AbsoCachinlutely

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!

2 Dublin caches hidden today.

Finally got round to hiding 2 caches in Dublin today. One needs a camera to complete, the other needs a camera because of the scenery. I've not posted links yet as the cache's aren't live, but this is a heads up to keep an eye out.

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.

]]> First download the locr program to your pc - you will also need .net framework 2 on the pc (which it will download and install if you don't already have it)
Use mapsource to obtain the tracks from your gps and save the data as a gpx file.
If you have GSAK then you are in luck and can convert the gpx file to an nmea file otherwise download and install gpsbabel
Use the following command line to convert your gpx file to nmea format - replace the paths to your gsak (or gpsbabel) location as appropriate
C:\Program Files\GSAK7\gpsbabel -i gpx -f data.gpx -x track,fix=3d -o nmea -F output.nmea

If you save the following as a .bat file and create a shortcut on your desktop you can then just drag your gpx to the shortcut and it will create you the nmea for you in the same location and with the same name (but with the .nmea extension)

"C:\Program Files\GSAK7\gpsbabel" -i gpx -f "%1" -x track,fix=3d -o nmea -F "%1.nmea"

Once the file has been converted you can then proceed to geotag the photos.
Open the locr program.
Add the photos that you want to geotag.
Open the nmea file. As soon as the nmea file is opened, the photos will have their locations updated. However the files will not be stamped (and there will not be an x in the flag column).
Click the Automatic geotagging to set the flag status to x.
Your photos will now be geotagged.
You can test this by removing the files and tracks, and then loading in the picture by itself. At this point the picture will be tagged and displayed on the map.

For a pictorial walkthrough see my locr gallery walkthrough screenshots - just hit the next button to see the next image in the series.

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.

GSAK 7 beta and stats

I ran a test installation of gsak 7 on my pc this week. The main reason for this was to install the statistics macro to generate the stats for my geocaching finds. There were a few prerequisites below - links point to the download page rather than the actual file to ensure new updates get downloaded.
First download the cutting edge, most feature packed aka beta version of Gsak 7.
Install the latest patch to bring you up to 7.1 build 64
Finally download the
FindstatGenv3 and whilst you are at it, I would highly recommend the Google Maps export macro too that produces a very cool google maps interfaces to caches.
Once you have downloaded and run the Stats macro, I recommend you download your "My finds" pocket query from Geocaching.com and save the results into a temporary GSAK database. This means the macro has less work to do as it only has to look through one log - yours. Even if you don't do this the results are outstanding. The stats generation used to take 4 minutes to run in version2 of the macro - it now takes 20 seconds! The output can be seen at my Geocaching.com profile (although this is using the old version stats -I've not uploaded the new ones yet)

2007 Jeep signup

This year the jeep travelbugs are red and you can sign up to receive one to put out in your nearby cache. I've requested one so will hopefully get one. It seemed to work ok with the diabetes travel bugs and this way also means that I will get to see at least one Jeep - I never got to log the first yellow jeeps but did manage to get a couple of the white ones when they came out - they were bigger than I was expecting.

Geocaching greasemonkey scripts

If you have firefox and greasemonkey installed (and if not why not?) then check out the greasemonkey scripts at Locusprime that enhance some of the website pages. There are some really nice enhancements here - I'll leave you to go search the site and start enhancing your cache viewing.
LilDevil also has a couple of greasemonkey scripts for caching too (some of the scripts overlap each other)

500 (and more)

Saturday I went caching with Team JNLe4 and hit my 500th geocache - Aslan's lair and also continued to do 5 more after that (we couldn't stop). I was intending to try and make a meeting on Sunday as my 500th cache, but we were having a good time in Newark, it was still early in the day and more caches left to do so we kept going. We had a great time caching - it's definitely more fun when there is more than one of you caching. I also got my first earthcache - A Cryptozological EarthCache so that is another icon on my caching stats page.

New caching map tool

I discovered myGME this evening whilst doing some gsak work/experimentation. This gsak macro allows you to get a google map of all the caches in your currently defined filter set with a radius circle predefined to show you the caches within that area. If you want to move the area, you select the red marker icons and move them to the center of the circle and the distance away from the center. It works great. Takes a while to load if you have a lot of caches mind.
The graphic below shows the initial output for the geocaches near Hocking Hills.

Geocaching photo's

Most of my online geocaching photos will now be in my Zooomr Geocaching set. I've uploaded todays pictures here too.

Another cache night

Had a great time tonight doing 3 caches, although one was actually a dnf. The cache in question is Tiger Den and I've posted some pictures in the extended entry (as opposed to the cache page) due to the possible spoiler nature - even if the cache is missing, this is well worth going to do.

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More pictures are uploaded to the Tiger's Den zooomr set

A cache!

I actually got to go out and do some geocaching this evening as the weather was so nice. Unfortunately I only found one cache, Wyandot Trading Post due to the number of muggles at the other caches I tried to do. However I posted some pictures at flickr and whilst doing this I noticed that the time on the gps was wrong as it hadn't updated automatically. I thought that the gps's got their time from satellites (which I still think they do) but they don't know that Daylight Saving has kicked in. Once I turned it on in the gps the time was correct. I also had to change the time on the camera, but that was because it was set to 8.24am and not 8.24pm which meant the process of geotagging the images was very painful.
I did upgrade my gps by using the Garmin Web Updater which upgraded me 4 versions of firmware - some of the newer garmin gps's have new firmware available.