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I'll add one that's been present for several years now. When a PNG or GIF image is uploaded to a cache page, the contents of the file are quietly changed to progressive jpeg with no warning and no change to the file suffix. There are plenty of puzzle caches that rely on these file formats, for example where the solution is encoded in RGB values, yet this behaviour isn't even documented in the Help Centre, leaving unwary COs oblivious to the fact that their carefully crafted PNG or GIF file has turned into a jpeg without even the .JPG extension to suggest anything's changed. The only explanation given for this is that, for players on slow internet connections, it looks prettier for images to gradually come into focus than to be built up raster-fashion. Talk about form over function!

Be welcome! I would suggest that you do some caching for a while, attend some Events and talk to folks there... I bet all (almost) your questions will be answered just by playing. On the other hand you may be interested also in some geocaching based books and movies or series, like Splinterheads, Dark, etc. Some rare geocoins would be good things to leave in the caches, or memorabilia from pop culture, like the original artifacts in the APE Cache series, from Planet of the Apes. Enjoy and be inspired. PS: I have done a lot of covers for the portuguese versions of Goosebumps, from R. L. Stine.

I've been checking and couldn't find a thread for this type of WM. How many times can we see a satellite and we have not had time to talk with a partner, or even two partners saw a satellite, but someone who also saw it (and is within the distance of being able to share WM) is left without being able to register it? Well, here we can write down what we saw or did (especially those that were not published)

Nothing personal of course but as from tomorrow I shall be on holiday and out of contact for a couple of weeks. If you have any questions, comments etc. please contact either Eckington or Deceangi in my absence. I'm hoping to have limited internet access from 22nd March and I'll be back as normal from 30th (or more likely 31st allowing for jet lag). If anyone has a TB or Geocoin that wants to go to Grenada in the West Indies be sure to put it in Gatwick Bug Hotel MK 2 (West Sussex) by tomorrow morning as I'm hoping to bag a few caches on my way to the airport tomorrow afternoon. Be good while I'm away Byeeee

Yeah color me unimpressed lately with HQ. I definitely see them less as stewards now and more of a corporate machine that does not care about us, only about the bottom line. They talk a good game, but killing benchmarks and then messing up the search function and telling us "Sorry, we are on vacation and will get around to it when we get around to it" has me completely put off. At least I can go find a ton of adventure labs with little to no effort from a parking lot somewhere. What an adventure.

When I try to upload or download waypoints from GSAK to my GPSMAP 76CSx from GSAK, a "sending waypoints" or "receiving waypoints" dialog box comes up with a gas gauge that goes from empty to full over and over and over and over and over, ad infinitem. It seems like it isn't communicating with the GPSr at all. USB connection. I can upload and download fine with Mapsource. The only way to get GSAK to do anything is to end task in task manager. Help!

Just figured I would post an update here, since we're partway (most of the way) through the summer. This has been a fun project for me, and some of our scouts really took interest too, while others didn't really. We had the whole gamut. What worked well -- having the scouts "vote" or submit ideas on where they wanted the TB to travel talking with the older (3rd/4th graders moving onto next grade) about geocaching, rules, and how to do things right. This age group wanted to follow the rules. posting updates about where the TB travelled on the pack FB group and public FB page. Those who were interested asked about it more. Asking my local geocaching group for help to get the TB moving. I met up with a couple cachers, who took the TB to events and meetups, allowing them to get out of state. hosting an "unofficial" cache event for the cub scouts (grades K-5th) -- they got to learn about geocaching, have fun finding caches, signing names, etc ....but when some kids didn't get the rules, it didn't mess with any official caches. (we had a couple kids empting swag and not replacing, even though we had a "swag bin" you could grab from. Other scouts kept them honest, but still....). What didn't / or what could have been done better -- I wasn't able to monitor/lead all the kids through the idea of geocaching. I think it would have been awesome, retrospectively, to get help from a couple local geocachers willing to talk about / lead interested scouts on a hike and talk about geocaching. This wouldn't work at the pack level, but at a den level, and only for the older kids, I think. Obviously I transitioned away from my idea for the pack planting actual caches. That wouldn't have worked. We did hide a couple caches, with interested scouts, but it's something that will be maintained by me. I think at this age, the parent needs to be willing to help maintain the cache for it to be a go. Some of the parents didn't really understand (or care) about geocaching. It would be good to have a couple adults (i.e. more than just one) who know how to do it, and how to teach kids the basics. Other takeaways I got a ton of help from my local (state) geocaching group. I wish I had known about that earlier. Sometimes kids who love geocaching are just not in the mood to geocache. It's okay, and don't take it personally. There are a bunch of people who are willing to offer tips/advice for you if you message them. My kids regularly ask me to ask for additional tips. And people are very kind. scouts will be much more interested in geocaching at the older ages (middle/high school)....BSA troop level. At cub scout level, Trackables are cool enough to keep them interested ("ooh, look, our trackable made it to Wyoming!"). Thanks so much for all your help, I really appreciate it.

Atlas, I understand your collection. I also know you realize the difference between using them and collecting them and are prepared to use bespoke software if you can get it at all. (Good luck with that Magellan stuff that required online registration, for example.) Mineral, close call! The 600 was actually the last device that I purchased when it was substantially discounted. The 450 it replaced had gotten crash-happy. The 600 at least rebooted more quickly when it crashed. By the time I purchased it, my own geocaching was largely limited by my own health and available time to business travels when I was "stuck" out of town. South SF Bay had enough geocaches to keep me occupied and there was enough flat land that I could choose my own adventures to tailor my days to my pain level for the day. I think I probably have a thousand or more finds that I've not even logged when I cached in part of a group on GeoWoodstock weekends, but I'm pretty much a former geocacher at this point. Thanx, user13371. For a few years after my surgeries, I was "frownie face" most of the time. While I still can't predict how much time I can devote to software just due to the nature of spinal issues, I do have some random lucid hours from time to time, so I can still pop out a release or two a year even if working from the bed or something. It's just the nature of my disability. The removal is in https://github.com/GPSBabel/gpsbabel/pull/961. Once I get that build green, I'll push it and it'll be gone in the nightlies and all future builds. For some reason, the doc build is silently failing on my machine right now and I don't feel like debugging that. I'll just "spray and pray" in the build cluster at Github. Once that PR is submitted, it shall be done. In vaguely related news, the birthdate of GPSBabel's original code turns drinking age this week. It was just before the Christmas holiday in 2001 when I was still in a neck brace from my very first spinal surgery (the morning of 9/11) when I started geocaching. I had a DNF from mistyping the coordinates in my Map330 and I started writing code to talk to the device from SCO UNIX after being frustrated with the tools available at the time.

I occasionally look through my old finds, and noticed that I am the last one to find dozens of caches. In fact, I made a spreadsheet of caches for which I am the last to find, and I have now recorded 130 caches. I was thinking this could be a good Challenge Cache. Of course if you just went on a big Geo Trail and found 100 caches that might be unfair, so I could put certain date parameters on it like one of the following: "To qualify for this challenge, you need to be the last finder on 100 caches and the most recent "last finder" cache must be at least 30 days ago." or "To qualify for this challenge, you need to be the last finder on 25 caches and the most recent "last finder" cache must be at least 6 months ago I would like some feedback if the community thinks this would be a good idea for a Challenge cache. If people think this would be a cool idea, who do I talk to about writing the code for it?

OK, who has an opinion on handheld compass's to share. I'm looking for a good mapping compass primarily to use with 1:24K topos and aerial photos. So far I've been looking at the Brunton 8096 Eclipse GPS compass Brunton and the Suunto GPS-Plotter G compass. Suunto. What do you think about the quality of these manufacturers, features these offer, other options, or ??? I haven't seen a Silva with similar scaling features for my purposes, am I missing something? Thanks for your comments

I notice the card option on the forums. Could we get a google talk line in there?

A lot of talk here about COs not using the OM log. My irk is when COs use the OM log to say. "I'm going to fix the problem." Case in point, a location I pass frequently when traveling where the cache has been missing for 8 months and the CO is doing nothing but posting bogus OM logs.

I've been geocaching for a little over a year now...not too religiously, but enough that when I travel, I take a quick look at what caches are in the zipcode I'm going to. It looks like the hot setup is to download all the specific cache info to a PDA and use the PDA in conjunction with your GPS. There's a lot of good and bad to every PDA I've researched. Anyone have a "most bang for the buck" story related to their PDA. BTW, I just "upgraded" from a Garmin 76CS to a 60CSx and LOVE IT, now I want to get the most out of it by throwing some cash into a reliable and functional PDA. Comments? Fire away!

Another way to work around it would be to block cookiebot.com, say at the firewall or HOSTS file. I've done this for a few years, and the site works fine for me, including the message center. Also keeps the site from asking me about cookies, don't ever talk to me about cookies.

tell me about them

My ladyfriend and I went caching today at a spot just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. After we had located the cache and hiked back to the parking lot, I unlocked the car and laid my brand new GPSr (A Lowrance Expedition C) on top of my old Taurus wagon because I needed to put my backpack in the back seat. As soon as I had done that, we hopped in the car and headed home. After eating dinner, I went in the den and reached over to pick up my GPS carrying case and thought to myself, "this thing feels awfully light." Then I felt a sick feeling beginning to well up inside because I didn't remember getting my GPSr back off the roof of my car. Thinking that I may have just laid it in the back seat, I raced outside and there sitting on the top of my Taurus wagon was the Lowrance, just where I left it. I picked it up and stared at it in disbelief. I had just driven about 30-35 miles on an extremely curvy road at speeds of up to 50 mph and the thing hadn't moved. The only thing I can figure out was that the Expedition has some tiny rubber feet on the back of it that must have kept it from sliding around. Man, what a lucky break!!!

Just a place to talk about cache problems and other random cache stuff please feel free to post anything cache related!! Such as Problems you have had in the past with your caches and the odd stuff you have found in them and make it so this is a non judgmental place to talk no bashing other players about what they think speak your mind!!! and have fun!!

Not a naive assumption, but, yes, I did take for granted that you hadn't talked to the COs because if you already had reactions from the COs, I would expected you to present those in order to make that the topic. The responses you've now told us about are the real problem that we can talk about solving. It's far less productive to start with the unsupported claim that the NM attribute is useless because you don't think it's being used correctly. But, I see, this way you got to call someone innocently trying to help you with your problem "naive", so that's always fun.

I am glad our countless hours of research through logs and plethora of photos mean nothing to HQ and zero attempts are being made to keep our data available in an archived format. All this community talk is nothing but lip service to the corporate machine and bottom line.

I'm watching as thread after thread is closed and wondering, what can we talk about that is not going to get deleted, edited or closed? And if you can get past all of that, chances are you're going to get scolded for not saying what you want to say in the most innoculous manner possible -- heaven help you if you get the slightest bit passionate about what's on your mind -- you'll be slapped with a warning (the online equivalent of standing in the corner). What can we talk about? If we're told that the answer is caching (which I suspect it will be), then let us talk about and discuss the things that are related to it. So come on -- deleting, editing, closing, and scolding is not doing anything but getting everyone frustrated and afraid to speak about caching, much less anything else. This is a social activity -- do you really think that stiffling everyone is doing anything positive to further this activity? I think it all comes down to the social aspect of caching -- and this has been brought up several times in the past -- what are these forums really about if not a social venue to discuss whatever the topic of the day is amongst those who share a similar attraction to this activity? This should be especially true in the non-specific 'General' Forum. *****

If this is based truly on non use (vs cost cutting which I believe it is) then get rid of other things in geocaching that get little use such as caches that require special equipment such as Wherigo or project APE caches. You guys talk out both sides of your mouth!

Yesterday evening about 7 pm we found a cache near a local business. We had to walk about 10 feet through knee high grass to find the cache. No problem, signed log, traded TB's and were on our way. Had a good evening and went to bed about 11. At midnight I was woken up by something crawling near my leg. I tried to shake it off and go back to sleep. I felt it again, and jumped out of bed and turned on the light, expecting to find a spider. When I threw back the (luckily yellow) sheets, my husband saw a tick walking around. IN MY BED!!! So, I let it crawl on a piece a paper and fed it to the Venus Flytrap in the kitchen and then TRIED to go back to sleep. I laid there for an hour and a half waiting... I knew if there was one, there may be others. And where in the heck was that thing hiding for the last five hours? No bites on anyone, but ugghh! I finally fell asleep and dreamed about ticks all night. Today the sheets get a wash in hot water. Here is my question. Are the ticks worse this year? Or is it that we are new to geocaching? We've walked through the woods with the girl scouts, boy scouts and just the family before, and never had a problem. Now we walk 10 feet through grass by a business and gets ticks in the bed. This is our fourth tick encounter this spring, even using DEET sometimes. Are there superticks in Sacramento? Do I have to put off geocaching until it's cold? Help! Signed, Sleepless in Sacramento

Are they travel bugs or collectibles or both? How can a coin from finland start here (calif). Can anyone purchase foriegn geo coins. They are interesting and i picked one up BUt I do not quite get it...Thanks a newbie who is getting rolling

Looks to me that the proposed category is very similar to the elongated coins category (aka Penny Smashers) in the aspect of an automaton creating/selling a touristic token. T0SHEA told me (not a week ago) that we should strive for inclusion if we have similarities to another category. So you should have a talk to the category leaders / officers first if they are willing to expand their category to accept these touristic tokens also.

Hello everyone! Here is a great place to post that you want your score updated, talk about high scoring caches, ask questions, etc. Have fun with the game, and check out the rest of my "Let the Games Begin!" series caches! GeoEskimo