dakboy

How did this post get past the moderators? I also have an Android geocaching app ready to release as soon as commercial apps can go on the Android market. I was forbidden to post here advertising a link to my web site explaining my app and displaying screen shots too. Groundspeak is very cautious about outside developers intruding on their turf. It seems that anyone with a competitive product has road blocks thrown up to prevent producing it easily. That is a shame as the geocaching community could only grow better with a supported developer attitude. From the description it reads as though it functions almost excusively "offline" with GPX files, not by screen-scraping GC.com or using any kind of API. I don't see how it's any different from GPSrs which read GPX files direct from a memory card. Perhaps that's the difference?

Or after. My mother can't seem to stop from moving the camera after pressing the shutter. She has it in her head that if she pushes, that's the shot. Not understanding that the camera has to focus, fire the flash, then actually trigger the shutter. Press the shutter release, count to 3, THEN move the camera. The other thing to understand is that you will not get the "perfect" picture by waiting for it, or on your first attempt. Take TONS of pictures (hey, it's all digital, so it doesn't cost anything), learn what works and doesn't, and don't forget that there is sometimes a bit of luck involved with getting the timing just right.

The only reason I have Verizon is because no one else has comparable coverage where I live. The phone selection over the past 5-6 years has degraded terribly to the point where, when I get calls from Verizon asking me if I want to renew my contract & upgrade my phone (going into another 2-year lock-in) , I tell them "there's no point to me doing that. You don't offer any phones that I want. I barely like the one I have now." And don't even get me started on their crippling of the phones & forcing you to use their proprietary software, instead of the software and features the manufacturer built in. Things like removing the OBEX Bluetooth profile so that you can't sync your phone w/ your computer's address book. Even if the manufacturer's spec sheet says you can do it, Verizon strips that ability when they load on their proprietary software. There's no 3G service yet anywhere around me, so there's not much point to getting one of the phones that can take advantage of it (iPhone, G1, etc.) on the other carriers. So until that time comes, or the other carriers improve their coverage overall and offer up a phone that appeals to me, I'm stuck on Verizon month to month (unless my phone starts breaking down).

Depending on what software you use to view PDFs, they're not 100% harmless. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...y-exploits.html Really want to be safe? Download the file, don't open it (it can't do any harm if you don't open it), then upload to Google Documents to read it.

I very often use my GPS with an orienteering compass (a Silva one I've had for going on 20 years now). A GPS will always have an error radius, but I've found that when I'm having trouble nailing down the location, or the GPS is pointing me somewhere that's impossible, triangulating the position with my compass helps tremendously. My GPS is ancient by most standards around here (Magellan Meridian Gold, bought in 2001, never updated the firmware) and lacks an electronic compass, so I probably do this more often than most folks.

I picked up a TB back in 2003, and then my interest in caching plummeted. I had that TB kicking around for a year or two, handed it off to my father at some point, and it did eventually get back on the road after a little over 2 years. That bug is still on the move today

Did they remove WAAS from later iterations of the Meridian Gold or its firmware? I bought mine in '01 and it has WAAS support. I've considered upgrading to the latest firmware for it but if they removed features, I'll stick with what I have.

It's a great unit for geocaching. They are very accurate but sometimes suffer from the "slingshot" effect. When I used to cache with my Meridian I would stop and pause for a second or two between 50 and 100 feet from the cache. All was good then. If you don't do that and you are moving along pretty good heading toward a cache you will all of a sudden find your self passing the cache by a hundred feet or so. This is the slingshot as it takes the unit a few seconds to catch up sometimes. So a quick pause when nearing the cache is sometimes necessary. Other than that the gold is a very good unit and probably the most popular gps out there at one time. I will second this. We've had our Meridian Gold for over 3.5 years and it's been very accurate for geocaching. I do think it doesn't get you in quite as close as Garmin's might with the zoom feature. However, with triangulating we've had good success. Enjoy! It's slower than newer units, and maybe not as accurate, but I've had mine for 7 years, running on the original firmware, and it's been quite good to me. It's been no trouble at all in my geocaching renaissance (finally coming back to it in earnest after many slow years). This week I've been looking at newer units, but I can't justify the expense when this one works perfectly fine and once I get a USB->Serial adapter for 1/4 the cost of a cheap new unit, I can plug it into my Mac.

Or when the address isn't even in the GPS navigation system. The in-dash navigation in my father's truck cannot locate my house, nor his own. He has to use a bogus address at least for his house in order to get the starting point close.

Would like to get out on my bike caching, Waymarking & benchmarking. If anyone has a handlebar mount for the Magellan Meridian series, please let me know. Thanks.

If you look up the address in Google Maps (don't even need Google Earth or the geocaching kml), and click "Link to this page", usually you'll get the coordinates right in the URL. If you don't, zoom in one notch (make sure the hotel is in the center) and try again. Should work there. I did it about a half-dozen times this weekend. I'm going on vacation myself in about a week and my plan is to load up as many caches & benchmarks as I think are reasonable into my GPS, and print out the pages to take with me. I'd like to find a way to condense each cache's web page into a space small enough that I can fit 4 onto a sheet of paper.

Plattsburgh, NY is in the far North East corner of NY. Are you still looking for help with this? I'm not exactly in the area but may be able to find someone closer.

Started w/ a '99 Dakota 4x4, then an '03 Dakota 4x4, now I'm into an '03 Subaru Outback. Though my last cache I found using the oldest transportation mankind has ever had - I walked there from home.

There's the McIntyre Mine (iron) & Upper Works http://www.adirondack-park.net/history/mcintyre.mine.html - Now that I think about it, this may be where you're going already. The B47 crash site can be difficult to find up on Wright Peak. While you're in that area, Marcy Dam is a nice stop, yet very heavily trafficked. There are 2 good museums up there, one in Blue Mountain Lake and a newer one in Tupper Lake (I think).

Thanks everyone. I'll go ahead and log my own if/when we do this. Weather's looking spectacular for tomorrow, but it's not enough notice for him, so I'll be going solo this weekend.

I haven't done this yet, this is more of a preparation question. A coworker of mine is also into caching, and has tracked down a couple already. If we were to go out caching for a day and log a few, would it be better to create a new "userID" on geocaching.com for our joint efforts, or each of us log the finds on our own? On one hand, I don't want to bloat the cache hit counts on the site by both of us logging, but OTOH I think we should be able to group these finds with our personal ones easily.

Well, nothing serious - YET. Last weekend while chasing Round Lake National Natural Landmark, I was presented with "400 feet, dead ahead" to get to the cache. That meant up a 45° or steeper slope, wet, loose dirt, lots of dead leaves on the ground. Nearly slid down the thing a few times. Got to the top, then finished decrypting the hint. The cliff it warns about? Yeah, I climbed it. D'OH! Worst part was, I never found the cache. This makes TWICE I've gone after a cache in that park, approached from the wrong side, and didn't find the blasted thing. Encountered some treacherous climbing on the other hunt as well, but not as bad as this one.