangollen. Download a higher quality version (20Mb) Many thanks to everyone who took part in this one - Merry Christmas!

Time to get into the Christmas spirit... Altogether now "sleeeeeeeeeeep in heavenly peee-eeeace" - (slightly higher quality version here) If you didn't see the rather more elaborate video I did last year, Merry Christmas!

Nice work Jon, I've been following in your footsteps at various locations the few past months, you've clearly been on a mission!

TDW was on about doing this in a day, but he's an ex-soldier and I'm a lardy software developer. Doing it over a bank holiday weekend sounds good to me, I'm in!

Barry Hunter will like it, but I think he has memorised all that data anyway. Go on, test him

I think I know who would win the Schmirnoff Award

If we had an award ceremony, what categories would you propose and who would you nominate? I'll set the ball rolling... Tastiest Cacher 2006 Beds Clangers surely? He's got the taste dogs just can't get enough of. I think when they see Nick over the horizon their eyes glaze over and all they can see is an enormous roast chicken walking towards them. Dumb and Dumberest Cacher 2006 You can nominate yourself. Go on. Best Caching Moment 2006 What made you just think "this is fantastic!" Evil Genius Award 2006 Who drove you insane with their cache setting skills? Suggest more! Nominate! (Small print: No gold plated statue or similar trophy will be awarded. It's just for fun. May contain nuts.)

Memory Map say Pocket PC: Microsoft Pocket PC Mobile 2002 with Active Sync. 16Mb RAM. Additional Storage recommended On a typical outing you will need the bits of the map you are visiting - a 12km x 9km approximate screenful of a 1:50K map will take up 2MB or so. You'll also normally have a Pocket Query GPX file running to 4-5MB if you've got 500 caches in it. So you don't need *huge* amounts of storage unless you're intent on loading it up with every map and cache you'll ever need

Here's a reminder of how we all looked last year....

There's a great database of ROC Bunkers available too!