icabrian

Nothing has changed, still get entire list since June 2023 when I upload drafts. Things break and then take forever to fix. This is very annoying.

I hope the new logging flow will not allow logging trackables on log types that don't involve travel. Such as Will Attend logs or Locationless cache logs.

This is the way it makes sense in real life. If I search by location, I want the caches closest to the location listed first (which was the case until recently). Now I'm getting them sorted by the distance from my home location. Which, as you can see from the screen capture attached, is a bit awkward. I would expect the Fremont caches around HQ first, but I get the caches on the eastern side of search perimeter first. Displaying search results on the map works as expected, though.

That's what I'm saying. If geofencing is large enough and people are instructed where to go by the app, no one has location problems. Accuracy isn't an issue anymore. Your phone might think you are on the lawn outside, and you can still play. But it turned out most phones did much better than that. Still, navigating just by location would have been tough. It depends very much on the type of the building, I guess.

Almost 450 people completed the adventure in one day: we didn't hear of any location related issues that would significantly affect the play.

We have created an AL guided tour of National Museum for our Mega in a 19th century building (that has very thick walls). Even in the mummy crypt in the basement (a very small room in the centre of the building - lots of walls all around) the phones knew well enough where they are and we have been able to obtain the coordinates that placed the stages on the map with acceptable accuracy. The museum is in the city centre with lots of wifi's and base stations around. But we didn't rely just on location services for navigation. The adventure was sequential and followed the direction of the visit of the museum, and people were given visual and verbal instructions at the completion of each location where to go next. And we have put geofencing wide enough to make sure stages would open even with less location accuracy. We ran into the issues with sequential adventure, unrelated to location services (see Adventure Play forum), but for players that had no such issues, it worked well and it worked as intended. So in my experience, indoor setting is OK, but you need to provide more than just location services for navigation.

The contest is over, thanks to everyone that participated. The winner was #3, and pretty convincingly. Because of the voting system, the total votes don't tell much, but #3 had the largest number of votes for the first, second and third place. Also, the top 5 photos appeared at least once in 92 % of the ballots. The gallery with photos sorted by the result from the first to last is at https://www.geocacher.si/geolovska-fotografija-leta-2021-je/

Thanks everyone who voted. Unfortunately, we started on the same platform as last year (I admit that out of convenience and hoping we'd get away with it), but there was just too much trolling and abuse. So we restarted the voting from scratch on a new platform with a new system and only count the votes with a valid geocaching nickname. Everyone is well behaved now. So I would kindly ask everyone who voted before Ranger Fox, to take a few extra minutes and vote again. And of course invite everyone else to help us with their vote. The contest is extended until December 15. I will post the results.

Thank you both! International votes are very much appreciated.

Slovenian geocaching club is organising the geocaching photo of the year contest again. We are kindly asking you to help us select the winner by visiting the gallery at https://www.geocacher.si/geolovska-fotografija-leta-2021-finalni-izbor/ and vote for your favourite photo in the end. We'd be very grateful for any international input that will expand the voting base. The cachers taking part in the contest are from Slovenia, but many photos are from other places. The voting is open until December 10, 2021.

It's the event organiser's curse: taking home all the trackables, that have been left behind after the event is finished. I don't see any other option. You have to accept that this can happen when you organise an event. Sometimes, the ones left behind can be quite bulky. In that case, I suggest you attend an event and pass the torch to the organiser.

Great! Any plans to localise it?

The voting is over, the final results are published on the voting page. Thanks for helping us. It's been fun and we are looking forward to organising it again in 2021.

The year 2020 has been challenging for geocaching, but we managed to find some geocaches, attend some events and, of course, take some photos. Slovenian Geocaching club has asked the local community to take part in the photo of the year contest with their memories from geocaching outings in 2020, that were worth keeping. We are kindly asking you to help us select the winner by visiting the gallery at https://www.geocacher.si/geolovska-fotografija-leta-2020-finalni-izbor/ and vote for your favourite photo in the end. We'd be very grateful for any international input that will expand the voting base. While the cachers taking part are from Slovenia, many photos are from other places. The voting is open until December 6, 2020.

Can't think of a better year to take a GIFF break. Most events would have been cancelled anyway...

Read this: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56 - you don't have to be a scientist to understand the message. Social distancing is the basic intervention, the hammer by which we can suppress the spread of the virus to a manageable level. To be effective, social interaction with others has to be reduced to the bare minimum. We need to stay at or near our homes and shouldn't leave our home area for unnecessary travel. For recreation, go to the nearest park or other recreational public space. I have disabled all my caches for the time being. It's unlikely that someone would get infected by touching the containers. But I wanted to set an example of how to practice social distancing and reduce unnecessary travel. I don't want my caches to be a temptation for people to ignore public health advice or government ban. I leave it to the judgement of individual COs whether to disable their caches or not. As a health professional, I believe it was the right thing to do.

Facts and numbers exist, and we should all take very seriously what they are telling us. We should not loose the time and energy debating whether the mortality is 0,5 % or 3,5 % or what the worldwide death rate is. You don't count the dead in percentage, but in absolute numbers: 10.000 people dead is 10.000 people dead regardless of what percentage of whatever number this is. Even if it's a tiny fraction of something, it's still 10.000 lives lost. As we can see, this virus can bring down national health care systems and shut down countries. No one needs to run around with their arms in the air, they better stay calm and listen to the health authorities. And firmly demand action from the politicians, if their response is too indolent.

https://www.geocacher.si/dirka-2020/ Trackable racing is fun. We started a race with 41 racers in December. We're tracking the distance and location manually. Every Monday, we log the distance travelled and last known location to a Google Sheets table and the table does the rest. With 4 cachers, each of them has to spend 30 minutes every 4 weeks, and it takes me another 5 minutes to export the location data to the map and update the leaderboard.

Yes, it is a bit strange at the first glance. I'm guessing that it's because the real usefulness, at least in the current state, is in focusing on an area of interest that covers 500 caches (somewhat arbitrary limit for testing purpose probably?) and not in the the wide area or world search approach. It makes sense to me for everyday caching. For San Francisco that covers entire downtown at zoom level 14 with some 300+ caches (if I hide my finds), which is more than enough for planning a geocaching afternoon. Likely, I'd work even at higher zoom levels when planning a geocaching outing. Current search and the new map are two different and hopefully not mutually exclusive approaches to viewing the cache database.

And limiting the number of hits isn't a bad idea either. In the current map, panning at low zoom level (or in some areas even not that low) is unusable, because the world is completely covered with cache icons.

It's worth noting that the map is a "search field" itself, so you can search by either the keyword search field in the left margin or by zooming and panning the map. I like that visual approach, so I can see the caches in the area of interest around the center point right away. Sorting by distance is not missed that much (or not needed in this concept at all), but it requires a mind switch to a different concept of searching. It doesn't and shouldn't replace the "old" search, though. As I remember, world search was HQ's pride and joy when it was introduced, I hope it still is. I like many features of this map, it suits my style of geocaching and cache selection process well. It's still work in progress, I guess, and we should take it as such.

Yes, it's true that if you just want the souvenir, you don't have to do anything special. But why not trying harder anyway? Use the Adrenaline month as a motivation to go for that T5 cache even though you already have the souvenir in your pocket. What if this all is not just about getting the souvenir? And the souvenir is just a cue to a month of adrenaline experiences?

In the app settings. I think ARKit is only available on newer iPhones (7 or better?). On older iPhones, Legacy is the only available mode.

In Legacy rendering on iOS, the app tells you to turn left or right to see the character. I haven't figured out, though, how it chooses the direction where the character is displayed when the experience is started. Metaverse app seems to behave in very different ways depending on what kind of hardware and software (ARKit on iOS and some AR support on Android) you use. For my AR cache, it seems that too sophisticated AR support is not an advantage. The best way to do it on iOS is to switch to "Legacy rendering". We have to remember, that these apps were not developed with geocaching in mind, so some nice AR features turn out a bit awkward. For example, with ARKit on, the character size is displayed proportionally to the distance from the waypoint. For my cache, that means that at maximum distance from the waypoint, Signal is displayed so small that people can't see it on the lush green background. Even the treasure chest in the last step is hard to see, unless the cacher is near the waypoint. In Legacy rendering, the character size doesn't change. Also, I've seen on an Android device with some additional AR support (I have no idea what it is, never owned an Android phone, something one of the cachers downloaded in the field when I was giving him a tour), the character and dialog are shown mirrored when the cacher moves past the waypoint. So we had to move back to the "right" side of the waypoint to be able to solve the stage... On this Android phone, the character and the dialog were rendered too large for the screen very close to the waypoint. The map on Android seems to be working now, so that greatly improves the experience with multiple stages. I guess we all need to cut some slack to both the technology and the cache owners. It's is still the early phase of testing this technology in geocaching. I've seen a question, why would someone use this if the same could be done (possibly better) in Wherigo. My answer would be: Why not? We have a unique opportunity to try something new in geocaching this summer.