Reading through the logs at Peanut’s Playground, this sounds like another cache that is worth doing. At the moment I’m weighing up the advantages of waiting a bit for the ticks and bugs to die down and for it to be cooler vs the disadvantages of not being one of the few who have done the cache and the cache getting archived or muggled before I have a chance to go and do it. If you are interested in joining as a team to do this then let me know – it certainly looks like a cache that needs more than one person to do it.
Snoogan’s Quantum Leap Cache in Texas.
GCHRVB, the 5/5 difficulty Quantum Leap is not a cache I am likely to ever do, but it is one that has some great entertaining log reads – well worth adding this to your watchlist.
My Flickr and Geocaching greasemonkey script updated.
I have updated my Geocaching.com to Flickr greasemonkey script to work with the new geocache id’s. To install go to userscripts with a greasemonkey enabled browser to show links to Flickr from the Geocaching website as per the screenshot below.
For more technical information see my blog postings with the tag geocache2flickr
For those of you who don’t have greasemonkey installed yet, this allows you to download scripts that tweak the layout of normal websites to do various things such as add extra links, remove adverts etc. Greasemonkey can be downloaded from Mozilla addon site
S2009CNDBDSK cache event tomorrow.
I’ll be at the GC1NMKA cache event tomorrow which looks like it’s going to be a really great day. It’s an early start but looks like we’ll have the opportunity for some new caches as part of the treasure hunt – more details tomorrow.
Another 11 caches in North Carolina
The weather today was meant to be overcast and cloudy today so I was hoping to get out and do some caching without overheating. An early start this morning meant I was able to get out and do another 10 11 caches in North Carolina. All caches were pretty unique with interesting hides or hikes to the cache. There were a couple of caches I was unable to do – one was due to the fact there were about 10 people crabbing right at the geocache spot but all was not lost as I was able to take some photos of an Osprey on the nest and another Osprey tearing into a fish – sounds gruesome but was cool and none graphic photos at the extreme end of the zoom are uploaded to flickr and tagged with the geocache code GC1RMWR. I also got two geocoins, two DNF’s and two notes as I was unable to search due to people in the vicinity of the cache.
700th cache milestone – Jockeys Ridge.
I finally got around to my 700th geocache today – an earthcache at Jockeys Ridge. I uploaded some photos from the cache to the cache webpage and a couple of others to my flickr account under the cache name, GC13F27
In order to log this cache I had to climb to the top of a huge sand dune that is roughly the height of a four story building (apparently). Thankfully it was slightly overcast today, but still hot (the car registered 82 degrees) and I think I suffered from mild heatstroke as I really did not feel well after I got back to the car. Thanks to Kristen for taking care of me!
There were two reasons I wanted to make this cache my 700th – one was due to it being at Jockey’s Ridge – this is the site of my hang gliding lesson in 2001 which I thoroughly enjoyed (but again got heatstroke – will I ever learn?) and so I uploaded a picture of me gliding as part of the cache log for GC13F27.
The other reason I wanted to do this cache is that it’s an earthcache. From the geocaching website :-
An EarthCache is a special place that people can visit to learn about a unique geoscience feature or aspect of our Earth. EarthCaches include a set of educational notes and the details about where to find the location (latitude and longitude). Visitors to EarthCaches can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage the resources and how scientists gather evidence to learn about the Earth. For more information about EarthCaches, visit http://www.earthcache.org/.
These caches are pretty rare and are also pretty neat. So far I’ve found 4 in three states – OH,NC and NY which means I need to find 2 more AND place an earthcache and then I’ll be a Silver EarthCache Master (ooh-er). I’m not sure how likely that is to happen, as these geological processes are not very common, but we’ll see.
North Carolina Caching.
We’re currently in North Carolina on holiday and I’ve yet to go geocaching. Unfortunately it’s pretty warm outside and my hayfever is really acting up. I managed to get to a Travel Bug hotel on the journey down here but that quick stroll through the grass made me sneeze for about 2 hours straight – not much fun when driving down the highway.
Anyway, I’m really close to my 700th find, (hovering at 695) so I’m hoping for a good couple of half days caching coming up and I’ll post on here when I get that far.
As far as this web site is concerned I’ve made a couple of tweaks, hopefully so that those of you reading this site in their feedreader will start to get updates again. For some reason, the feed had broken. Hopefully this is now fixed again.
Cacheberry review
Yesterday Team JNLe4 and I went on a cache run to the south east of Columbus. The plan was to do about 30 caches but we managed 20. This is still the highest number of caches I’ve done in a day so I was pretty pleased.
This was also my first time using the registered version of Cacheberry and it worked really well. I’ve purchased a 4gb SD card for the Blackberry that I used to store the data on which also made it easier to transfer the gpx data from gsak to the blackberry.
The ability to quickly search for a cache,open the logs and hints really helps when out in the field and the option to save cache logs whilst out in the field and email the log file for “one click logging” is very useful.
As we did 20 caches with several travel-bug pickups I was actually saving the travel-bug information in the Blackberry note feature – but that was because I wasn’t sure how the field-note logging works. However, now that I’ve logged when I was back home I now know that I didn’t really need to do this.
It’s better to write the travel bug information into the field note in cacheberry and then as you log the cache itself by clicking on the saved log within the website you can delete the travel-bug information.
What would be nice would be a separate function to pick up the pre-existing travel bug information. Currently cacheberry knows that there is a tb in the cache but there is no interface to say that it’s been found or discovered. If you’ve used gpxsonar in the past you will be used to this function.
The other thing I’d like would be to have the time that the cache was found added to the online log function, I like to know how long it took me to go between each cache but once the caches are logged online this information is not available anymore (unless I go back to the cacheberry application).
I didn’t use the new compass facility (as I was using my gps) apart from one test cache find. For this cache I had both the gps and the blackberry running a search for the nearest cache. The Blackberry normally had the distance to the cache about 5-6′ shorter than the gps, but when it came to ground-zero, both the gps and cacheberry had the same information. I was very impressed at how quickly cacheberry updated itself with the position and it wouldn’t certainly make a good emergency gps if the main gps battery dies or if looking for that ftf without a gps available. I’m not sure how much using the gps affects the battery but I suspect it does make the battery life shorter.
Overall, this app is well worth the $15 registration fee for those blackberry owning geocachers
Cacheberry for caching with the blackberry.
Currently I use a 8 or 9 year old Dell Axim for my paperless caching which has served me really well but it’s yet another device that I need to keep charged and carry around with me whilst geocaching. I’m about to go caching for the day today starting with the Pi day Party and then hitting about another 10 or so caches with Team JNle4 – yes, I have dragged him out of retirement too!
Anyway, I wondered if there was a geocaching application for the blackberry (work phone) and discovered Cacheberry which looks like it has an offline database, the ability to export field notes via email and also integration with google and blackberry maps. So today I’ll be using this app and I’ll let you know how I got on.
Various changes to absocachinlutely.
I’ve made several changes to this blog – the biggest difference being the fact that I’m now using WordPress instead of MovableType to host the software. Things and links may be broken for a while as I migrate various settings and functionality over to WP.
I added a new favicon to match my geocaching avatar and stamp thanks to Shockingly Simple Favicon plugin.