The Cheeseheads

I found one near Battery Park. After walking past the area a couple times and having a fairly good idea of where it probably was, I sent the kids in after it while Mrs. Cheesehead and I sat on a bench. Nobody paid any attention to a few kids walking around through the bushes.

I use both a regular Garmin GPSr and an iPhone. Personally, I'd be afraid of dropping my phone on a rock or having it get wet, which is why I primarily only use it for looking up cache information. Also, the accuracy of the phone is great out on the open, but poor under tree cover. For that reason alone, if you ever plan on hiding a cache, I'd recommend getting (or at least borrowing) a "real" GPS unit, otherwise you run the risk of angry cachers complaining about how your coordinates are always 50' off.

2-axis compass is older technology where you would need to hold the unit flat (just like you would a real compass) to make it work. More recent models have a 3-axis compass meaning you can hold the unit at any angle and the arrow on the screen will point correctly. With the 60CSx, there are two modes for the compass. For the electronic compass to work, you actually need to activate it on the GPSr, and then calibrate it. Read your manual for those instructions. The electronic compass also will use up your battery faster. Without turning it on, the compass only works accurately if you're actually moving, i.e. the GPSr looks at its coordinates once per second or so and uses that information to calculate what direction you're traveling. If you're standing still or moving very slowly or circling around an area in the woods, that calculation becomes inaccurate and the arrow tends to point the wrong way. As has been pointed out though, there are accuracy errors on both yours and the GPSr of the person that hid the cache. The arrow may say that the cache is ten feet ahead of you when it's actually twenty feet behind you. I personally keep the electronic compass turned off. I use my GPSr to get me to the general area, then just start hunting from there.

On-topic, with just a hint of off-topic, getting sent to the proper place.

I have seen lock-n-locks closed up with the lid on upside down (seal side on the outside of the container) The lock tabs still held the lid on. That said...lock-n-locks are the best containers after ammo cans. In that case, it's likely that the cacher also couldn't find their way back to their car, preserving the safety of the rest of the caches in the area.

I saw this in my email this morning and picked up a set, then came here to see if anyone else had mentioned it. I'd say, if you're going to hide a plastic container, I'd go with a lock-n-lock because the seals tend to be pretty reliable (I've had lock-n-locks hidden here in Wisconsin for years with no complaints about damp logs) and because of the locking mechanism, it's easy for a cacher to be sure they closed the container correctly before rehiding it.

Apparently the new iPhones now have GLONASS support: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/19/apple-expands-iphone-4s-gps-capabilities-with-glonass-support/

Moving out of off-topic...

What was it, exactly?

I'm seeing this in Safari on MacOS X 10.7:

Kiss a frog is a worldwide challenge and those can only be created by Groundspeak. Normal cachers are expected to come along with challenges taking place that specific locations. Cezanne And unfortunately, that point isn't the most clear.

Was it "Take a picture is this specific dilapidated building" or "Take a picture of some sort of urban decay in your town"? If it was the latter, then that would probably explain it.

It looks like a lot of the ones that aren't tied to a specific location are getting archived. Bad: Post a picture of yourself doing a phoon. Good: Post a picture of yourself doing a phoon in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Turn off the caps lock and tell us what it was.

Moving to the General Discussions forum...

Moving to the general geocaching discussions.

When I was running the INATN site, one thing I was doing was flagging traveling caches, and then excluding them from distance or "what places have I cached in?" stats.

There was some other discussion of the forum makeover here as well. I'm not going to attempt to try to merge the two threads, but Jeremy has a few pieces of input.

More discussion of the forum software over here! (I have merged that one into this one thread. - MissJenn)

Follow [twitter]cheesehead_dave[/twitter] on Twitter! Follow @cheesehead_dave on Twitter!

I will not be closing posts/threads that mention alternate sites, so long as they remain on topic, and the discussion is about the sites and not promoting the sites themselves. (e.g. "I noticed that oc.com has a blue mascot now." vs. "I'm cross-posting all my caches to oc.com. You should, too!") Although, as this is still a geocaching-related discussion, it should probably be in the Geocaching Topics forum and not the off-topic forum, so that's where it's going.

Moving to the appropriate forum...

Excellent topic. Moving it to the correct forum...

I'll assume from your request that if you're traveling, you already have a means to look up this information, i.e. a smartphone. I can't speak to other platforms, but the iPhone has many apps available for looking up POIs near your current location.

Groundspeak is aware of the issue: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=257589