DavidMac

You may want to email Bamboozle or short circuit 2. They both live in the area and are active cachers who maintain quite a few hides. I'd hate to see a good hide disappear.

Enjoying the nice warm 20 degree weather, I see. We were up that way two weeks ago and it was 4 below!

I know that very few MS folks read this forum, but for those who do I'd like to announce that the memorial service will be held on Friday, December 18 at 4:00 PM at Liberty Baptist Church in Flowood, MS. A short visitation will follow. All are invited to attend.

Butrflybec and I were at home this evening when we got one of those phone calls that you hope you never have to receive. TrkDoc, her father and my soon-to-be father in-law, passed away sometime today while on a cache hunt in Louisiana. TrkDoc was one of the top cachers in the state of Mississippi and over the past few months had completed many challenge caches across the southeast and central US, most recently the Oklahoma county and Delorme challenges. We know that he was in LA for the weekend finishing up the parish challenge. However, at this point we still don't know much, and are still awaiting more details. He was a great asset to caching in our state and will definitely be missed. Here's what Bec posted on the MSGA forums:

Thankfully I haven't (yet!), but I did get an interesting post on one of my more remote hides once. Somebody had visited the cache from out of state and came across a meth lab on the way. Their log talked about a really interesting abandoned "campsite" that they found near the cache, but their pictures showed all of the obvious warning signs: copper tubing, a random assortment of corroded pots and pans, a dozen or so discarded propane bottles, and even a pink-stained bathtub! (the pink comes from dyes in the medicines used in one of the stages of production) I sent them an email explaining what they most likely had found and warning them to be careful poking around since the county was infamous for such labs. I even included a few links to websites by various sheriff's departments explaining what to watch for... these labs are highly dangerous because, for one, the waste byproducts are incredibly toxic and are often dumped right at the site. I was shocked when they completely blew me off! In their reply they insisted that they had just found an innocent campsite and obviously not a meth lab... after all it was just a bunch of discarded camping gear. Um... yeah... you mean camping gear like aerosol cans and a bathtub?

Back in 2004 somebody gave me a DVD that had a later interview with Dave Ulmer as well as the original stash footage linked to above. All I remember is that he was interviewed somewhere in the desert while sitting beside a camper and a dirt bike. I haven't seen it online since and I'm not sure who the author was. The DVD is in storage but I'll see if I can locate it. If I can find out the author and get permission I'd like to post it to Youtube (if it hasn't been done already). Does anybody else remember that one, or have a link to the video?

Bumping this old thread to update the list. I still don't know of any Delorme Challenges for Florida or Texas. However, with the recent publication of the Louisiana County (Oops! Parish) Challenge, every state now has a county challenge. Be sure to check it out. Alabama: Delorme: yes County: yes Arkansas: Delorme: yes County: yes Florida: Delorme: no County: yes, three: north, south, and final. Georgia: Delorme: yes County: yes Kentucky: Delorme: yes County: yes Louisiana: Delorme: yes County (er, parish): yes Mississippi: Delorme: yes County: yes North Carolina: Delorme: yes County: yes South Carolina: Delorme: yes County: yes Tennessee: Delorme: yes County: yes Texas: Delorme: no County: yes (believe it or not... and people have actually completed it!)

Garmin has a selection of Mac software. I use RoadTrip to manage non-geocache waypoints on my Colorado 400T. You can load pocket query GPX files straight into the GPS without using GSAK. I do run GSAK through Parallels on my Mac, but that's an expensive option.

Keep in mind that the limitation is in the image dimensions rather than file size. Anything under 1 megapixel (1024x1024) should do the trick. I haven't run into any filesize limitations, but all the images I've tried were only a few MB when cut into the proper size. I think that odd dimensions (512x2048) may work too as long as they don't have more than the maximum number of pixels, but I haven't tested this myself.

Not natively. But... I've run GSAK under Wine on Ubuntu, granted not without some issues and a bit of configuration. It runs perfectly well on my OSX machine through a VM running Windows XP, which is my current preferred method of running Windows-only caching tools. It uses about half the space that a dedicated partition does and requires no rebooting.

Aw, come on. You know I'd never tell a lie and hurt you, never let you down, never... Tinyurl has an option to preview the final destination of a URL before actually redirecting you there. You have to go to their homepage and accept a cookie, but it prevents you from being tricked into viewing catchy music videos or NSFW pictures.

Not usually all that accurate. Within 200 to 300 feet usually though - close enough. All it really takes is the coordinates for the nearest intersection of streets in either direction - then based on the address - you can approximate how far down the block to go. Its called geocoding. Translating street addresses into coordinates. Wikipedia has a bit more info on how this is done. The software takes the street address and estimates where it should lie between two intersections. To quote their example: I used to know someone who (in the 1980's) helped digitize the data that is still used to geocode many of the street adresses in our county. It was originally used to help 911 determine where to send emergency vehicles when responding to call. It also had census implications but I never got the details as to how.

I see that this is not a beta version and can also be downloaded through Webupdater. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I wonder if it fixes any of the minor issues that the 3.02 beta introduced? (such as the pink tracklog and the lack of popup text displaying feature names when hovering over them with the cursor)

For as long as I've had my Nuvi 500, I've noticed that I've never managed to arrive right at the scheduled ETA, but that the time always increases en route. I always blamed this on traffic lights or getting stuck behind slow drivers, but on a recent trip I did a little more testing. I brought along a Nuvi 500 (with built-in routable topo maps) and a Colorado 400 with City Nav 2009. Notice anything off in the screenshot below? (I was driving along interstate 20 in Louisiana/Mississippi) Here's a hint: the speed limit is 70 MPH for all but 10 of those miles, where it decreases to 60. To make my ETA, I'd have to keep up an average of 73 MPH! With a little more testing on other roads I calculated that the Nuvi assumes: - I will always be speeding 5 over the speed limit - I will not have to stop at any traffic lights or stop signs - I can turn at intersections while going full speed The Colorado was a bit more realistic, putting my travel time at 1:08 for the same leg shown in the screenshot above. For comparison, Google Maps assumes that you will be traveling at 5 under the speed limit, making your ETA a bit later. Here's what Google Maps has to say about the same route as the one on the GPS screenshot. I kept an eye on the speed limit icon on the nuvi screen, and it accurately reported the speed limit on all the roads I tested to within about 300 feet of the actual speed limit change. Thus I believe that the data is accurate, but that the GPS software is inaccurately calculating travel time. Has anybody else noticed this or is it just me? Do other Nuvi models do this too?

Believe it or not, less trouble than you'd think. Partly because there's a higher concentration of virtual caches, and partly because most people in that city are too busy to care about your business. And I suspect that over time, there is a natural selection process that weeds out the more noticeable caches. The areas where I've had the most trouble are small rural towns where everybody knows everybody's business and where an out of town car/cacher draws immediate attention. My absolute favorite area is New Mexico, southern Utah, and southwestern Colorado. Lots of great scenery, rural drives, and good caches along the way. And just about everywhere you go there's a good mix of quick roadside caches, strenuous hikes, or historic sites to suit whatever mood you happen to be in. I've made three trips through the region since I started caching, most recently last week.

Word from the cache owner is that there are supposed to be 144 in all. About 10 have not been approved yet. I may get a couple when I'm in the area but I don't think I'll have the patience to do all of them. Or I may just do them all so that I can write a unique, relevant, 50 word log for each.

I'm not sure if this happened as a result of the last release but I've never noticed it before... Go to any user's profile and click on the "Trackables" tab. The username in the navigation links at the top of the page is replaced by:

I was on the road nearly all day and never noticed any problems.

Not anymore. This used to be a method by which cache owners could slowly move cache listing coordinates over long distances, but steps have since been taken to prevent it.

You have to be really careful not just in the woods, but in urban locations as well. Many times in the woods I've used a stick to poke around before blindly feeling for a cache with my hands.

NO! Sounds were disabled on cache pages for a reason. Let's keep it that way. Provide a link to the sound that users can click if they want.

Hi there. I am the hider of the Earthcache over on Highway 45. A few of us do check these forums, but more Mississippi cachers spend time over at www.msga.net. If you have any questions feel free to sign up and ask away.

You never know. With a new "bring back virtuals" thread appearing in these forums every week I could have a whole paragraph by the end of next year

This request has been brought up many, many times over the years, and no matter how many times it is asked the answer will most likely always be no.

I ran across this one on a recent cache run. Really, would somebody even try to get a truck down this road? For starters, it is a dead end road that runs parallel to a perfectly good 4-lane state highway. And this picture was taken at the widest point in the road. Around the bend it becomes steep, narrow, and rutted. My car made it through with a little finesse, but a semi would never make it. And once reached the end I found myself in Deliverance. Dogs laid in the road and barely lifted their heads as I passed. Old pickups sat on mossy cinderblocks. Women with beehive hairdoos stared at me from behind the blinds of trailer windows. The shotgun holes in the sign were just icing on the cake.