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Pasha

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Everything posted by Pasha

  1. If I'd been attesting to quality, I would've said "quality" instead of "numbers." I'm still relatively new to this and wouldn't presume to judge the quality of caches in the area, at least not publicly. I certainly have my own opinions about some of the caches I've done in Kitsap county, but I'm not sharing until I've placed a few myself and dealt with the issues that arise in that end of the game. That said, there's some great ones around here; you mention the Cemetery Quest ones, which are great fun; there's many others in the same well-designed vein.
  2. As a resident of Port Orchard, I can attest to the numbers; one of my PQ's shows all caches within 10 miles of home and has yet to go below 500, even though I've found upwards of 100 of them. Howe Farm is a nice place to be, let alone cache. Haven't been up to Schold yet either.
  3. We have a local TB hotel cache that's an ammo can locked shut and cabled to a large tree. The combo for the lock is part of the puzzle of the cache. No problems with it in a year or so, but I think that speaks more to the quality of the location and hide than to the lock.
  4. It's not a moral issue at all, nor a flatulent one. You have no right to privacy in a public venue, and that's no different than 100 years ago. When you go to a baseball game, is your expectation that photographs taken of the action that may include you in the background are violations of your privacy? You do know that every time you drive down a highway that your image is stored in DOT computers and videotape machines? Many stoplights in almost all major cities now have cameras to catch violators - is that a violation of your right to privacy? Your picture is on your driver's license and stored by the government. They know your Social Security number, too! My guess is that if you've been out of the house in the last year, that you've been captured on innumerable cameras in innumerable places, at every retail location you've entered, etc., etc. Anyway... the idea of using a camera to monitor a cache location has absolutely nothing to do with stalking or voyeurism, and the leap of logic it takes to make it some sort of horrific transgression of everything that's right and holy is beyond me. This is "fun" stuff. Try having some.
  5. I find that difficulty levels are really hit-or-miss, though since it's something of a value judgment in the first place there's no getting around it. A very experienced caching friend and I spent a total of about 6 hours DNF'ing two brand new caches yesterday, two visits to each cache location. Both were 1.5 difficulty and 1 terrain, and both had at least 5 DNFs this weekend before the FTF's... Generally speaking I agree with Briansnat - a 1 or 1.5 should be a park-and-grab cache, but in this case... Of course, I'll probably go back this afternoon and want to die when I see how obvious it actually is.
  6. When I was posting last night, the cam was turned off for the evening, so there wasn't any way to find it. Well done. Here's another Java cam cache (cam itself is here) if you want to exercise that big brain some more. Java... Javascript... blarg. The point is, no direct image link.
  7. The name, by, dif and ter tags all support the format %tag=nn, where nn is the number of characters. Using this, you can construct your tags to be meaningful within the 30 character limit, e.g.: %name=20 %by=8 %dif=1 %ter=1 Or whatever combination of character lengths works for you (I find that the half step difficulty and terrain ratings give a false sense of precision due to the variability of how people rate their caches, so one character is just as good as three for dif and ter). I know I'm way late to this discussion but I wanted to suggest something for this space problem. I use an eTrex Legend, which limits the waypoint name to 10 characters and has no description field, so I've had to really condense the information I can send. Instead of doing %dif=1 or %ter=1, which loses you some information, try using %dif1 or %dif1a. The former uses 1-9 to indicate all difficulty levels, instead of just rounding to one digit (i.e. a difficulty 1.5 would be a 2, a 4.5 would be an 8, and so forth,) the latter replaces the half intervals with letters, so a 1.5 is A and a 4.5 is D. Also, instead of %code, try %drop2, which drops the useless "GC" prefix to the 6 character code. My GPSr export string is "%drop2 %dif1/%ter1/%con1" fitting almost everything useful into the 10 characters I have available.
  8. Here's a cache that pretty much does this same thing, except it's an actual webcam cache. The cam is set up specifically for the cache, you go to the coordinates, note the time, then come back to your computer and go to the archive of cam pictures (stored for 24 hours) and find the one you were in.
  9. I'm with you, basically. My version supports maplets, but it's a bit much of a hassle with not much reward to add cache waypoints into it. The maps themselves are useful, but only about as useful as the maps I already have loaded into my Legend. I mainly use Mapopolis as a reference when I don't have the GPSr in my hand, since I carry the Palm everywhere anyway.
  10. Having spent all last weekend out in the rain, I took a break today and never left the house. I feel a void. Apparently the rain is supposed to be a bit more spotty tomorrow.
  11. Well, I don't think that's really a concern - most webcams have very low resolution and a focal length like a piece of paper. With a cache 150' from the cam itself, you'd be lucky to be able to tell a .30cal ammo can from a film canister, let alone where exactly they found it. The particular cameras we have at work (they're actually part of a security system we bought) are better than average, but it would still be more of a novelty than anything else. Here's a sample image from our reception area camera. The double doors in the picture are about 25 feet away from the camera, so imagine what 150 feet away would look like. I can increase the resolution but it's not going to change the focal length. Still, I think it's a fun idea that I'm looking forward to implementing.
  12. I just have to reiterate how nifty this is... I just tested again with High Five over Eye Five and the image was in my Gmail inbox within, literally, 5 seconds of my dialing the number. This may not fit a traditionalist's idea of the difficulty of a webcam cache, but for those of us with no friends it's really cool.
  13. Heh... well, this would be in Kent, Washington, in an area that would probably frown upon pantsless cachers even more than normal. Here's where I work.
  14. I have a webcam at my office and was planning on doing exactly this - placing a cache across the street in a grassy area and pointing the webcam at the cache. I would just have the cam store a running MPEG during daylight hours and go back and capture a pic whenever someone logged it.
  15. Well, that was the point of my mentioning that particular cache - that it currently won't work with this webpage/service because there's no direct URL link to the cam image itself.
  16. Heh... well, I'm planning on being there. I may see if I can drag Gordo1013 along with me, as I'm sure he doesn't know about it yet. Guess I should go post on the event page itself.
  17. OK, folks, this works great. I just told it to get a pic from my own webcam at work; the email with the picture showed up about 10 seconds after I called the number. I let it ring about 5 times and hung up - no charges on my bill. Note for USA callers - the actual numbers you need to dial are: 011-49-2171-909557 (011 being the international dialing prefix for the USA) The next thing you need to code for is Javascript webcams, like this one for this cache in Seattle - there's no direct image URL published for this one. GREAT job, this is really amazingly cool.
  18. Ahhh, that's different, I get it now. So it doesn't actually get answered - the ringing itself is what triggers the capture? Very cool... I take it back, I would use that. I was actually asking if the caller's mobile number had to have a Germany country code, but I see it was just a misunderstanding on my part. You're saying that when the caller enters their number in the form, they just have to enter the full number including their own country code. I can test this without actually going to the webcam myself - give me a few minutes.
  19. Win the auction, get the coords, then enter a listing for it here; just find a volunteer in the cache area to "own" it... But don't bid over $1, that being my guess as to the total value of the items in that container. As soon as the FTF confirms that it's a bunch of broken McToys and inkless pens, you can archive it.
  20. Use the User Flag - on the User Flags menu, click "Set for next nn records", enter the number you want, click OK. Then use the "user flag = set" default filter, and your list will be reduced to just those flagged records.
  21. Yes, but what if my GPSr is more accurate than the one you used to set the target? Ho ho ho. Sounds like a fun contest. I assume this takes the place of the previous lightpole placement thingy?
  22. Probably because the user in question is in Florence County, South Carolina.
  23. I'm sure it works well, though I don't see myself needing a webcam cache bad enough to call Germany from the US for it. One question, the form says "Your cellphonenumber must be in the format +49172000000." Does this mean that the caller's number has to start with that country code?
  24. I was going to check this out but apparently the export plugin only works with PalmOS 5. Globalgirl sad she had a Tungsten so that should be fine for her, but not for us poor version-challenged older Palm owners. Mapopolis is still the only way to go for mapping on the Palm.
  25. I've had the same experience. The only thing caching has replaced in my life is spending my lunch hours at Taco Bell and sitting around the house watching TV all weekend. Instead, now, I spend my entire lunch hour out tramping around, and every spare weekend moment doing the same. I know where every park within 20 miles of home is now (and oh my, there's about 10 times as many parks around as I thought,) and can see and feel the difference physically after just a couple months of constant caching. Caching has replaced almost all the unhealthy parts of my lifestyle.
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