Fier

The 'beginner caches' is a great idea - I suspect that you also include some consideration regarding the number of 'finds' against DNF's (information that I can't trust in an off-line database.) My definition of a 'quick cache' is up for debate. Perhaps I should have phrased it in reverse and tried to define a 'veteran cache.' I have put some thought into a better definition but we're limited by the information available. What I find particularly difficult is to include into the 'veteran caches' all caches that have a terrain less than 2 when the difficulty is 3 or greater and visa-versa. Which brings me to me response to both your observations... The pocket queries (and for that matter the normal 'seek a cache' page) do not let me easily ignore all caches that have a combined value of terrain and difficulty being 4 or greater. In GSAK, I filter for all Traditional caches that have a difficulty of 1.5 and terrain of 1.5, then apply a reverse filter. (That helps a lot, but not when I'm on holiday and my PC is at home.) What I do not want to do is filter out all caches that have a difficulty of 2 or less and miss those with a terrain greater than 3 (or visa-versa.) I hope that you can see my angle here - I am trying to find a way to highlight the challenging caches - that's what inspires me to geocache. @Moun10Bike - now that you mention 'beginner' caches, now I've started wondering whether there is a consideration to highlight 'veteran' caches or something similar?

funny how my ( b ) became a That really was no pun intended

To give some background, I (like many other cachers) do not engage in the so called 'numbers game' and with the recent explosion of easy-find caches being published, I find it difficult to identify caches that appear to be interesting finds (however one may consider a find to be interesting.) So my idea is to try facilitate both sides of the coin - enable people to filter on GC.com for 'quick finds' or to filter for the opposite. When I refer to a 'quick find' I think the best way to define it (with the information available) is to use a basic algorithm and categorise 'quick finds' to be: 'small' or 'micro', 'traditional' caches with 'difficulty'+'terrain' <= 3. On my count, for every 26 'quick find' cache, there are 23 'not quick find' caches. If we can apply this filter to GC.com's search page and to the PQ function, we will be able to facilitate people wanting quick finds while travelling and those who play the 'numbers game' by ignoring the 'not quick finds' if/when they want to, and also facilitate people like myself who mostly enjoy the multi's, mysteries, and hard traditionals to avoid being troubled with (as I think of them - uninteresting) easy caches on the list of nearby caches. I hope everybody reading this understands that I am not trying to start more debates regarding 'numbers game' or 'should we allow power trails' or 'I hate micros' - I am trying to propose a way that facilitates (a) what my good friends and gaming partners who find maximum reward in finding 'quick finds' than struggle for just a few 'not quick finds', and ( still facilitates what I appreciate about the game.

Now that's a Power Trail worth doing. When I did the trail, I only found two caches in the 5 days but those two are "mega smiley"! Unfortunately (well - actually fortunately) I'm sure I'll have my hands full next July. I would have loved to join you - especially looking at the great company gathering and also because you timed the tides for your booking (we hiked for an hour in the dark to be at the river at low tide)

AND please before I get crucified again.... Let me spell it out. The same small group is the only people with the personal attacks and seemingly zero tolerance for other peoples opinions-- I see this on the Facebook geocaching page as well. Um well, that's not the idea of this 'representing body'. There is certainly no financial gain behind this representing body, so the only gain would be for one to be in the thick of things and do more geocaching. Any geocacher can choose to chase numbers or badges - I normally choose mystery caches and caches with concise, favourable logs entries when I'm on holiday (and I normally find those gems I'm looking for). Please message me if there is any evidence that this 'body' starts to be a benefit a few at the expense of many. As a founding member, my experience is precisely the opposite.

Thanks to Geo936 for hosting yet another organisers evening last nigh. Looks like we are making great strides to our Mega next spring!

Now that was a great 'Brainstorming Session' and I'm convinced we can pull this off. Two more attendees from from Fier. We just need 482 more people.

I only found this wap.gc.com site tonight and thought it is such a great improvement over the 500k+ page sizes from the www.gc.com site. (and the gc.mobi site is no improvement - it actually is just a facade ontop of gc.com) On the other hand, it seems like simple improvements that could be made are not being addressed. My style of geocaching is completely paperless and my (htc) phone with cachemate is all I need to go caching. (of course I have my cache bag with the necessities - like tweezers, torch, pencil, etc) There are three important things that I think need attention for this site to become a well-used capability by Groundspeak: 1. allow for a lookup that uses the DD MM.mmm coord format, 2. fix the TB update capability and 3. allow for seamless integration from cachemate. As I can't fix 1 and 2, I'm going to look into 3. Has anybody tried this yet?

As all of us rely on satellites for our GPSrs to work, it would be in our nature to think about interesting events that occur in near outer space. If anybody is interested, there is a total Lunar eclipse on Thursday morning. The next one visible from South Africa is in 7 years. Just copying the summary from the planetarium website (http://www.planetarium.co.za/LunarEclipse2008Feb.html) early morning Thu 21 Feb starts 3:42am ends 7:08am (after moonset) The eclipse is total from 5:00am to 5:50am. All of South Africa will see the start of the eclipse. Durban will miss the last few minutes of totality. Only western South Africa will see the Moon start to move out of the eclipse. The Moon sets before the end of the eclipse (for all of South Africa). So, at 5:30, look at the moon in the west (and then go back to sleep if you can.) Note that the moon will be setting while the sun is rising, so when the moon is about to touch the horizon, look east and you'll see the first rays of the sun (in theory, anyway)

I've sorted it out - how exciting! I had tried starting different apps in different orders, but this time I restarted my PPC and set up the BT signal before starting Wherigo. I think my PPC's memory is pushed to it's limit resulting in the BT port getting a back seat. Restating the device sorts all this out. Thanks David for your hard work. The tutorial cartridge was fun

I am rather excited about this concept of Wherigo, and I spent this weekend trying to get a Nokia 6110 Navigator to transmit the GPS signal via Blue tooth to Wherigo on my Pocket PC. I was really excited when I found a simple java application that reads the internal GPS feed on the Nokia and transmits it via BT to my paired device (I tested this using the Cachemate NMEA plugin.) Then I started Wherigo and it crashed because there was no GPS. I tried again with success and loaded the tutorial, only to receive a message that the GPS signal is not strong enough when I try the first 'task.' The problem I have is that I believe that Wherigo is fixed as to where it gets it's input. My PPC only allows BT on Com6 or Com7 and I think that this may be related to the problem (it appears that some people who use Com5 have less problems with Wherigo.) In the end, I think the developers have done a great job making the application work on a very large number of devices already (really, well done), but I think that it's important to allow for a more complex set-up when a device is attached to an external GPS without any GPS software installed. I agree with what Bringer and others say - give functionality to the end user to configure the port!