Tomorrow is another Dublin Cache meetup. Last year was a really poor one for me geocaching, the only time I went caching was on holiday in North Carolina and at a couple of the local events so tomorrow I hope to get my first cache of 2009 and hit some of the 184 geocaches situated within 5 miles of my home. Thankfully I was able to find my gps this morning 😉
Another good reason to get caching is my premium membership was up for renewal tomorrow so I’ve also renewed that (Happy early Birthday to me). I’m also in the process of upgrading gsak – I was on version 7.1 – it’s now on 7.5something so I’m well behind in it’s updates. I’m looking forward to seeing what else is new in this excellent piece of software.
Caching again!
1st Dublin Geocachers meet
The first Dublin Geocachers meet is this afternoon at midday – it looks like there will be about 30 people there or more which is really neat. What is really bad is that this will be my first geocache in Ohio this year which is really bad – not sure how I’ve managed to go a whole year without caching. If you’re going, don’t forget to say hi.
Long time since I’ve posted!
And it’s actually been a long time since I went geocaching. The last time I went caching was in December 07 – I almost can’t believe it’s been that long! I remember that day was really nice and TeamJNle4 and I got several caches in. This time I was caching by myself during our holiday in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. I had tried to get Afton Mountain Multi but for some reason my coordinates were putting me in the middle of an open space and nowhere near where a cache was likely to be hidden. Kristen was pretty anxious to get going (and this cache had meant 3 stops along the road already) so I reluctantly agreed to carry on. It was actually really hot outside so it was a relief to get back into the air conditioned car.
When we got to North Carolina, we had some free time in the second week so I checked the caches that were available and found that one of the caches (Dare County Water Project) hadn’t been found yet – a chance to get a first to find – this couldn’t be missed. I got all scratched up trying to find this cache as I was wearing shorts but it was a really good hunt. The cache owner has hidden some very clever hides in the vicinity and I managed to get several of his caches done whilst on holiday.
I’ve now got some travel bugs and there are still plenty of new geocaches nearby that I’ve not found so hopefully I’ll get the chance to get out and do some caching in Ohio this year.
Nano containers
I found a source for nano and capsule containers at AEToys which seem a reasonable price, especially for the nano’s……Look out for some new Dublin caches soon 😉
GSAK stats update
I updated my profile on Geocaching.com this morning using the new Stats macro. There is now a cool feature to add statistics on placed caches. However, as some of my caches in the UK have been adopted, I needed to edit the database to reset the owner back to me as per this post on the forums.
The macros needed can be found on the GSAK macro forum and I used the All Purpose Statistics Generator for the output and the Manage Waypoints macro to load in the logs from my adopted caches.
The end result can be found at my Geocaching.com profile page
Bronze EarthMaster achieved.
On our recent trip to Canada I managed to do a couple of Earthcaches. Combined with the one I had already done in Ohio, this gave me the three caches I needed to get my Bronze EarthCache Master status. After finding and logging the cache I went to the website, filled in a form and a week later received a badge and a sticker through the mail. The next stage is silver status and for that I need to develop an Earthcache…although I’m not sure what would fit that bill around Dublin!
Ohio Delorme Challenge
The Ohio Delorme geocache requires a visit to each cache in the Delorme atlas for Ohio but only visits after the cache was placed will count towards the cache find. Once a cache has been found on each page you then get the co-ordinates for the final cache hidden somewhere in Ohio.
With the aid of a KML file, the recent finds pocket query, GSAK and Google earth it is quite easy to work out which pages you need to do.
First download the Ohio Delorme KML file from the main cache page, GCZ554. Next download Google Earth (if you don’t already have it already. Finally you want a .loc file of all your finds since the 2nd of December 2006 when the cache was placed. The easiest way to do this is to download your latest finds into GSAK, then using the filters set State=Ohio, Found=Yes, Date=On or After 12/2/2006. I saved the filter as Delorme so I can run this whenever I need to check my status.
In Google earth open the KML file and then open the loc file to see the caches appear in gridlines for each page. You may want to turn off extra options and layers such as road names, community uploaded content etc. This will give you a cleaner picture. 
The picture above shows the gridlines and the picture below shows my found caches so far. I’ve actually found quite a few other pages but unfortunately they were before the cache was placed so they don’t count.
So far I’ve found pages 45-48,55-59,65 and 67-69
Meanwhile TeamJNLe4 completed all the pages yesterday and now just has to go for the final cache – congrats Jonathan!
New Mapping Software to geotag pictures
WWMX is the current software that I use to geotag my photo’s and I’m always on the lookout for some better software that will do the trick. Today I came across locr which seems really nice. The interface is cleaner and looks much better and also integrates with Google Earth and if you use locr then it also integrates with that website – It’s actually their bulk uploader tool.
However if you have a garmin gps you may find that loading in the waypoints does not work correctly so here are the complete steps for encoding your photos.
New 2007 Jeep Travelbug
The 2007 Jeep travelbug arrived in the post last night. Looks really neat. I have plans to go out to a special cache on Friday with Team JnLe4 and looking forward to getting some good “action” photos before I leave it in the cache.
