jon & miki

Well, that's interesting. So something is removing the image from your page. The whitelist references in the HTML make me think that you might have some sort of ad blocking software installed and that very well could be what's causing the difficulty. What extensions and (possibly) greasemonkey scripts do you have installed? You could try disabling the extensions one at a time until the problem goes away or start FireFox in "safe mode" to disable all extensions temporarily. Either way, you may be able to find the extension (if any) that's causing the trouble.

This one's got me. I guess my first question would be what you have changed in the about:config area (I didn't think most folks even knew about that page, let alone went there to make changes, so presumably you went in there to make some advanced settings?). Any properties changed from default will show up in bold, so it should be relatively straightforward (though time-consuming) to look through what's not in the default state and then look up on the web what that particular property controls. You might also select the area where the stats are supposed to be, view selection source and see if the HTML includes the image. Not that I can suggest what to do if the HTML is missing, but perhaps if the HTML isn't there, we might have a starting point for further investigation.

If you are running Adblock Plus, you'll see a small circle in the lower right corner of your window. It is supposed to be a cockroach with a "prohibited" red line through it. Bujt unless someone else set it up for you or you downloaded Firefox from a site that already set up the browser for you, you would know if you are running adblock or adblock plus.

On my grayscale Vista, the owner information is modified from the main menu page. It's not one of the icons though, it's a menu item.

A couple of shots in the dark.... Are you running Adblock? Or maybe you have the preferences set to load images from the originating site only?

Thanks Raine, I noticed I was logged out after I posted. Don't know why that happened, but logging in fixed the problem. Sorry for the false alarm.

I just noticed that the links that normally follow the cache description are mostly gone - the only survivor is the link to caches hidden and found by the cache owner. The nearest and various map links are gone, as are the maps. It could be because we're using a mac, but it's not browser related, I tried it in Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer and all had the same abbreviated display.

In another thread, there was system that would seem to work. It could have very well have been discussed elsewhere I've not seen it or assimilated it at the time. I believe it the post described the way NetFlicks does it. I guess as it applies to Groundspeak is finders check whether they enjoyed the cache or not. This date does not show to anyone other than the person who made the log. The system then looks at the rest of the logs and makes a list of the other users who indicated they liked the cache and makes a list of the other caches they've indicated they've liked. The number of "I liked it" indications create a relevance rating. You set a threshold of relevance that suits you. Sounds like a good idea? Not really. This scheme relies of a common circle of finders. Unlike movies, geocaching is very geo-oriented in that each cache is limited to one place. If I haven't found any caches in the area the system would not know what caches I like compared to what caches others liked. It would be utterly useless for traveling any reasonable distance from your home area. That's not to say some sort of hybrid system might not work. I'm sure there is something. Heck, I'd settle for half a loaf if it helped. CR has a good point, but I think his travel objection is overstated. Presumably this type of rating system would work better the nearer you are to home (more crossover), but the very flaw he points out, travelling out of area, means that there IS some traffic between the areas and therefore some number of logs to cross reference for the rating. And if someone really is travelling to a place that rarely exchanges visitors with their home area, they would be flying blind at first, but then your first few ratings of local caches would begin to identify the "compatible" caches in the area. That's what happens when a netflix customer suddenly finds a whole new area (like anime) and hasn't rated anything like that type of movie before. But in reality, there is quite a bit of travel from one location to another already - look at the maps folks make for the states they have cached in. And the rating system does not have to be limited to "one degree of freedom" either - Once the "affinity" group is identified, the ratings for caches liked (or disliked) could be shared by the whole group, not just those who had found the same pair of caches. But even without the extra degree of freedom, I believe there probably would be enough crossover for an "affinity" rating system to work. In any case, the first step is to allow some sort of rating system. A lot of different approaches to sharing ratings could be tried, but not without the raw basic input from the users.

Most libraries have free internet access. Some libraries require that you be a resident, but many do not (our county libraries do not).

And it's not possible to filter out the really lame regular's and preserve the rest. The only "problem" I see with a rating system, is the finders that like that sort of cache will rate it high, while those that don't like it will rate it low - it would tend to average out. Then we'd see threads complaining about lamppost hides that had too high a rating (the finders to whom that's new rated them too high for the everyone else)... There are "affinity" rating systems that get around this problem. The Netflix system is one example. They'll tell you that folks who liked this movie also liked that one. Once you've done a few ratings so the program has something to compare to, the recommendations get fairly good. A system like that would allow folks who like micros to rate them high and generate recommendations for others who like similar hides, without generating recommendations for those caches for folks who dislike that kind of hide.

I wish it wasn't 10.4 and beyond. I've avoided upgrading from 10.3 since I didn't particularly need any of the new features, but maybe I'll have to when Garmin finally gets MacSource out the door.

The Seattle phase has begun... see this article

Good point! I should have not just said "in general", but specifically mentioned commercial enterprises and rather more than "casual" usage.

It's probably a good idea, at least in general, to actually patronize the places offering "free" wi-fi. See this news story for a bad example.

I agree that the purpose of puzzles like this one is often to teach the cacher about something interesting. I'd say let the hiders pass along hints as they feel appropriate. On the other hand, there have been times I've wished for a program like the one you're describing just to avoid tedious calculations in spreadsheets or one-off programs, and based on what I've seen of your work so far, it would be much better than anything I'd find in an internet search. I'd certainly download and keep a copy around if you provided it, so perhaps I'm being a bit hypocritical?

All I know about it is what's in the link, but as to who's behind it, it's obviously part of an ad campaign for a shoe store, so I'd take a wild guess that it's the shoe store and their ad agency. What's different to me is the inclusion of geocaching in a national advertising campaign. It's been done a few times before by state tourism bureaus and of course by jeep and project ape, but this one appeared to be a bit more mainstream than the usual. Unless I missed something, they aren't trying to be another listing service, just using geocaching in their ad campaign and probably limiting the caches to where they have their stores.

This is not a commercial endorsement or anything like it, (I've never even seen one of these shoe stores as far as I know) but when this link popped up in Google News this morning, I thought it very relevant to our form of geocaching and a further indication of how mainstream the hobby's becoming - see Palcaching. Wonder if it will spread to cities other than the original targets?

If you are going for the mathematical rather than the graphical solution, you should focus on the simultaneous equations solution suggested above. You can convert from dd mm.mmm to decimal degrees by the formula decdeg=dd + mm.mmm/60. UTM is a better coordinate system if the circle is just a little bit "large" though. You'll have to convert the coordinates, but your gps will probably do that for you. If the circle is REALLY "large", you'll need a more complex approach, but that's true of the graphical solution too.

Yep, the order changed to leave the caches that ran most recently at the top rather than at the bottom, but that was after a brief time when they were sorted into alphabetical order. See this thread and the thread from last November that it references.

Wish that was enough . It doesn't quite match my experience though. My streetpilot decided to clear about 2/3 of the waypoints we had carefully chosen along our route while we were on a caching run many miles from home. The deleted waypoints were apparently chosen randomly, but seemed to be mostly the last entered ones, that is, the caches we had picked out as targets, and of course we had no way to restore them on the road. It only happened once and we managed by hand entering a lot of cache locations, but I've learned not to be too sure of a GPS memory. Even as reliable a unit as the Garmin occasionally has problems.

Yep, can you tell my degree was in math and that I'm often accused of being very detail oriented (usually in much less flattering terms though)?

I'm not quite sure how that last approach works, but it reminded me of the method we used in my long-ago geometry classes. Assuming a geometric solution is acceptable, plot the three given points as dots on a map, draw a straight line between two of the dots, bisect it and draw a straight line perpendicular to the line between the dots. Do the same for another pair of dots. The intersection is the center of your circle - read off the coordinates on the map and you're golden. In case your geometry is as rusty as mine, the bisection should be an easy exercise with a compass (the pencil kind, not the magnetic kind). Just put the sharp point of the compass on one of your dots, set the radius to put the pencil on the other dot of the pair and draw an arc. Do the same using the other dot. Then draw a line through the intersections of the two arcs. That will give you one diameter line - do the same thing again for the next pair of points to get the center of the circle. Of course, this assumes that the distances involved are short enough that the earth's curvature doesn't come into play, and that you've got a map with a fine enough scale that you can read off the coordinates from it with enough accuracy. Good luck!

Now, the NEW order I like!

Dang, I thought the alphabetic sorting thing had gone away after the last time we saw it. Can we get back to a most-recently-run sort again? Or at least have an option to see it the old way? The ony change I'd like to see from the "old" sort order is to put the most recently run at the top so I don't have to scroll down for them, but even the old order is still tons better than alphabetic!

Garmin's locked products are locked to the GPS, not the PC. That is, your unlock code will unlock maps for a particular GPS, and you should be able to install Mapsource and the mapsets on any PC you have access to in order to download specific maps from the mapset to the "licensed" GPS. Now if you want to download the maps to more than one GPS or change which GPS the mapset is unlocked for, that's a different problem....