dunos

I can't stand plastic bags. I have even seen some in supermarket carrier bags. Disgusting. It makes the cache look like litter. They smell, I don't know if I am going to get stabbed by a neadle, eugh. How about if you find one in a bag you mark it as such in the log. something like: WRAPPED IN NASTY PLASTIC BAG would be good. That or just remove the bag - Looks like litter found its way around the cache

I have a list of SD cards and how they perform in various iPAQ's here: http://www.durrans.com/cardspeed/ The rated speed of a card has little effect on how it performs in your device. The X speed that is often quoted tends to refer to the write speed while the maximum read speed remains constant at around 10Mbps. In an iPAQ you are unlikely to ever see these maximum speeds. I would recomend you go with a known brand card as these tend to be more reliable. Sandisk, Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, ATP are all ok. A good place to buy I have found is xlshop.com which appears to have the cheapest prices and cheapest delivery cost. Dan

Pift. If you think you have it bad with fuel prices over there you should try driving here for a bit. Current fuel prices for petrol (unleaded gas) in my home town are 91 english pence per litre. That works out as 344.47p per US liquid gallon. £3.4447 GBP is $6.25 USD. $6.25 USD per gallon. I do get about 35mpg in my Rover.

Has any analysis been done on common pocket queries? If say 1000 people request the same query on a daily or even weekly basis perhaps that query could only be processed once and the result cached. The cached copy could then be sent to the 1000 people. For example I like to keep, in GSAK, all the current caches in the UK. I imagine that there are alot of others in the UK who do the same. At the moment I run about 5 queries a week to maintain the data and sometimes I re-import it all (15 queries) when it gets a bit stale. If lots of other people do the same then perhaps Geocaching.com should have the ability to send one compressed gpx file per week, to all UK paid members who want it. This would then only cost: + The time taken to process this one single query once + The bandwidth needed to send it to X number of UK paid members The file could even be distributed using BitTorrent to save the bandwidth. Dan

My upgrade was shipped last night and according to UPS is in the netherlands still. *twiddle thumbs*. Learned Gerbil beat me to posting a link to TotalPDA. Global Positioning Systems appear to have sold out of their first batch and are expecting a new shipment on the 13th June: http://www.globalpositioningsystems.co.uk/

For users of TTN3 Pocket PC edition: When you order the update, which I have, they state that they will send it on CD within 5 weeks. They do not offer a download link. For TTN4 things may be different. The update includes, for free, street level mapping of all of the EU as well as UK maps. The retail version of TTN5 doesn't include the EU maps. TotalPDA have now shipped retail copies to people.

Lets face it, this isn't about congestion it is about raising more tax money. Putting tax on smokers isn't about helping people to quit. Those who are most addicted just end up paying more. I don't think this will affect geocaching since most caches I do involve lots of country lanes that are generally uncongested. This sort of scheme is to catch the commuters and school-run mums. This sort of scheme is likely to use GPS since GPS is accurate enough for tracking how far you have travelled and what roads you are on. Even in a built up area a navigation system like tomtom is pretty good at fixing you to a road based on your speed and direction (vector?). In cities with lots of high-rise blocks close to the road this could be augmented with number plate reading cameras such as in London. Will this sort of scheme be introduced? Probably at some point. I don't see it happening for a while, not for the next ten years or so. To start with you have to get all new cars fitted with a black box. Retro-fitting to old cars would be possible but it wouldn't be accepted by the public on a compulsary scheme, especially as these things cost in the region of £300 (more for the ones that do engine monitoring, track which gear you are in, if the boot is open, etc...). So then you have to wait 10 to 20 years for the majority of people to buy one of these 'new' cars as they filter down into the used car market. Then you have the issue of another massive government database. It is bound to fail initially and everyone will be charged incorrectly. This is where having your own GPS with logging will be a good idea to prove where you have been. I imagine that if the black box can't get a GPS signal for a while it will do one of several things:- - Alert the police - Fine you a fixed amount - Tell you to go to a garage to get it fixed - Revert to a default road charge till you get it fixed If this was really about getting people to use public transport then they would improve public transport. I agree with congestion charging in London since there is some fantastic transport there. Londoners don't realise it. 5 minutes between busses and tube trains? OMG THE WORLD WILL END IF THERE ISN'T A BUS EVERY SECOND! Try living in a country town or even any other city where it is a bus every half hour if you are lucky. If you are lucky then it probably doesn't go where you want anyway. Dan

At the end of the day it is up to the player how they play the game. By releasing a travel bug or setting a cache you are effectively putting it into the public domain and while many will respect the wishes of the 'owner' it really can't be regulated unless you intend to camp next to it and enforce those rules. A travel bug hotel is just another cache. If I visited such a cache and found travel bugs that I didn't think I could move on fast enough, didn't like the look of, or didn't think I could help then I wouldn't take them. Travel Bug Hotels are a good idea in that if I had a bug that had the objective of moving quickly to a particular country then I would be inclined to leave it in a high traffic cache or hotel knowing that it is more likely to be moved on than if I left it on the top of Ben Nevis. An empty hotel is not necessaraly a bad thing. Surely the hotels are there to help bugs move, not to provide a prison until the requisite rules of said hotel are met.

I went onto the tomtom webpage and the update download is there for 59 euro's TT5 Navigator download is only for the Go, not for the Pocket PC or Palm. TomTom Navigator 3 maps are aparently incompatable with 5 unless you have a Go which has slightly more up to date maps than those that were shipped with Navigator 3 for the palm and PPC. While it is all based on the common platform there is still a hardware layer that would introduce platform specific bugs.

Since the only version of TomTom 5 that is available for use today is the hacked copy I will be intrested to see what the official one is like. TotalPDA only got theirs on Friday for shipping at the earliest Tuesday and the first batch of upgrades isn't due to be shipped till next week. Or do we have some people here who work for a PDA shop? Dan

I geocache with Memory Map so the long/lat function isn't of much use to me. I do however use TomTom when driving around and I have ordered the upgrade to 5. They have spent a long time developing it and I am sure there will be bugs to start with and patches will follow. I mainly bought it for the updated maps. As a bonus the upgrade includes the full set of EU maps which will be fantastic as I am off to France and Holland in about 6 to 8 weeks time. Shame they don't do one of Aruba where I am going on holiday in October. There are 12 geocaches on the caribbean island and I am going to bag one if the girlfriend will let me! Dan

I have an HP iPAQ 4150. I use this with a TomTom bluetooth GPS unit and Memory Map to find caches. It works quite well.

When caching I use an Aquapac to keep it dry. I have the Pro version which has the flap to protect the screen. When not caching I have a leather flip case from proporta.com which has a sheet of aluminium in the cover to protect the screen. Dan

My first thought was that this is wrong. My second was that I wish I had thought of it. This will raise awareness of geocaching. Much like the TV news clips and radio shows that we get excited about. £12.50 may sound like alot of money however I would imagine that it doesn't actually result in alot of profit. From reading their website they have to pay for an office, a vehicle, and if they don't want to end up bankrupt then alot of public liability insurance. I wouldn't imagine that a large group of people is that much more suspicious than just one person stomping around in a bush. It will be obvious they are on some sort of activity day and if I was a walker I would try to stay clear of them. I would have thought that the cache locations would have been discovered by the company before hand so that they would know roughly where to look. What about event caches? Do the local caches in the area suddenly have to cope with lots of people turning up on the same day or within a short period of time? The Blaze Castle cache and the Hansel and Gretel cache would be quite good for a large group. People won't cause much damage to the environment while hunting these two caches I would have thought. Everyone has to start somewhere and while GPS costs are getting lower I can see that it would be a barrier to someone who didn't know if they wanted to continue with a hobby or not. It doesn't look like they are planning on doing this every week or every day. Infact from their events calendar they don't appear to have another Geocaching day planned. A polite email, possibly from one of the cache owners or from our forum moderators, might not go amis just to confirm the guidelines on things like travel bugs, cito, etc. I think it would be worrying if we were to chastise these people when we could educate them. Why sound like an elitest clique when we could include someone in an activity that we enjoy and others could also enjoy. Surely if people can be introudced to the activity by an organised event rather than stumbling over the website and not bothering to read the guidelines then this would be a good thing?

I had decided what caches I was going to visit. I was even going to scope out a location for a new cache. However fate decided that it was not to be... My reason why I couldn't geocache this weekend is as follows. Woke up on Saturday to a windy but otherwise fine day. Birds were singing etc. Went to the local garage to get the tracking adjusted on my car (stupid speed bumps). Got them to do a brake check while they were at it and it turned out that I had a leaking caliper. By the time I had walked home, had lunch, walked back to the garage and picked up the car it was getting late, cold, and I was starting to feel hungry and in need of Dr Who. Sunday comes around and what do I find. I have a cough, sore throat, and generally feel minging. What is taunting me more is the fact that it is a LOVELY SUNNY DAY outside. Dan.

There are a number of versions of firefox that can run stand-alone from CDs and also from flash memory cards.

I think the great thing about geocaching is that competitiveness really isn't a factor in playing the game. For some the fun is hiding, others number of finds, others it is just a good excuse for a walk. The more regulation you put into a game the less accessible it is for people.

I am actually impressed at how people who drop litter manage to get to some quite remote and out of the way places.

1.0.4 is now out.

So I am thinking of setting my first cache. I am now looking for a good place to put one . I think I have found somewhere and need to do a bit more walking around at the weekend to find a suitable spot for the cache but what I need to know is if anyone has had any contact with the Avon Wildlife Trust. Are they fairly amenable to geocaching? I know that there are a few caches on their land already but there isn't a general agreement in the agreements database yet. Regards, Dan

You ask my legs after walking up and down hills on Sunday if it is a sport.

I don't have kids so I am not very qualified on how to raise them but having said that I was once a kid myself so I think I can still comment. Surely learning about loss and stuff is a good thing for kids? A bit like having pets that die off after a while. While it is sad that both of my hamsters, Dennis and Fudge, died I think it will help me to cope with any future loss. They can always release another travel bug.

I can vouch for the bus service. I was most impressed when I went there in October last year. If you have never been there before then I can also recommend the city bus tour which is also a good way to have a day ticket to go all around the city centre.

Well, the car got home without overheating so fingers crossed it is ok. I think the smell was probably the clutch being not very happy with me. The lack of bee should have alerted me I guess. Although the four other caches I found yesterday were also bee free.

Guess what happened when dunos didn't bother to check if the cache was archived before he left home... The cache page: Brown's Folly (Bath & NE Somerset) My log entry: Log entry by dunos Dan