[gotta run]

If you can’t find it, I have the original on my desk.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

I recommend castration rings; go to the livestock section of Fleet Farm. Little green rubber bands, buy a whole bag of them for cheap. They hold up very well to the elements. Don’t ask how I know this.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

They frequently leak. The gaskets disintegrate or fall off. You can upgrade the gasket.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Look at the bigger picture everyone. Geocaching.com is just a bulletin board. A big one that requires you to ask to put stuff on it, but a bulletin board nonetheless. It doesn’t own the world.

So whether it’s terracaching, navacaching, opencaching, letterboxing.org, atlasquest.com, Big Bob’s Big Bulletin Board o’ Caches…people are going to play outside. It would be polite if they didn’t stack a letterbox on top of a geocache, but go to the letterboxing boards and you’ll hear letterboxers complain about that from their perspective. And some sites get along just fine without reviewers too.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

@Lostby7 wrote:

I always have to convert it.

I thought you would be an expert at that from doing bike races? Just multiply everything by .6, close enough for government work, en so?

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

@Team Deejay wrote:

It is pretty easy to tell an illegal program. If you have to load the program with caches from a query (like you would load a Palm), it is ok. If it just displays the gc.com page in a browser window, that is ok. If it is sold by Groundspeak, that is obviously ok. If it has its own database of caches which were obviously downloaded from the site, well, that is pretty much guaranteed to be against the TOU.

I strongly disagree with the “easy to tell” part of this, Deejay, as it relates to the END USER of this app. It’s not clear at all (or at least not clear to me) how the app loads the data, and there is the option to load cache information through a standard web browser, or thorugh the c:geo display. So as far as I can tell without tearing the program apart, it’s just a snazzy UI that includes a nice integration to maps and navigation–just like my Oregon redisplays everything in its own format, except the c:geo app does it in real time…somehow.

I’m not a programmer myself but I like to think I’m pretty tech-savvy. But when I looked into this app (and I don’t just install things that look interesting without looking into them), the info looked solid, reviews were great, and nothing came up on the gc.com forums (now I know why). I suppose the second part might have been a red flag, but…

My point is, unless you have an insider’s knowledge on this, you are not going to figure it out or probably even try to figure it out.

gc.com is doing themselves no favors by pretending this app doesn’t exist. If gc.com doesn’t like this app, they’re going to have to do something about it with the app provider itself from a licencing agreement or intellectual property perspective, which perhaps they are. If they try to attack it from the user level, they better at least give people some warning before they start “banning accounts” as I’ve seen rumored on the forums. Because I can guarantee you that the vast majority of users are “violating” TOS unwittingly by using this app.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

So how is the average user who just goes to the android app store and downloads this great little gadget supposed to know it is a “banned” app? They don’t know what goes on behind the lines of programming code so how would they know it supposedly violates the TOS? (And how many really care?) And if that big of a “back door” is there on groundspeak’s part, don’t they have some responsibility to lock it down on their end? Is groundspeak going to–or even able to–determine what app a user is using to access a site? And then take some action?…if so, what?

All interesting issues, that we won’t see discussed, seeing that they delete any reference to the app name. Seems pretty self-defeating to me.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Well that explains why I couldn’t find it on the groundspeak forums when I looked initially. Thought that was odd. Apparently not only is the app “banned,” but they delete any references to it that pop up in the forums, so that e’splains it.

Looks like there might be some other free ones out there that don’t violate the TOS…geobeagle & geohunter? I honestly don’t know how you’re supposed to vet all these. Buy the $9.99 app I suppose.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Regarding accuracy, that would be tied to the phone’s GPS and not the app (right?). I’ve found the GPS to be pretty good but not to the consistent performance of a dedicated GPS unit, which is pretty much what I expected.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

I don’t know if it’s per month or one time–I just pointed the handy dandy barcode scanner app 8) at the QR code and that’s what it said it would cost so I said “no thanks.”

Instead, I’ve been using the c:geo app for a few weeks now and it’s worked very well. I think the only thing it does not allow you to do that the grounspeak app does is to use a PQ. However for my purposes it works fine because if I’m going to plan a PQ I’ll use the Oregon. I use the phone mainly for on-the-fly caching when I don’t have the Oregon, to check for log/status updates if we get stuck, and to occasionally do some logging from the field.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Do you currently use c:geo? It’s free whereas the groundspeak app is $9.99. So I went the cheap route and am very happy with c:geo. Everything is live and I can log online, not just upload field notes. Only complaint is that the app is comparatively slow to other applications.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Relevant excerpt from this thread: http://wi-geocaching.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=10540&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=save+spot&start=0

@Team Deejay wrote:

When we have multiple unpublished caches in the system, the lowest number takes priority. Now, if you enter a listing and don’t do anything with it for an extended period, it might be deleted during database cleanup…

To be honest, we discourage the practice of “saving spots”. It is difficult enough for hiders to avoid hidden multi and mystery cache waypoints. It is impossible for people to avoid unpublished caches. That said, you can submit a page and then take time to plan your caches, execute timed releases or get permission for a placement. Just don’t make it your life’s work to get a permit filed.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

Will reply when I am.back at a regular keyboard…

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

I think 15 to 20 feet is fine.

However what’s also important is how you set up the rules for entering the zone. My recollection (and it’s been a while since I did the programming) was that if I set the zone to 20 feet (or whatever) and set a rule to fire upon entering the zone, the rule still would not fire until I got to the exact coordinates, even if the zone was supposedly a 60-foot circle.

Therefore I to set all the rules to fire “when a player is in proximity to the zone”–20 or 30 feet or whatever. This may just be a “Garmin thing.”

But getting it to work right is very important in my opinion, because it is very frustrating in the field to have to do the drunken bee dance to get to the exact zeroed-out coordinates before the rule fires off (unless that’s your intent to do so). My opinion was that when you got to a spot where you could reasonably “see” something in a zone, the rule should fire, and that only worked if I did an “on proximity” rule.

On the Left Side of the Road...

[gotta run]

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On the Left Side of the Road...

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