fauxSteve
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Posts posted by fauxSteve
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One is to use the GPS as a "cell phone" ( or use a real cell phone if available ). People talking in cell phones can do lots of things without drawing any attention.
I hid my GPSr in my shoe, which I pretend to talk to like a phone. No muggles bother me. In fact, nobody even makes eye-contact with me.
Urban caching problem solved...
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I've never used .loc files on their own, but I regularly download pocket queries. If what is being asked for is the option to upload .loc files with related waypoints to a cache page I'm all for it! Right now we can only keep jpgs on the hosted pages. Perhaps, partly for site security reasons, it could be an option for cache owners where they can fill out a form field with additional coordinates that gets automatically turned into a .loc file that is available for download on the cache page. As far as memory goes, those would be rather insignificant, especially compared to images.
These could be parking locations, points on a long trail, waypoints in a multi, or whatever. I'd support something like that. Something I haven't seen much of in the States, but I've seen a lot in Europe, are complicated multi's with lots of waypoints already listed on the cache page (i.e. go to these ten locations and get the information from virtual waypoints that lead you to the final cache). This feature would work well there too, so that you don't have to hand enter each one into the GPSr.
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I don’t get to have the same adventure as before because now the cache is almost a drive-up. The smiley earned in this example has less value to me than in the first example, IMO.
When I think of parking coordinates, I'm thinking more along the lines of suggesting the trailhead where there might not be anything more than a turn-off, and then you go on a lengthy hike for the cache. I wouldn't waste the energy suggesting a parking location for a city park or a Wal-Mart lamppost micro
, but there are plenty of times that they would be helpful.Not too long ago I found a cache in a park. I looked around for a legal place to park on the street for a bit, finally found one, and walked the ten minutes or so in to find the cache. Only when I got close to it did I realize that the park had a parking lot that would have essentually made it a walk-up. I snickered to myself, but I actually enjoyed the walk across the park more than if I had parked in the lot. This is not where I see the function being used. But if my goal is to go on a long hike or a climb, parking coordinates might mean the difference between making the journey at all or not. The last place I want to be is sitting in my car driving around looking for parking.
Therefore, I think a parking option on the page could be nice in some situations, if it can be done in a convenient way. However, I'd rather hand enter in given parking coordinates for a special cache than end up downloading tons of unnecessary parking coordinates into my GPSr just because the option is available to people. So, maybe I'm not taking a strong side other than recognizing the pros and cons of giving parking coordinates.
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Aww, dang! The domain GEOPARKING.COM is unavailable!
Are you saying that someone is parking that domain?
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I am thinking that it could use a variation of the GCXXXX number, perhaps 1GCXXXX, 2GCXXXX, etc. This may cause an issue for older GPSrs (that is if the number of characters in the name exceed 6 characters), but it would really only affect people downloading the cache info via gpx, and these people typically have newer units (I think) without the 6 character limitation.
We could have GPXXXX = GeoParking
Sometimes part of the fun is trying to find parking, but I'm partly of the opinion that if I had to drive to the cache in the first place there was already a problem with it
(would you believe I haven't found very many parking lot caches). Other times, it's nice to out-of-towners to suggest parking--especially if the point of the cache is the hike and not the drive. For instance, I wanted to go find a cache that sounded like a nice hike near a lake the other day, but not knowing the area very well I went to the main trailhead parking. Unfortunately, the actual trailhead for the cache required entering from a different spot with little, if any, signage. I never got to hunt the cache because I didn't know how to get onto the trail.Also, I don't have a problem scanning the page for suggested parking and entering them into my GPSr. I also know if you want to remove a step that there are some sites out there that will grab any coordinates off of a cache page and give them to you prepared for .loc download (does someone have a link?).
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For urban caching I always have a small mirror and a flashlight for finding those evil micros and concealed waypoints, and some gloves are good for all caching excursions. I grew up in places where bad creatures lurk out of sight, so I'm rather cautious about blinding sticking my hand into spots I can't see just to add a smiley
to my stats.Out on the trail I just add my caching goodies to the usual outdoor essentials (fairly well represented above).
--> gps, pda, compass, swag, extra batteries, and a pen and pencil
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I've been thinking the other meaning a lot lately, whether I'm first not to find or not!
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The One-Hundred Oldest Geocaches
I'm slowing working on them. I found the Tribute Plaque, the Un-Original Stash up the hill, Firestone in California, and Mingo (the oldest surviving) in Kansas.
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The best FTF prize: being first to find!
I've seen many people who don't often go for, or get, FTF complain about those who will go out at all hours for a first to find, and ask why they should get the prizes. The funny thing is, at least with many of the FTFers I've come across, that the first finder takes only the bragging rights and leaves the prize (if there is one) for the STF. I'd say that it is better to to regularly upgrade the contents of your cache than to include one fancy FTF prize.
My personal favorite FTF prize, though, would be a geocoin, Jeep, or travel bug (activated or unactivated). But then again, I recently found a cache for which I was first finder after it had been reactivated (not FTF overall). The hider left a $10 bill in it, but I didn't take it. I left it for the next cacher.
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The first cache was on the side of a country road with a can of beans in it.
This was something I was thinking about today as I went looking for, and decided not to sign ("find"), a micro because of its placement. The oldest caches I've found were white plastic buckets or plastic jars with screw-on tops. Even when I started caching in early 2002, I didn't know about micros, and all my finds were one or two hour hikes in. But I now know from finding some of the earliest surviving caches, that they were often buckets that are essentially park and grabs (perhaps not urban, but next to the road anyway—and yes, buried with food, beer, ect. ).
As caching gets more popular we will simply have more variety. Sure, there are lots of micros in urban and suburban areas, and many of them, actually, are among my favorite finds. I think the real difference is not that there are fewer "traditional" high quality finds (although I think that there's lots of selective nostalgia happening around this concept), but that you drive past many more caches on your way to find those. The hike-in cache opportunities are far better now than ever before (and often in ammo cans instead of paint buckets or cookie tins), you just pass many more caches (good and bad) than in the early days.
Plus, I suspect that the best hides today are better than most, if not all, of the early cache hides. (And anyone thinking of just hiding a plastic bag out there, please don't!
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I just read about it over in the German forums. geopirat und huskie are credited with 263 finds while in Florida last week.
In related news, I found one cache in the last 24 hours, and had 2 DNFs.
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That's pretty strange. There were a few coins and travel bugs logged into the event. I bet a coin was being passed around with a similar tracking number to yours, and a digit was copied wrong when someone wrote it down so that it matched yours. It could even be the case that other people who held it briefly for logging just asked their friend (who wrote a wrong digit) for the number instead of trying to read it from the coin, thereby giving multiple false finds. In fact, it looks like the two people who did grab it cache together (fishily similar names and many finds together).
It was most likely an honest mistake. I'm a nice guy, so I wouldn't want to punish them, but I can understand that it messes up the mileage. You might send them a friendly e-mail nd ask if they could double check the tracking code that they wrote down (since the coin is back in the event cache, I assume that they didn't hold on to it). Otherwise, if it doesn't bother you, is it possible to delete the log where it got put back into the Florida event so that the mileage gets erased? Maybe the two "finders" could keep the find out of good faith, but you just grab it back. Maybe even a small note in the coin logs could say it never crossed the country. ...Or you could just delete everything
. I'm sure someone will come along with that argument any minute now...edited to fix broken link.
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2) Making sure the cache is anchored in some form or fashion, i.e. you don't want a flood to carry the cache downstream.
I say go for it! It won't get many visitors, but those who go for it will probably write wonderful stories about their journey. The only boat-only cache I found seems to have been swallowed up by rising waters soon after I visited it, and most caches I've seen next to the water have experienced some flooding. Keep that in mind if you walk out when the water is low enough it will rise as well, so anchoring it to a tree like Difficult Run said would not be such a bad idea. Also, this sounds like a prime candidate for an ammo can. Since moving caches are no longer permitted, anything lighter would be a problem
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The Japanese cache gets a lot of international visitors, so it could have been any number of Europeans or American visitors, or a Japanese visitor to Europe. Whoever moved it might not log their finds online (quite common, actually), or could be logging finds on other sites. But I always hope that if people play with travel bugs, they at least log their movements on-line even if they don't want to log cache visits (although there are some technical issues with that)
I don't know if there are other sites catering specifically to Japanese geocaching, but Hungary has one. For example, the Hungarian cache cache where the bug was previously seen before miraculously appearing in Japan has been found and logged in many more times than it has been logged on geocaching.com.
Anyway, I love when bugs come back to life. I think the mystery of its travels are actually really great. I just a imagine it riding the Trans-Siberian railway across the great Russian Plains as far as Lake Baikal before hitching a ride with a Motorcycle-riding cacher to Vladivostok, before being carried by another cacher onto a ferry across the Sea of Japan to Niigata making its way to the cache where it was found. For all we know it had an amazing six month journey that can only be imagined...
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Use the Palm search feature instead of scrolling through hundreds of cache names.
Got it!
Since I only use the Palm for caching (it's a cheap Zire 21), I haven't figured out all the tricks. But the search worked great. Thanks! -
A runner-up solution that would be acceptable, but far less ideal, is if the cachemate list could be sorted alphabetically by waypoint name (but my mind likes sorting "names" in order more than the odd waypoint designations--is GCNFWZ before or after GCNGP3? I prefer: is “Department” before “Geocache”?)
Okay, I've figured out that in Cachemate I can display the waypoint names in the list by ticking "Display waypoint as name... when sorted by waypoint" in the "List Options" menu. That solves a lot of my problems. At least now I can find the waypoint relatively quickly in some kind of alphabetical order.
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I upgraded from a Magellan GPS300 to a Garmin Vista about three years ago, which was a significant upgrade. While I still have the Vista and use it regularly, I recently "upgraded" in a way by picking up a Garmin foretrex as a second machine for traveling in places where I don't want to carry around a "big" blue box to look for a cache (urban caching on foot and such)--and just for fun. It has fewer exciting bells and whistles than other units, but as an upgrade it does exactly what I want in a small size. I just want something that shows me the coordinates where I'm at and it seems to do that fine. What neither of my units has that I would think about as a true upgrade at soome point would be a magnetic compass--but I solved that with the real thing--and sometimes I'd like to have Quad Helix antenna for some areas. Auto-mapping might be fun to play with, but I don't really need it myself.
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Hi everyone. This is a question about coordinating cache names on my Garmin Legend and in cachemate on my Palm, and I hope someone can help me with. At home I keep an old PC around solely for running GSAK, USAPhotomaps and Streets and Trips (and solving the occasional Windows-only geocaching puzzle). But I'm Mac oriented in all other ways, especially when I'm traveling with my Powerbook.
When I use GSAK in Windows, I export the caches into a cachemate file and send the waypoints directly to my GPSr. Everything works great that way, with cache names showing up on my GPSr (as nearest searches and on the map). Likewise, cachemate lists the caches by name. That way, when I'm just traveling around and see a nearby cache (especially on road trips or new cities), I can quickly find it by name on my Palm in alphabetical order to see if it's a cache that I want to hunt.
However, when I get pocket queries while traveling on my Mac, I'm using the GPS Connect (for uploading waypoints) and MacCMConvert (for sending info to my Palm). I'm traveling a lot right now, so this is the standard method these days. The problem is: GPS Connect sends the waypoint names (ex: GCNFWZ) to my GPSr instead of the cache name (ex. "Department"), like GSAK does. That makes it a pain to find that same cache in Cachemate, since I don't seem to be able to search by actual waypoint name.
For example, I see that cache GCNFWZ is nearby, but I want to quickly look at cachemate to see if it’s a cache that I want to grab right now or not. If I’m driving through town I might be willing to make a stop to hunt an traditional in a park, but not a complicated puzzle that requires planning, or at least read a few logs to see if it's worth my time. What I have to do now is Search by coordinates in Cachemate, hand entering-in my approximate coordinates into the Palm and then clicking on each cache name that appears nearby to see if the waypoint name matches with the one on my GPSr screen. This can be a real pain.
What I'd really like is to be able to do is have GPS Connect send cache names instead of waypoint names to my GPSr--like GSAK does. That would be the best thing. A runner-up solution that would be acceptable, but far less ideal, is if the cachemate list could be sorted alphabetically by waypoint name (but my mind likes sorting "names" in order more than the odd waypoint designations--is GCNFWZ before or after GCNGP3? I prefer: is “Department” before “Geocache”?
). Does anyone know of a convenient way to fix this disparity between the two programs? (I don't want to run clunky VPC just for this).Thanks!
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Wow, that's really weird! Has anyone else noticed similar problems in other areas? I know the post office--and the zipcode lookup on geocaching--at my parent's house is about 10 miles away from their home, but that's in relatively spread out zipcode area (155 sq. mi.) in Colorado. For the 30152 zip-code, which is only 20.6 square land miles, that distance seems very strange. Plus, I noticed that the geocaching map puts you out near the 37316 and 30751 zip codes. That seems to be a mistake in the database which could probably be fixed if brought to the right person's attention.
Edited to add area in CO for comparison.
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Hay jester..
You might want to contact fauxsteve he just logged mingo on May 6.. Looks like he is on a road trip also.. Anyway have a great trip..
Hey yeah, I grabbed Mingo on a dark, windy night not too long ago while driving across Kansas! These great old caches really keep our perspectives straight about "the good old days of geocaching"! As long as you pretend that you're looking for a benchmark disk it should be no problem at all.
Have fun out there! -
Unfortunately it's not active cachers that are the problem, so punishing a premium member (or just an active non-paying member) probably wouldn't help much. The times I've seen an active cacher hold on to a bug too long is usually if it got lost, stolen, or something terrible happened to them. And usually they feel quite bad about the whole thing... The problem is really with the new cachers who grab a bug and then never hunt again. No geocaching punishment would affect them, since they're no longer part of the community. Another thing that I suspect happens a lot but can't prove it is that younger children grab them thinking they're cool trades or something and the parent doesn't notice that the bug was removed.
My suggestion is that we develop some sort of advanced bio-nano technology into the tags so that after a cacher has held onto a bug for two weeks or so it turns into a real bug... something nasty and vicious. Maybe it even grows larger the longer you hold onto it. So, after the third week you start waking up with nasty bug bites all over, and after a month or so it starts gnawing on your toes and fingers. Then, if you hold on to multiple bugs they might even reproduce. I think that would get bugs moving again!
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I dropped a Washington State coin in The Lodge today. Have fun!
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I've been locked in my room trying to figure out your latest puzzle, globalgirl!
But really, I'm still here--just weighed down by real-world responsibilities. I did find two caches today, though. -
Congrats gg and little blue on your milestones. I see that gg caught most of the caches on the first page of my nearest unfound in the days leading up to 200. I've finally realized that the list is like an endless bowl of spaghetti. No matter how many of them I get, new ones appear!
At least for the moment, there's absolutely nothing I can do about finding the first four (one is invitation only, one needs a boat, and two are disabled and not even there)! Keep on cachin'!
Urban caching problem solved...
, but there are plenty of times that they would be helpful.
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Since I only use the Palm for caching (it's a cheap Zire 21), I haven't figured out all the tricks. But the search worked great. Thanks!
). Does anyone know of a convenient way to fix this disparity between the two programs? (I don't want to run clunky VPC just for this).
Have fun out there!
At least for the moment, there's absolutely nothing I can do about finding the first four (one is invitation only, one needs a boat, and two are disabled and not even there)! Keep on cachin'!
Avoiding Muggles
in How do I...?
Posted
I'll double the serious response: I completely agree with WalruZ here. Scavenger hunts have enough history associated with them, and account for our strange behavior in a completely understandable and fairly accurate way.
Actually, I often just say: "I'm geocaching, it's like a scavenger hunt using a GPSr." That approach removes a lot of the mystery and people realize that I'm having more fun than they are.
If you still want stealth, you can just pretend to be writing text messages on your "cell phone". That allows you to still look at the screen.