needaxeo

If this is even close to the truth, why do so many people use an iPhone to cache? Well, lots of people buy mobile phones. To try and get you to buy coffee from your nearest retailer, many of them have gps, digital compasses, wibbly wobbly web access, maps and an app store full of toys (some of them probably still make telephone calls? ) It's kind of an obvious step from having the capability as part of something else to trying it out I suppose. I think the first time you see it in action it looks quite amazing. Google Street view that reacts to the way you're pointing the phone? After all phones are new, and perhaps car sat nav is old hat, but maybe just as being able to walk around and make a phone call amazed people in the early 90s (late 80s if you were a yuppie) I'm guessing walking around with something that tells you where you are is a novelty for many people. An apple owner saying "what if you can't afford something?" - That's irony Steve Jobs will have visibly aged. But, TBH, I can't see the point in buying an iphone 3 or 4 to geocache. Why? Well, it has few advantages over your common or garden GPSr. How about "Get a £99 android phone." instead? That does have some - It's cheaper than many (most?) paperless gpsr devices - It's got wibbly wobbly web connectivity, phone connectivity, gps, digital compass and more besides. - Maps. Street view. Navigation. - You can run whatever software you want on it to do your geocaching (or anything else) including writing your own software. There's no Steve Jobs to tell you what apps you can and can't have. No Garmin / a.n.other gpsr manufacturer giving you a "take it or leave it" application either. "This model can store 500 caches. On this model we change the 500 to 2000, recompile and charge you £100 more. But that's nothing, wait till you see the price of our maps" Compared with most outdoor gps it has 2 possible downsides - Battery life - Ruggedness Although there are probably android phones that address one or both of those. I've got a Dakota 10. It's great for what it is but my son recently bought a Samsung i5500 android phone and, for everything except battery life and ruggedness, I'd say it's better. I was amazed at just how good it was. And its not the only one by any stretch. so you can add :- - pick your own hardware. Cheap, expensive. Big or small. Although you might lose the price advantage (Not for long though I suspect as I said above, lots of people buy phones) If someone brings out an android phone that'll survive a 25mph head first exit from a cycle as my Dakota did last summer (my phone survived too, but that was tucked away) I'd say Garmin would have a lot to worry about. They don't really do anything now as far as I can see. In the sense that if they turn their outdoor gps devices into a phone / app store / computer in the way that phone manufacturers have basically turned their phone / computing devices into gps receivers, at best they'd be another phone manufacturer.

That's exactly what it means - go to their website and use the "API" link near the bottom. Well, I doubt it. I read that blurb about an "api" on their blog and translated it to mean that they've just developed a way to try and get members of geocaching.com who either have lots of caches and / or lots of found stats to leech their data off of this site and move it to theirs. They take something that belongs to someone else and attach a freetard license to it? Doesn't sound good to me. Oh please, Garmin's "business model" is selling GPSr devices. They are closed devices and still are afaict. it stands to reason that there has to be restrictions on the data, because otherwise someone would just steal it (although as we can see, there's nothing stopping someone creating a crap site and a tool to leech data and trying to get the members here to pinch their own data for Garmin) If Garmin's business was geocaching, they'd probably want the data protecting too. Similarly, I suspect a lot of cache owners want their data protecting as well, and maybe some of the members here who are posting logs and photographs want their data protecting. Telling me how great my data is going to be for your business model (or garmin's or some unnamed developer) isn't selling it very well. Oh, but it's "free" for me? Whoop de doop. The idea that you can only access geocaching.com via their software seems to be flawed, so I'm not sure what you mean (unless they wrote google earth, google chrome and the software on the garmin dakota for just 3 examples of software I've used to interface with their site) Garmin knocking up a site (that at the moment is barely finished and next to useless anyway afaict) and seemingly some api or tool they hope members here will use to leech their own data is all it is. Well ok, like Kellogs they've added a cute mascot too - is that supposed to get the kids to nag us to use it?

Dunno if it'll be good or not, but it seems disingenuous to the nth degree for them to call it "open" and to blather on their blog about how they believe geocaching should be "free" and, just when I thought I could keep my lunch down apparently GPSr with paperless geocaching are 'eco-friendly' ?!?!? All they were missing was some crap about the Dakota 10 containing friendly bacteria to get rid of that bloated feeling. Presumably they will be sending me the cash I paid for my Dakota 10 soon? So my geocaching can be free like the great outdoors? Excuse me, I need to fetch a bucket. I can't think of many companies that are more price gouging than Garmin (fair dos to them, we don't have to buy their products, I'm not anti- them, but this opencaching site's blurb is patronising garbage imo) Unless "open" means they are developing some standardised, published spec that any site or gps manufacturer can implement to interface with their site and with any paperless geocaching features on Garmin products? If that's what it means, all power to it. But if not, then saying "open" seems pretty meaningless. But, I think it's moot. If geocaching has a boom phase like CB radio or skateboards it'll be short lived after which, Geocaching will reach a finite, but relatively small size simply because of the nature of it. I can't see the point in lots of sites hosting caches. Nor for that matter that there's any great requirement for innovation or new products - except perhaps hopefully if/ when the EU sats go live. Maybe there'll be some EU company with a product that competes with garmin (I know the US has a few alternatives, but here the expensive end has some but there's not really an alternative - even the US competition like magellan seem thin on the ground in the UK) I thought the memory map adventurer sounded like it could have been good. If they released an SDK so you could develop a real "open" paperless geocaching application on their PDA based receiver, that'd be a great alternative to Garmin. That's really where something new is needed in the UK imo, not another site with caches. This one is fine and the price is trivial. But some competition in the receiver. But I suppose the masses will just get GPS on their iphones, and if they spend one or two weeks messing around with it, that'll be enough for them.

Well, I'm sure you implicitly meant to say "so long as you have their permission to send their name and details of course" but as that wasn't clear and as you and the earlier poster both seem to imply that you only ask them after the fact, let's say the thing I think that would stop most people from putting forward someone else's name is simple manners.

Personally I think you'd have to cache over a /lot/ of sq mileage of the UK to justify buying it. Unless you have a need for OS maps for other activities that you do (but then you'd probably already own them) I'd wait until - They get licensing that means buying a copy of OS 1:50k or 1:25k means you can view it on your PC, your GPS, your ipad, your TV, your phone, your new gps now you've replaced it and so on. - They add some decent digital features, like stile-by-stile cross country routing and so on. For casual route planning, you can view OS maps online for free at bing.com and a few other places. You can get a reasonable sized custom map using OS maps on many Garmin handhelds - as an example, I have a custom map of OS 1:50k that covers the area around my home coords that a PQ for "1000 nearest caches I haven't found" returns. But, the openstreet maps, when you route as pedestrian, do some pretty amazing (well I'm always impressed) "stile by stile navigation" if the footpaths, bridleways and so on are well covered in the area you are caching. Sometimes, if that's not the case, having the OS map showing the footpath wins, but really the OS maps functionality as a digital map is pretty poor for the premium they want imo, especially when you consider the number of copies you might need to buy just to get the same map on 2 or 3 devices you own.

So that rules out most of the people using them then Are you saying you submit names and do all this without the person's knowledge and before you've ascertained whether they have any interest in doing it in the first place? Management by committee eh? I'd speak to a good libel lawyer too, I am not one, but I would have said it's probably better to let someone apply for something first before discussing their suitability or what their posts are like amongst yourselves.

I think there's a distinction between TBs being logged by someone and then they lose or hoard them, and TBs that disappear from caches. I've seen no end of logs in caches that say "Took whatever TB" and even looked online and have seen them say "Took whatever TB" there too. They think they've logged it. Yet they've clearly not logged the trackable online despite signing the log in the cache, and filling in the log online. IMO, a lot of this is just because the interface for logging and trackables is badly designed and it doesn't spell out what folk should be doing. Even the paperless geocaching GPSs don't (yet) have anything to hold an inventory of TBs and functionality to let you mark which TBs you've taken from a cache, and select when you drop them off. As I've said in these forums before on the same topic - the trackable system also conspires against simple mistakes too. e.g If you drop the TB off in a cache, but log it into the wrong one by mistake, you no longer have the number and can't do anything about it (unless you wander out to the cache again and get the number) I've done that once, for a cache that was about 2 miles down the road. If I'd travelled further I can't see me jumping through hoops because the system is so badly designed you can't fix a simple logging mistake. Plus it's not always easy to see that mistake. Why? Because the log page is bereft of the info. It's not even that it's that complicated either. It's simply left to chance that a new geocacher twigs that they've got to log a trackable separately when finding it. But at the same time when placing it you can do that on the log page. Even just typing that discrepancy shows how flawed it is. The fact that log books and log entries are full of folk saying "I took the TB" "I dropped off the TB" that suggests, erroneously, that these logs are what you do when you find or take a TB. That's what people see, that's what they do. See the obvious flaw? Clearly there should be no need at all to say "I took a TB" in a log. The fact folk do it, is because the system is flawed and doesn't display in the log that you took it. Why doesn't it? Because you can't say you took it at the right time. Fixing the system won't stop theft or hoarding, but nothing will - at the very least though they could deal with the majority of mistakes or confusion over trackable logging by improving the interface to the site.

If I'm by myself I'm usually cycling and I generally only do 1 or 2 caches. It's on the theory that if somewhere is nice to cycle to then it doesn't make a lot of sense to do every cache you can find the first time you visit...plus if I'm by myself I always think I might go back with my son and revisit. If I'm going with my son I tend to pick a series. As for caches close to home : using the premise that you can "nip out after school / work" to do a cache if it's close by, I prefer to leave some local to that end, and travel further on the weekends or holidays when you go out for a longer day. But, at the moment there are several hundred relatively close, when I've done them (and as you can see, I'm in no great rush) I'm not that sure how motivated I'll be to go further afield. I've certainly no interest in caching by car. I guess it depends at what rate caches change or new caches appear, if local caches slow to a trickle I'll probably just use the GPS to plan interesting cycle rides instead - which is more or less what I use the caches for in the first place, just an excuse to cycle or walk somewhere.

When you choose 'log attempt' on the Dakota, it adds an entry to a file called geocache_visits.txt, that's in the Garmin folder when you connect the Dakota 10 to your computer. If you go here, http://www.geocaching.com/my/uploadfieldnotes.aspx when your Dakota is connected, you can browse to the file on your garmin select this file and upload it to the site. After you've uploaded it : http://www.geocaching.com/my/fieldnotes.aspx will show a list of the caches you marked as 'found', 'not found' etc on the Dakota. So you can go through them and log them on the site. The site will get the status and date from your upload (it will also upload any comment you added on the Dakota. Personally speaking, all I use the comment for is to add a reminder if, say, I've taken or dropped a TB or geocoin so I can remember which cache it was from) It depends what your PQ is. I use a PQ that selects 1000 caches nearest to my home coords that I haven't found. It's a fairly basic query (because, imo, the rest of the options are mostly guff anyway. e.g I can select caches with the cycling attrib and get caches that you can't cycle to and miss lots that you can. Similarly, cache size, terrain, and difficulty are all fairly arbitrary and meaningless ime) So, I figure you may as well just get as many caches as you can near where you want to go that you haven't found before, and do any extra filtering with your brain. The PQ interface is an ugly mess too imo, which doesn't help. So the most simple answer to your question is, the caches are in a file on your Dakota (if it's from a PQ it'll be called something like 4547574.gpx with the number corresponding to the zip file you get from the PQ page) If you delete or replace that file, the caches will be deleted or replaced en masse. You can't delete individual caches, just the whole file. Although you can have more than one file with caches stored in it on the Dakota if, for example, you have more than one PQ and want to copy both. But, presumably if your pocket query doesn't filter out found caches, then they will be on the Dakota (marked as found) when you copy it. It's all much easier to do than to describe I think. Perhaps not helped because the site doesn't do a very good job of presenting all these options. When I first bought premium membership I already knew all the features I now had access to, but I still found myself hunting for where they were amidst the mess of links and pointless guff (do I need to be told what GPS I own?) stuck on the rhs of your profile page. But persevere and you'll see you probably don't need a geocaching for dummies, it's something that's very simple that's just made to look more complicated than it is because of bad design. e.g The fields notes interface. You're supposed to find a link to upload your field notes by clicking a word at the end of this sentence "While Geocaching with the Garmin Colorado or Garmin Oregon you can upload your geocache finds directly from the device once you return back from your day geocaching. Click here to upload Field Notes from your Garmin Colorado or Garmin Oregon." ?!?! It's the interface equiv of "programmer art" in early games I think. It doesn't mention the Dakota either, but I hope they don't add any more words to correct it (because there are about 5 other similarly verbose sentences with hidden links in them on the same page) Yes, if you drag and drop the latest version of the query into the gpx folder before you go geocaching, you should have fairly up-to-date info (you can configure the site to email notifications to you if you want the very latest info)

True, but not everywhere on the planet is of interest, however! Yes it is. Special interest on the other hand...

Seems moot then. A cache (or anything else for that matter) should have permission from the land owner whereever it is. This really has nothing to do with reviewers or geocaching rules, it's just the right thing to do tm. And there's an expectation from the folk that are looking for the cache that permission was sought. If I'm getting chased across a field by a large angry scotsman shouting "get off my land" when I say "But I'm geocaching" he says "Oh right, yeah, Bill did ask" then we're cool. If no permission was obtained someone's done a disservice to him and anyone that went looking for the cache. e.g There is a cache near me in an area near an SSSI and when I enter the area all the signs make it very clear where horses, people and bikes can and cannot go and the same signs make it clear they don't want anyone wandering off the footpaths. Yet the cache isn't on a footpath. Like you, I can't be bothered to find out if it has permission or not, but I suspect it probably doesn't, and I won't go for it as a result. So long as folk mark any caches with "I couldn't be bothered to get permission" if they don't already have it that seems reasonable. I guess the "glass half full" approach is, you (or someone else) got away without getting it for nearly a decade, which, to an extent does support your "it's pointless even trying to get it" stance. Nearly. It's an area of land that is of special interest to the scientist Ok, I make a joke, but the whole planet is of interest to science.

You could use mobile atlas creator and create a kmz (i.e garmin custom map) of the area the caches are in. Mobile atlas creator can use various sources, including bing's 1:50k and 1:25k OS maps. http://mobac.dnsalias.org/ The resulting kmz file can be loaded into google earth, garmin basecamp (and probably a few other programs) as well as a few garmin gps devices (so long as you keep within their size limits) Obviously you'll know the same programs can load gpx or loc files too, so voila you end up with an OS map with caches on it.

Ah, a religious argument There's not one correct way to do anything. Ok map reading is relatively simple anyway, but imagine your idea applied to something that takes years to master. The idea there is only one way to play the piano, write a book, paint a picture, do an experiment or write computer software and so on and so on. Not only would that be completely ridiculous, but it's self evidently not the case. But although I say it's ridiculous, you'll find folk frothing at the mouth on computer programming forums about where things like { or ; should be and what is "correct" That said, there are usually far more incorrect ways to do things that inexperienced people find to make their lives difficult. And that's why we have advice, teachers and so on. But no teacher is telling you the correct way to do something because there is no such thing (and the intelligent and talented shouldn't have too much problem observing and learning more than one way, switching between them and, if they are really good, coming up with own) The phrase "north up" doesn't actually mean anything without clarification. Folk that make maps or stick satellites into space are using (usually different) co-ordinate systems that are pretty arbitrary. There's no "right" one. No more than speaking English is right compared with Spanish or Italian. I think you'd be better letting kids find what works best for them, letting them identify what problems they have with the way they are doing it, and pointing out what might work better as an alternative. They might find something we didn't think of that improves the way we do things.

I think the problem here is, the woodland trust have stooped to using facts and scientific knowledge to make their points.

Makes you wonder if he shouldn't get someone else to check that grandpa's ok... You were arrested and charged for using a nail in a tree?

Just FYI, all of our relatives are mortal too, you don't have the monopoly on it.

Brilliant post. Nobody with an ounce of sense will attempt to attack it. However, I REALLY wish people would quit using this annoying phrase. In order for comedy to work, it has to have an element of truth. There is NO evidence of a healthy grey wolf ever making an unprovoked attack on humans in North America. Ever! As long as I'm up on my soapbox, what's this snarky reference to "beasts in the forest"? huh?? Perhaps, but "being made of meat" is enough provocation for an animal that's hungry But "evidence of provoked attack" doesn't sound like something you'll find outside of a disney film where the wolf is depicted as having human-like emotions, motives and desires and is voiced by Brad Pitt. "I'm only eating you because you've been a very, very naughty geocacher" Next week, "Man's life during the time of the dinosaurs" that we learned by watching the Flintstones. Quit playing around. Does it really say that? Well, if you read the entire paragraph, it's actually a qualification made April 2009 to prevent the deletion of logs that had extraneous additional logging requirements. In other words, the way I read it, it's not saying to finders "You must sign the log" so much as it's giving the guideline to placers "You mustn't require anything more than signing the log, except optionally"

Take Ross Kemp with you, you'll be fine.

Try google earth, ime multimap's aerial is off compared with it. I've done 2 waypoints near my house using Garmin's waypoint averaging feature, one on the drive, and one sat on the computer I'm typing on inside. Both are within a couple of feet of being "right" assuming that google earth is right. But, when I look on bing, the waypoints aren't in the same place. (But as I said in another post the way Google earth imagery aligns with OS maps suggests to me they are right or at least both wrong by the same amount)

Well maybe, but I think in general it's a mistake to decide there's "one true way" to do anything. "here's how I do it" is fair enough, but there's a danger that turns into "here's how everyone else should do it" Even north up, I rotate the map, I'm just rotating the GPSr unit itself, so it's me rotating the map, not the software. But if someone else navigates effectively south east up or track up or, without using any map at all, I don't think they are wrong.

Generally speaking the models with electronic compass are, because of the feature, the more expensive ones of the range. But I guess if you mean "cheaper than a Dakota 20", there are a couple of Etrex models that have it and no doubt 2nd hand ones too. Although when you stand still Garmin do seem to often do a 180 degree turn telling you where you've been is now in front of you, which I've no doubt will confuse some. I'm not sure having a compass will make that much difference when you're close to the cache though, bar telling you which way north is. You don't want to walk and just look at an arrow in case you fall off a cliff I'm always telling my son to not wander along looking at the GPS it's not a good habit to learn. Instead, you're looking at the screen, it says "50m", say, and you look at the terrain and see a tree or a bridge or whatever about 50m ahead, you think "It'll be that tree / bridge or whatever" You get pretty good at judging distances. Setting the map north up rather than track up can help a bit (because the only thing that spins then when you stop or when the signal is poor is the arrow, and as it's often easy to orientate the map to the terrain, you'll already know which way to walk without needing a compass) although some may find 'North up' confusing. If you use "track up" it's better IME to get into the habit of not stopping. Especially not just as you get near the cache site in a kind of "right we're here" way. Instead, start from as far back as you can aligning the track so the 'as the crow flies' line is the line you're walking along and try to walk straight up to the cache and then stop. As you get closer you can make small adjustments to keep it so you are walking directly to it (subject to not walking into a wall of course ) But you really want to aim to get the gps to be saying around 4m or less and then you stop, and that's pretty much as close as you'll get to the co-ordinates given most of the time. The next bit is just looking for the hiding spot without the gps. But if you don't / can't walk right up to it there's little point ime trying to follow arrows once it's saying below 13m. You just need to eliminate each direction from where you're stood looking for the distance to lower, rather than by walking around and around in circles trying to follow the compass screen.

Certainly in the UK, the following seem to correlate very well 1. Ordnance Survey 1:25k and 1:50k maps (e.g as viewable on bing) 2. Google earth 3. My GPSr 4. The caches I find. 1 and 2 have a 1:1 match for the areas I've looked at. e.g I can load a kmz made with mobile atlas creator into google earth, and note from the edges of the area that the roads match exactly. Then by sliding the opacity slider up and down it's clear to see it's more or less pixel perfect and the shape of a village or town matches nigh on exactly. That suggests that they are either both accurate, or that one used the other in its creation. So they are both as inaccurate as each other. I just take the view that if the real world varies from what OS and Google say, then reality is wrong 3 and 4 are obviously not quite that accurate, but the waypoint I placed at the front of my house, which every now and again I go outside and add another 'waypoint averaging' sample, appears on google earth within a couple of feet of where I am standing, and tracks I've made along streets, footpaths, towpaths and so on as well as caches I've been to correlate extremely well. We're talking a few feet out typically, just as you'd expect with the inaccuracy of a GPSr. But there's certainly no sign of this "100' out" that's spoken of in the geocaching kml extension (although it's not clear whether they are saying they deliberately obfuscate the cache positions in their extension to make them wrong or whether they are saying google earth is wrong to begin with? It seemed moot to me because google earth will load the same gpx file you put on your GPSr anyway and when I do that, the caches appear over 1 and 2 in the same place and, for many caches that are, say, on a particular junction of 2 footpaths that's where it is when you visit it. So, at least to that scale it seems accurate. But obviously the maps I'm comparing here are still only 1:25k) Whether other countries / areas are as accurate though I wouldn't know.

"Found cache" and "Signed log" seem fairly easy to distinguish as different things. Not the least that you're reading a log in the first place to know that they haven't signed a different log. What if someone found a cache and didn't sign the log online or off? Maybe he's telling people he found it. Or his GPSr says he has. You should be absolutely apoplectic with rage but wouldn't actually know that you should be. Sounds to me like you should jump up and down shouting and shaking a stick for 30 minutes. Just in case. If it's signed at all that's merely proof that it was found and since there are other ways to prove you found it (taking a photo holding it for example) I don't see any reason to require signing the log, especially when there are valid reasons for not signing it. But, if you feel some have been dishonest about finding it when they haven't, then maybe you have a point with those logs.

The first time I tried to upload my field notes it kept saying there were no records. As I only had 2 and the first was a "didn't find" I deleted that line and then it worked...and it's worked since (even with didn't finds) So, I'm not sure what it didn't like about the line I deleted (if anything at all - it might be they fixed something while I was messing about) But I suggest you create a copy of your geocaching_visits.txt file and delete the top line from the original, and retry uploading, if that fails delete the top line again...so on until it works. And then you should have the line that, for whatever reason, causes the upload to barf (which presumably someone at Groundspeak would be interested in seeing)

Newspapers and magazines are struggling these days. I think you'd be very lucky to create a magazine that was financially viable, especially for a hobby that is predominately web-based in the first place. Although to answer your question, personally speaking I haven't bought more than one or two magazines for over a decade (and one of them I bought electronically and only because my brother was in it), so I doubt I'd buy it.