hal-an-tow

I agree with Anpefi, both on the probable effect of the promotion , and the disappointing lack of accuracy involved in including Mickey Mouse's dog as a planet. Labels matter, inaccurate labels don't inspire confidence. " ... seven stars are no more than seven ..." surely that's a reference to the Pleiades or seven sisters (stars) rather than planets ... they are a well known test of eyesight , as most people will see only the 5 brightest unless they use the averted gaze trick and their eyes are very well dark adapted. Tudor playgoers would have been far more familiar with naked eye observation of dark skies than we are today.

Yep, that's what I said in my post You may infer all of that if you wish, but it's nowhere in the post you are replying to ! Not actually global, but only national data for parts of Western Europe and the USA. As I said, I didn't have time to include most of the world. I missed out Canada, a huge proportion of Europe, all of Asia , and the entire Southern Hemisphere I'm afraid. My aim in posting them is to give folk the wherewithal to make an informed assessment of the situation for themselves from objective data.

The statistics are objective definition 3 - "expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations ". Anything we say based on our own point of view, experience or judgement is subjective definition 4a - "peculiar to a particular individual ... modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background" Objectively the statistics give us a snapshot of the country wide situation as it was on December 31st 2017 with regard to cache publication, finds and numbers of participants , taken from groundspeaks database and collated by project GC. They are dispassionate facts, like them or not !

Well, Im in the UK, not Australia, so I can't perhaps be as specific as you would like , but ... I absolutely endorse noncentric's post and would echo all the points there, so no need to repeat all of them about the advantages of a GPS over a smartphone ! The most commonly used cheap end GPS devices round here are Garmin Etrex , which are between £80 - £200 UK, use NO data,run on a pair of AA cells and survive all manner of indignities that would kill any but the most rugged smartphone. I initially bought the cheapest model, but after a few years heavy use (the device still works, friends have it) I went for the etrex 20, which has the big advantage of showing maps . The 10 has a built in Garmin map which is effectively useless unless you are unsure what continent you are on ... Do a google search for etrex20 and I'm sure some outdoor shops will pop up where you could have a look at one , altho it will probably be cheapest on amazon. Beware of paying extra for the GPS with pre loaded maps , it's not difficult to get open street maps loaded on which are totally free - check and see if OSM is good in your area, as it is updated by volunteers coverage varies around the world. The only extra you will need is a micro SD card for the maps, and maybe an overlay for the screen. which is plastic and can be scratched. There are newer, more expensive touchscreen garmins, but I'd not consider one myself as I doubt touchscreen input would be a good match for my habit of sticking the device in a trouser pocket while walking / cache opening & signing etc. Ah, the curse of the slow typist ! NYPaddlecacher has ably made several of my points already - oh well, may as well press submit, I've typed it now !

Thanks - yes I know I picked stats for N. Hemisphere only, and Europe mainly, but as that's where I am, that's where my interest lies. I did screenshot the USA stats, but missed uploading them so will add them here. I don't think the 'last week' or 'last month' stats are particularly useful to give a picture of the situation (PGC data refresh rate, late logging etc etc.) but the annual statistics do suggest trends. There's a lot of red in the 'caches hidden' sections.

And a few more:

Which reminds me ... took a few screenshots of the stat.s on project GC on Dec 31st 2017 while waiting for the celebrations to begin ( celebrations which may well be why I forgot all about them ... )

Thinkig about it, of the half dozen or so caches I've found which the setter called a TB hotel only one stands out as a model : this cache is a quality clipbox, with a second clipbox inside especially for the TBs, in a place which has a great view, is not much frequented by muggles, and offers a good hide. It would be a good cache and location without any TBs, and the CO takes good care of it without being officious about trying to impose 'rules' of TBs in/out. If you read back through the 5 1/2 years of the listing it gets frequent CO check up visits, has been relocated a considerable distance after an early muggling, has been the victim of farm machinery once, and picked up by a curious local once - who handed it back to the CO ! The CO adjusted the hide intelligently after each problem to ensure the same thing didn't happen again. I'd not hesitate to drop any TB in that cache .

You had me worried there for a moment, as I allowed the update of firefox just a couple of minutes ago , but checking a few random cache pages has my setup showing everything GME is OK. I'm using Windows7 (on an 8 year old laptop ) Firefox 57.0.3 , GreaseMonkey with GME and the really handy GC Street View both running fine. I have found problems recently with NoScript, which seems to have become unreasonably paranoid and I've been constantly having to 'allow' by hand to get pages loaded which were previously no problem, I recall it blocked google maps at some point. I've found the GS mapping very slow to load recently, and as I believe GME does not work on all the servers, it takes a few refreshes of the map to see that vital third title in the side panel. I'm a blundering user with limited technical knowledge, so I don't know if any of this helps or suggests a cure.I'll upload some screenshots for evidence that it really is working for me !

Not sure this is the place to look for a consensus ! If you hope to attract TBs, the container needs to be large enough to accommodate them, so think about any awkward things you've seen with TB tags on which might give folk difficulties finding a cache to drop them in. I've found TBs with 20cm tall soft toys, Barbie sized dolls, giant plastic ducks and other strange items, and had to search out a big enough cache to move them to (or in some cases attend an event and make them someone else's problem ... like the trackable oar, or several roadsigns ...) My personal opinion would be a proper regular sized cache, (i.e. one with a capacity of 1L or larger) would be the smallest I'd consider useful as a TB hotel, and it needs to be a good, quality waterproof container too, as some of those soft toys etc are vulnerable to damp. If you don't want to buy another ammo can , a quality cliplock box of around 2L capacity is big enough for most TBs, but small enough to be hidden from muggle view in many locations. When I think about dropping TBs in a cache I check out the cache listing and previous logs. Any cache which has been lost or muggled in the past, has logs mentioning missing TBs, or otherwise suggests to me that the container may be an insecure place sounds alarm bells and I will probably not choose to to leave the TBs I am temporarily responsible for there. As you say your ammo can went missing from flood or muggle I'd suggest you are right to think you should move the new container to a new spot , that massive concrete you mention could also be a memorable landmark for a nosy muggle looking around for another 'free box of trinkets someone left just lying there for me to take ' !

Excellent quote, describes what I feel about 'streaks' nicely. Tried it, managed a couple of weeks, found I was reduced to looking for utterly dispiriting drive by micro rubbish caches (having found much of the good stuff near home already), decided it simply wasn't worth the effort. Just not my kind of caching.

My search took 0.02 seconds apparently !

Easy

What exactly do you mean by 'decal' ? To me, that is a water slide transfer as supplied in the Airfix kits of my youth, which sounds an unlikely thing to want for caching !

There you go, an unambiguous answer. "To post an "Attended" log on a geocaching event, you must have been at the coordinates of the event" . All the combative sophistry is irrelevant, and just makes me wonder about what psychology underlies it, and worry about what sort of impression it gives of the caching community to new visitors.

Arrgh, I know I've heard of this folktale - it's similar to the Russian Baboushka story* ... so it's not Russian, and I know the German and Austrian festive scare figures are male, so I'll have a guess at Swiss maybe ? * Woman invited to accompany kings to visit baby Jesus thinks she is too busy with housework, turns down chance, thereafter roams earth for eternity trying to make up for her choice. The moral of the story: ALWAYS abandon housework at the slightest pretext. Works for me ...

Yep, seem a few press-seal bags wrapped in duct tape (apart from the top, obviously) used this way, but they rely on the finder re sealing the bag carefully after signing the log, not tearing the bag in the process of opening, and being thoughtful enough to replace the bag seal side downwards so water is less likely to sneak in as it sits there. Consequently they are usually short lived containers ! I've found a few clever caches where the CO has taken a thin slice of wood and cut or drilled a recess for a nano tube, then placed the slice of wood in an existing gap in a wooden post (one pre cut for a horizontal rail for instance) with the nano to the inside and out of sight until you realise it's loose and pull the slice of wood out .Mayvbe something similar could be done, disguising the wood (or plastic or whatever) with paint to match the post/back of sign colour ?

I make notes as I walk (and my caching is usually part of a walk in the countryside, I dislike drive by caching and seldom bother with it) on a tiny MP3 recorder, and mark the caches 'found' on my Garmin GPS as I go. When I get home I upload the found caches list from the GPS to GSAK on my laptop, and then type an indicidual log for each cache based on my audio notes from the MP3 recorder. My 'phone is no more to me than a back up GPS/recorder/camera - it's a 'phone, the other functions are a compromise of what can be packed into that shape running off that battery. GSAK has templates I've custom set which 'frame' my individual comments with some statistics so I can keep track of my find order easily, it also allows me to automatically dip the TB I use to track my mileage in every find , dip, drop or pick up other TBs at the click of a button, and it even picks up the CO's name (correctly spelled !) from the cache listing and drops it in the 'thanks' bit at the end. I generally re-read my logs for stupid mistakes before pressing the 'publish' button which sends the lot (all the cache logs, TB logs and photos) out automatically to Groundspeak. Yes, this all takes a while: sometimes longer than the actual cache finding , but I use my logs as a diary for myself as well as feeling that a cache setter deserves some decent feedback from finders after they made the effort to set caches. On other threads recently a few folk have bleated about feeling excluded at events ... I go to events alone, and many times outside my local area have known no-one at all, but what regularly happens is someone recognises my caching name and says "You are the one who writes those logs !" and I have an instant connection .Which is nice ! I also get lots of e mails from CO's who appreciate having individual logs worth opening and reading, and have made good caching friends that way. It works the other way too, decent logs on my caches generally get a thank you from me, especially if they are a newish cacher, got to reinforce good habits ! Unless it's been a particularly big days caching I try to log on the same evening (GSAK picks the found date from the GPS info, so no need to worry about backdating) but sometimes it takes a day or so, in which case I may e-mail the CO and briefly let them know I found their cache(s) and a log will be coming soon. If delayed I'll also immediately sort any TB retrieval/dropping using the TB listings and notes so the record is accurate ASAP. I don't change my routine for FTFs, not that I go for many, but if I do and it takes me 2 hours to type my logs and someone thinks that means they wasted their time finding the cache second, well, they don't have much respect for the cache or CO if they feel the effort to make the find is pontless simply because their name isn't at the top of the paper ...

Some think it's OK, but I can't see any difference between logging an event you didn't attend and logging a virtual* you never actually visited. It makes a nonsense of that Groundspeak slogan "The Language of Location" Personally, I'd never log any event I'd not physically been at. * Or any other kind of cache for that matter.

Do a google search , there's loads of help out there, including videos which may be a good way for you to absorb the info. The official manual is rubbish though! There's a simple text walk through the main features here I don't think that tells you how to get a cache into the device ro play with though ...simplest way (simplest to explain that is ) is : Click on the download GPX file button on a cache page, Get that caches file on your desktop, Plug the etrex into the computer, it should pop up as a usb device (you may have to select how it behaves the first time: if so select 'mass storage device ' or similar), Click on the device to open it, you should see a folder called 'GPX' Drag & drop the cache's GPX file into the etrex's GPX folder, and Robert's your mother's brother One useful bit of info : waypoints are not the same as geocaches .. that confused me no end when I got my first Garmin !

She showed all her working actually

Just had a coffee break accompaniedby a little idle look around project GC, and noticed there is a lonely cache option in the statistcs tab . It says "The loneliness is calculated by dividing the age of the geocaches (in days) by the number of finds. " Could that analysis be harnessed to build a checker and allow a challenge I wonder ?

I used to have a 10, now use a 20 and occasionally find that I get a similar problem, a GPX file which really is in the appropriate folder of the device utterly fails to show any caches when the GPS is switched on. So far this has always been remedied by hooking it up to the 'puter and following the steps given above. One thought occurs to me though ... are you sure you are loading something within the capacity of the 10 ? As I recall it's not that generous , especially if you include a lot of logs for each cache. I'd try downloading a single cache to your desktop (using the button on the cache page ) and dragging & dropping to your Garmin's GPX folder. If that does work at least you know the device is not broken. If it doesn't work, if it was my device my next move would be to find the backup I made on my computer when I first got the GPS ...

Yes, I agree with NYhiker, the auto renewal trick may be touted by many businesses as a way of making payments more "convenient" for customers, but it seems more like a dubious trick to get an extra payment from the absent minded ex customer. I simply don't give my business to insurers and other service providers who give it as the only payment option. It's far too easy for them to "innocently" make the method for cancelling the recurrence as obscure and awkward as possible, a truly reprehensible business practice. In England not allowing cancellation of auto renew is against the law, should be interesting to see what options present themselves when my premium membership comes up for (non- auto) renewal by credit card in the new year ...

Ah, a debate on semantics, that could easily run to a dozen pages of intemperate shouting if this wasn't a civilised area ... If the " first person plus beloved" characters appear in each verse, and we assume they are the same individuals each day, how can we say the same french hens etc etc are not also re-deployed each day ? I can't tell chickens apart*, you could easily fool me by claiming these were entirely different to yesterdays fowl ...same for the other birds, none of which has the distinctive individually varied plumage which identifies budgies for instance ... Also, the initial question said ' How many legs ' , not how many different legs, so same beloved, same legs, different day = 2 more legs in the song I rest my case, (while suggesting that the problem lies with the phrasing of the question) and await the final authoritative verdict of the questioner (who is probably weeping softly over a calculator as I type) . ^ As an afterthought, I have farmer friends who have some rescued battery hens clucking round their yard, one of who (inevitably named 'Stumpy' ) I can distinguish from the rest, but only because she would ruin the leg count with 1 .5 to her name ... pretty sure she is not French though ....