Master Mariner

I'll do (City of) London...

Does anyone know the OOmpaloompas? They have a cache in Greenwich Park (London) that has recently started racking up some DNFs. I have tried contacting them, through GC.com, to see if they would like this cache adopting as it is quite a popular location/cache and it would be a shame to see it fade away. Thanks.

Rodz has volunteered to adopt these so many thanks to him. This topic can be locked now.

Why not set up a web based email address for yourself to cover this period? Gmail is good and reliable. You can change it in your account settings and change it back afterwards. Then you could log in from anywhere in the world. It'll give you something to do in the evenings too. Oss! Unfortunately this is a 24 hour a day operation offshore and this particular ship does not have a permanent Internet connection so that is not an option. On other projects, where there has been a permanent Internet connection, this has not been a problem. Thanks for the suggestion.

The answer is not a lot really! I am going away for three to six weeks to install the submarine cable for an underwater telescope - see this link if you are interested. As I do not know what my email address will be on board the ship I cannot set-up an auto email forward to get my emails. As I look after "The London Rainbow" cache series I will not be able to vet answers to these virtual caches so I am looking for someone to adopt these caches (seven virts and one trad). If it was a couple of weeks break - no problem but a six week delay is, in my opinion, too long to wait. The number of emails can vary from between zero and twenty a week and they're not always correct! If anyone is interested please send me a private email. Thanks.

Keith, I had seen your other posting about the 10 GPSr's and thought I had commented as I had done a calculation regarding them. Just checking I must have forgotten to post a reply but I still have my scribblings. If you take the centre point of the two latitudes and two longitudes a circle with 7 metre radius will cover all the points. That assumes that one position is actually at a corner point. If none of the positions fall at a corner point then the 7m is reduced. See this thread.

A minute of latitude is approximately 1853m, so: an error of xx° yy.100' in latitude equates to 185.3m an error of xx° yy.010' in latitude equates to 18.53m an error of xx° yy.001' in latitude equates to 1.853m For longitude, the length vares approximately as the cosine of the latitude. So, for example a minute of longitude at 51° N is about 1166m, so: an error of xxx° yy.100' in longitude equates to 116.6m an error of xxx° yy.010' in longitude equates to 11.66m an error of xxx° yy.001' in longitude equates to 1.166m So an error in the first digit after the decimal point is significant; after the second digit it is almost reasonable and with the third digit it is just about negligible. Of course if the error is greater than one... Hope that helps. Edited to correct speeling mistakes.

I'm with Geoff on this one. I don't know if they are all affected but the "ignore topics" is certainly not working. Is it anything to do with the ads that are now showing? Edited to add that LordElph has fixed the ignore script - well done sir!

If I remember rightly, you require Memory Map Navigator and NOT Memory Map OS, but I stand to be corrected. If you send your email address I can send you an "idiot's guide" on how to do it. Edited to add: The "idiot's guide" is for getting Google Earth images into MM but the principle is the same!

Always been digital apart from a notebook that I use for my scribblings. I must admit though I do derive pleasure from looking at paper maps and charts as they have a better "feel" to them.

If you use GSAK you can filter out the caches in the area that you have not found. There is a macro on the GSAK website called "ge-2.0.txt" that will then display the filtered caches in Google Earth. I don't have the link to hand but if you email me I can send the macro to you.

That's the procedure I have been using for a long time now, but since the recent changes made on the GC server, this procedure does not seem to be working any longer. Before the changes we had a direct link to the .jpg file from the description page of the cache, when now it goes through this javascript before you get a link to the .jpg file. I guess this is the cause for the problem. Did you check recently? I am experiencing the same problems as 'batla'. I have used a GPX file that I know used to produce images but now does not find any. Like 'batla' I have used the same procedure for ages and it has always worked until the recent tweakings by gc.com.

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere, but the stats routine that Rutson started have now been amended by Lignumaqua and are available as a GSAK macro. Absolutely brilliant Ian - I didn't realise my stats looked so good!! To run the macro you will need the latest beta version of GSAK. Edited to add available here

I think the TomTomGo 300, in its default configuration, will always stick to roads so if you enter a location that is not on a road it will take you to a position, on a road, nearest to the position you entered. If that makes sense! What you could try is entering the location of a cache adjacent to a major road and see if you have the same problem. Edited to add: You may have your TTG set-up to take the fastest route which is the default option. I have mine set up so that I have to tell it what type of route I want, eg fastest, shortest, etc. To change: 1. Tap the screen and tap Change Preferences 2. Scroll through the menu until you get to Planning Preferences 3. Tap Planning Preferences and then tap Ask me every time I plan. 4. Tap Done and Done again. Now when you type in the co-ords instead of tapping fastest route choose walking route. This is assuming you are using the TTG to get you to a cache and you are on a road close to to the cache. If not, you may have to get to a point on a road close to the cache and the choose a walking route.

The London Marathon organisers and Greenwich Council do a first class job in cleaning up after the race. I know that as I drive to work, tomorrow morning, there will be no debris along the three miles of marathon road (I drive along) and the only evidence that there has been a race will be the blue lines on the road and the spectator barriers at the sides of some roads. The barriers are normally gone by Wednesday and the blue lines just disappear in a week or so. Greenwich Park and Blackheath, the starting points, are probably back to pristine condition already. I assume other councils, along the route, do the same. One of the other benefits of having the marathon on your doorstep is that all potholes and dodgy manhole covers are fixed before the race!

I see that you are searching from your home co-ordinates. Have you got them set up correctly in your profile. Also, you have not selected a day to run the cache on.

Changing to v7 of GSAK reset my count to zero. I was around about 700 before but it is now showing as 44.

If it is the couple I am thinking of (scoutboy and mousewiz) they did three of my virtual caches in London. They must have visited the locations as they sent emails with the required data. Their on-line logs, individually, were identical but dirrerent to each others. If that makes sense! As these caches were virtuals there was no physical logs to sign so I cannot check them. When you look at many of the London caches, were someone has done twenty or so in a day, the logs tend to be very similar! A micro is a micro so there is not really a lot to say and cut & paste is so easy... What I am not clear about is what the OP saying: (1) the physical log books were not signed (2) the physical log books were signed and the content of the logs were identical (3) the physical logs were signed twice with the same content and handwriting (4) as for (3) but each cacher was doing "their own thing" in different parts of town. From the content of the emails sent to claim the virts, I do not think it was (4). Let's see what CGT comes up with tomorrow - if he finds any.

In MM v5.1.3 you can change by clicking Mode|Position Format|Lat, Long|Deg, Min.

Now that contains one of the oddities of calculations you sometimes see on cache pages (D-W+X) which calculation do you do first ? D-W or W+X ?? (D-W)+X) or (D-(W+X) both can and do give completely different results. Sorry to go OT but it's one of those thing's that annoys me. When I was at school I had the acronym BODMAS drilled into me by my maths teacher. That stands for: Brackets - Order - Divide - Multiply - Add - Subtract. Order is the only item that is not obvious but relates to raising a number to a power. Amazing that I can still remember this after 40 odd years and still use it on an almost daily basis.

Even when he was caching he once said he didn't always check his emails for caches. His dad was/is a cacher going (or went) under the name of oldb1234. You could try him. I cannot get onto gc.com at the moment to see if he is still active. Edited to add that Dave's information is probably better then mine!

The TB I received is heading for a place called Yoro in Honduras. A search on GC.com, today, showed there are only 12 caches in the whole of Honduras of which only four have been found. The nearest to Yoro is a touch over 70km as the bird flies!

My old maths are a bit rusty but if the four characters after "GC" are alphanumeric, that is contain the letters A-Z and numbers 0-9 then I think there is 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 or 1,679,616 possible combinations. Are there a million plus caches worldwide or are my assumptions wrong?

Brilliant... I now know I have done 133 Siloans caches! Great job Edgemaster!

In Greenwich, the new images were taken slightly before midday and in the depths of winter as indicated by the long shadows. Looking at my place of work, I would say the pictures were taken on a Saturday or Sunday due to the empty car parks - could have been a bank holiday - but definitely in the winter of 2005/2006. The image of the Millennium Dome is brilliant when viewed at about 300m. The absence of planes at City Airport would point to it being a Sunday as there are no flights form about 1300hrs Saturday to the same time on a Sunday. Interestingly, all the footie pitches at Hackney Marsh are marked out but no one in site - possibly not a Sunday but there is a helicopter flying over the pitches!