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Fish Below The Ice

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Posts posted by Fish Below The Ice

    Release Notes - July 23, 2014

    in Geocaching HQ communications

    Posted

    Oh snap! A new geocache was just published!

     

    After I opened a New Publication email I received, the above quote is the first thing I see and it makes me curious as to what the average age of a cacher is nowadays. Perhaps it's getting younger and I'm just some out of date old coot, but my belief is that the average user is old enough to remember when "Oh snap!" was common lingo, and it seems to me that 2014 is about 30 years after that phrase's peak. I imagine that someone on The Design Team thinks that this is a fun and cute and cuddly phrase that can be turned into a swag button or trackable to sell in the store, but to me it just seems unprofessional. Is the new target demographic 12 year olds? Who on earth says "Oh snap!" anymore? It was annoying back then and hasn't gotten any less annoying now.

    WHAAAAAZUP!? A new geocache was just published!

    Like ohmygod! Fershure! Gnarly! A new geocache was just published!

    23 Skiddoo! A new geocache was just published!

    Uploading corrected coords to iPhone

    in How do I...?

    Posted

    I've got a lot of solved puzzle coords in my GSAK database and I have unsuccessfully been trying to get them into my official gc.com iPhone app. Not so long ago I was able to generate a GPX file on my computer and upload that to gc.com. That feature seems to have either been removed or hidden so well that I can't find it.

     

    Is there another way to accomplish this?

    Visual timer

    in Wherigo

    Posted

    I was wondering if anyone has succeeded in creating a visual timer.

     

    If someone enters a zone a question about the location is being asked, but I want to prevent people from looking things up in wikipedia etc. For that reason I am adding a timer, but it would be much nicer if it would be a visible one.

    Animations are hard enough on their own, but trying to do it at the same time that you're prompting for user input is almost certainly impossible given the state of the art of Wherigo players. I think a better idea is to measure how long the user took to give the correct answer and award your points based on that. (Even this will require custom LUA coding if you're using the official builder... Earwigo or Urwigo might have something built in)

    Groundspeak break silence

    in Wherigo

    Posted

    Have you seen the comment from Jeremy?

     

    "Our plan is to continue to support Wherigo, but unfortunately other projects have taken priority - especially the features for geocaching. We do not have plans to retire Wherigo and believe there is a future in the project."

    Bland handwaving.

     

    Compare it against what Ranger Fox reported back to us almost a year and a half ago:

     

    Where Are the/When Will We See Updates?

    Wherigo is now "on the table" and more is being said about it. They want to get back to the project. Bryan agrees too much time has gone by. However, both of us agree it's best not to discuss time frames because there's a tendency for people to mistake them for commitments.

     

    Wherigo is still in the R&D phase. Conceptually speaking, the next step, now that Wherigo is a reality, is where to take it from here. This is in addition to new features: marketing, business processes, spec, etc.

    Back then, grοundspeak was thinking about maybe looking into starting to talk about making plans to do something with Wherigo. Now they "believe there is a future in the project". I'd call that a step backwards.

    Send to GPS

    in Canada

    Posted

    Hey KDotBlueDot!!! Don't believe everything Tequila says........ B):):)

    As the saying goes, "The man with one GPSr knows where he is. The man with three is never sure."

    G20 in Toronto

    in Canada

    Posted

    So we've all heard about the G20 in Toronto. Any of you have caches in the security zone? One of my cop friends says they're searching out anything unusual and removing them. It might not be a bad idea to pulll any trackables out of the security zone and relocate and disable caches temporarily. Just my thoughts. Security is also becoming higher at all City owned properties.

     

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/...116/?cmpid=rss1

     

    Geocachers planning to hunt for hidden boxes in Toronto during the G20 weekend are being warned to take their sleuthing outside of the city.

     

    “It’s not recommended to go down to a high-security area and start snooping around looking for a hidden package,” Ontario Geocaching Association vice-president Gregory Pleau said.

     

    Geocachers are high-tech treasure hunters who use Global Positioning System receivers or other navigational techniques to find hidden containers called caches. The containers are filled with log books to keep track of who finds the caches. Caches can be plastic containers or even ammo boxes, but are usually small items such as film canisters in city centres and high-traffic areas, Mr. Pleau said.

     

    It’s not the first time geocachers have been told to take their game somewhere else. The Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit asked geocachers to use “common sense” when geocaching and stay away from restricted areas at the Olympics earlier this year.

     

    Mr. Pleau also advises geocachers who own caches in and around the security perimeter to remove them until the summit is over. About five of Toronto's 542 caches exist within the security perimeter, he said.

     

    “We just don’t want to see the mother of all bomb scares,” Mr. Pleau said.

    Questions about Facebook "like" buttons on cache pages.

    in Website

    Posted

    Given all that's been happening recently on Planet Facebook, I think it's pretty funny that anybody with a Facebook account would think that anything that Groundspeak could do would have any measurable impact on their already hopelessly-compromised privacy. It's like someone who weighs 500 pounds complaining that the vending machine is out of Diet Coke.

     

    When I am at facebook.com, I can choose to limit the amount of personal information that I divulge. With this new "Like" widget, Groundspeak is providing Facebook with personally-identifiable tracking information about what web pages I visit, with no opt-in on my part and no apparent opt-out option.

     

    I'm sure that the Groundspeak lawyers will be able to quibble over whether they are violating the letter of their privacy policy (if they're just giving this information away to Facebook for free, they're not "selling" or "renting" it) but they are certainly violating the spirit of it:

     

    <quote name="http://www.geocaching.com/login/default.aspx">

    Disclosure

    At GEOCACHING.COM, we will not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party, ever. On occasion, we will aggregate personally identifiable information and may disclose such information in aggregate to third parties. However, in these situations, we will never disclose any information that could be used to personally identify you.

    </quote>

     

    Hopefully there will be an opt-in option for Facebook connectivity real soon now.

    Is Wherigo dead?

    in Wherigo

    Posted

    so what's the official status of Wherigo? a while ago i was working on a cartridge, but i heard rumours about GS abandoning Wherigo, so i never finished it. how true is it all?

     

    Groundspeak's official status is the same as it ever was: "Groundspeak's goal is to reintroduce the adventure game genre by making it easy for anyone to create and play location-based adventures in the real world. Using Wherigo, the physical world becomes the background for engaging story lines and location-specific virtual entertainment."

     

    In practice, though, there hasn't been an update to the builder since May 2008. There hasn't been an update to the PPC player since May 2008. There hasn't been an update to the Garmin players since July 2009. There are severe bugs in the Garmin players (inability to use non-English characters, no support for Tasks) that have remained unaddressed for years. There are no official players released for iPhone or Android. No hand-held GPS receiver since the Oregon has had a Wherigo player. I have never seen any traffic on any of the official grоundspeak-supported Wherigo mailing lists, and of course lackeys never communicate here in the forums.

     

    The closest we have to an official grоundspeak update is Ranger Fox's report from his trip to GS headquarters last August,

    here. Ranger Fox seemed pretty upbeat about Wherigo's future, although the facts of the matter as he relayed them are that there was at the time no active development for Wherigo and no commitment to start it. There was talk of discussions of plans to maybe restart Wherigo development at some unspecified point in the future, so who knows, maybe something is happening by now.

     

    That said, there is a lot of activity in the Wherigo community. There are two non-GS builders available and one non-GS-branded player. The forums here are active and you will get an expert response to pretty much any technical question you have.

     

    In my opinion, Wherigo will continue as a niche product for the foreseeable future. Earwigo and Urwigo will continue to get better, and people who enjoy writing Wherigo cartridges will continue to write them. But without Groundspeak making at least as strong a commitment to Wherigo, there won't be a player available on new handheld GPSrs, there won't be an app available in the iPhone or Android stores, there won't be improvements made to the Wherigo API, and there won't be awareness in the community at large about what Wherigo is all about and how to play it.

     

    Maybe GS is aware of this and have lackeys working away in their underground bunker developing improvements to Wherigo that will knock our socks off. Maybe they're secretly working with Garmin, Magellan, Lowrance, etc to make the player widely available on GPSr systems at pricepoints all the way up and down the scale. Maybe they've clarified the status of LUA with regard to Apple's licensing terms and we'll see Wherigo in the app store any day now. Maybe.

    Hardest Cache 'in' Canada

    in Canada

    Posted

    would suck trying to clear that off the closest to home list.. Wonder why he put it there as opposed to the middle of the ocean, or the Cosmodrome in Kazak?

    Cosmodrome: N45° 51.569 E 63° 18.802

    GC1BE91: N 45° 57.309 W 063° 21.017

     

    Looks like the cache owner can't tell the difference between East and West.

    Canadian Geopub Quiz

    in Canada

    Posted

    Why is Santa's suit red?

    Lives on the Russian border, doesn't pay his workforce, distributes goods for free (except to those who exhibit counterrevolutionary behaviour ("naughty" children as he calls them). Obviously, Santa is a communist.

    CHANGES TO SUBMITTAL PROCESS

    in EarthCaches

    Posted

    It seems to me that the problem with the vacation cache rule for earthcaches is that interesting geological features aren't necessarily in the same place as cachers who are willing to go to the trouble of putting together an earthcache. So if I want to get my next level of Earthcache Masters certification I have to find something interesting within 50 miles of my home. I suppose I could do that -- I could probably find three such places for my platinum level, for that matter -- but if I'm doing it at the same as all the other cachers in the area who want a Masters certification I suspect that it won't be long until we're at Barrel Bottom Scraping Time. ("Oh look, it's another earthcache asking us to measure the diameter of a glacial erratic!")

     

    I think the Earthcache program would be better suited by having a cache placed at a truly interesting location in an area where no regular cachers live than a barely-good-enough-to-qualify cache that just happens to be within 50 milers of a cacher's house.

    I had an idea can someone tell me if or how it would work

    in Canada

    Posted

    You'll never get it approved if there's no logbook. The way I'd do it would be to find a big evergreen and hide a proper cache in it. Then hang the twelve ornaments on the same tree. Put a note in the cache and on the cache listing saying "Take an ornament if you're caching with a child, otherwise leave the ornaments for someone who does have a child along." Most people are decent and will go along with what you're trying to do. Having them all in the same tree will make it look like a big Christmas tree when it's brand new, which will really add to the effect, imho.

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