Get in the Ring, Round 2: New Opencaching.com Poll
It’s been a month since kjwx’s ‘Get in the Ring’ poll on the (then) proposed Opencaching.com website. Since that time the site has released a beta version and now boasts over 5000 caches. A number of bugs in the first few days seem to be ironed out a little and there has been much debate over who is using the site and especially who is importing their geocaching.com caches.
kjwx’s poll had a huge response (272 responses) and the results were very interesting. But now things have moved on I thought it was time for a new poll…
In the Get in the Ring poll whopping 48.98% of respondents said they would join opencaching.com, though 31.17% of the respondents said only if it was free. Now that the site is live…
52.63% suggested they would retain their Geocaching.com membership and use both listing services. Which leads me to ask…
Opie
Signal the Frog
Both sites have cool cartoon mascots; Geocaching.com have Signal the Frog and Opencaching.com have Opie. Which do you prefer?
Opencaching.com has a simple and easy way to upload your existing Geocaching.com caches.
Opencaching.com doesn’t have any reviewers and some have expressed concern over what this means for the integrity of Geocaching.
91.25% of the Get in the Ring survey respondents were Garmin users.
Geocaching.com has Opencaching.com, soon GPS will have Beidou
Image via Wikipedia
Opencaching.com has become a recent alternative to Geocaching.com and it looks like the US may soon have their own competition as China are progressing with plans for their own independent satellite navigation and positioning network. They have launched the 7th satellite of the Beidou (Compass System) network that will eventually have 30 satellites.
China started building its own satellite navigation system to end its dependence upon the US GPS system in 2000, when it sent two orbiters as a double-satellite experimental positioning system.
Beidou, as the system is called, is designed to provide navigation, time and short message services in the Asia and Pacific region before 2012 and will be capable of providing global navigation services by 2020.
This could be a hugely significant development for the GPS market if China open up their network for use by the entire world. Assuming they do and the system is roughly as good as the US GPS system then 2020 could see a flood of cheap China produced Beidou units released into the GPS market. This must be an alarming prospect for the major manufacturers as the current smart phone craze is eating into their sales.
Of course the business world, just like the rest of it, is a case of adapt or die. Wouldn’t it be cool to be geocaching and be able to switch between satellite networks in the same GPSr? And think of all the new puzzle caches that could be created!
The Mad Cacher goes all Angry Birds on Garmin/Opencaching.com
Having plundered all the local caches and not being in a position to travel far from home due to Cumbyrocks clone #3’s imminent arrival I haven’t been out much. My recent acquisition of an Apple iPad has been a good distraction from the geocaching withdrawals I face daily and one of the best distractions is the game Angry Birds. The game essentially has you firing angry birds at the pigs (literally) who stole their eggs. It’s a fun game that is worth trying out.
And it seems that The Mad Cacher has gone all Angry Birds on Garmin/Opencaching.com. The blogger/cacher has recently sent out a message that reads:
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Hey <insert name here>,
Just a few days ago Garmin launched a brand new website that is basically their attempt at controlling our hobby.
That’s right, they’re trying to hijack the official Geocaching website and control the market in order to sell more GPS units!
Click Here To Read My Thoughts On This & Leave Yours
If you haven’t noticed, I’m a little ticked off about this and I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you have similar feelings about it or are you fine with it?Please leave a comment below the post. I love reading your thoughts and conversing with all of my Geocaching friends.
And if you’re on Facebook and/or Twitter, let’s connect!
Happy Caching!
Josh Spaulding
“The Mad Cacher”
It seems “The Mad Cacher” is quite, well, mad about Garmin introducing Opencaching.com and is rallying the troops to boycott opencaching.com.
Whilst I have been a little sceptical about the introduction of opencaching.com I’m not sure they deserve such an extreme reaction and a call to boycott. Geocachers will vote with their feet and I don’t see Garmin as producing something so evil that it requires organised destruction. But kudos to “The Mad Cacher” for being passionate about his cause.
UPDATE: For those who really don’t know what Angry Birds is
Related Articles
- Game On: Garmin’s OpenCaching.com Beta is launched (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
- In light of the reviewerless Opencaching.com – An ode to the gc.com reviewers… (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
Your Geocaching.com Christmas Gifts
Firennice over at Caching and Reviewing has given a nice run down of some upcoming changes to the geocaching.com website, including some good screenshots.
The changes are quite significant and introduce a number of elements to enhance the geocaching.com experience. These changes include:
- Stats – A new page on your profile for geocaching.com generated stats. Cachemania has posted about Groundspeak aquiring My Geocaching Profile for this.
- Maps – possibly the best proposed change is the increased functionality of the maps. At present they are clunky and slow but the changes will produce smooth and dynamic mapping that has no 500 cache limit. The screenshot showing the whole USA is very very cool.
- Favourites (or as it will appear on the site – Favorites) – This is another huge addition to the site and a long-awaited and desired change by many cachers. Based on the number of finds you have you will be able to award favourite points to caches you like. This will be extremely useful for figuring out which caches are the best to go for, especially when travelling – no more wasting time on 200ml snaplock containers listed as regular sized caches!
- Premium Members – Many of the changes, for example the favourite points, will only be available to premium members. This is going to be a big attraction to cachers to maintain premium membership and keep access to all this resource.
The changes were planned prior to the introduction of Opencaching.com but they are certainly timely. I believe they will be big draw card for cachers and may be welcomed by some of the disgruntled ones. Groundspeak have added value to the premium membership – a good thing as it had previously seemed like being a premium member was only to get access to pocket queries.
Well done Groundspeak!
Related Articles
- Geocaching.com goes into training (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
Mega-Event Proposed for NZ
Image via Wikipedia
The fine folk at the NZ Recreational GPS Society are proposing the holding of New Zealand’s first MEGA-EVENT. There is a poll up in the GPS.org.nz forums to indicate whether you might want to attend and you can check out all of the talk about the event there. The event is proposed as being at Easter or in October 2012 and looks likely to be in Christchurch (South Island) with an outside chance of being somewhere else in the country if the organising committee change their minds.
If you are one of the many international readers of INATN and fancy a geocaching holiday in New Zealand coupled with a MEGA-EVENT then this is something you should keep an eye on. You might even like to indicate your possibly attendance on the forum poll.
Of course, if you happen to be one of the many readers from geocaching related businesses (I know you’re there…I’m looking at your IP addresses right now…creepy eh?) you might like to seriously think about some sponsorship of this event – I know the NZ geocaching community would be VERY thankful (wink wink nudge nudge).
Related Articles
- NZ Geocache Featured as Cache of the Week on Latitude 47 (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
Geocaching.com goes into training
Geocaching.com have a major outage starting at 8pm Tuesday (PST) or 5pm Wednesday (NZDT) for those of us here in NZ. The site could be down for a long as 6 hours, so make sure you’ve got your gc.com fix before it goes down. Why is it going down you ask? The official word from Groundspeak is:
As Groundspeak and Geocaching.com have grown, the demands on our production network infrastructure have increased significantly. As a result, on Tuesday December 14, 2010 at 8:00 PM PST (GMT -8), we will be performing a number of major upgrades to our production network. These upgrades include a new network design as well as new hardware to help increase the performance, scalability, and security of the network.
We’re estimating that the downtime may take up to 6 hours, and during that time, all Groundspeak sites and services including Geocaching.com, the Groundspeak Forums, Pocket Queries, Geocaching Mobile Applications, and other 3rd party applications that access our API will be inaccessible.
While we’re giving ourselves a 6 hour window to cover anything unexpected that might come up, we’ll be doing everything possible to minimize the downtime and are confident that we’ll have the site back up much sooner.
Thanks,
Elias
Working on the ‘performance’ and ‘scalability’ leads me to believe they are implementing changes that will help them grow, expand and maybe introduce new functionality for use with other GPSr manufacturers. Okay, so I’m stirring a little with that last bit. However, when I read the announcement I did get visions of the Rocky training sequence…
Apple iPad: your newest geocaching tool
Image via Wikipedia
I recently got my hands on an Apple iPad to use as a work tool and was very interested to see what it was like and could it be used for geocaching.
My first impressions of the iPad were good – it has a fantastic interface and lots of very simple functionality. with over 300,000 apps there is a lot to keep you entertained. Its primary purpose is for work and I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of apps are available to make work more mobile than ever (DocsToGo, FileAppPro and MobileNoter to name just a few). Not to mention the fact that Angry Birds is available on the iPad and it is addictive and totally fun. But my main focus here is geocaching…
At this point I have elected to download three geocaching apps. The first is Geocache Viewer by NZM. This is a very simple application used for viewing geocache information from downloaded GPX files. All of the basic information is there is an easy to read format. The GPX upload tool was a dream to use and how to use the app was very clear. My only complaint is that the app may be a little too simple with not enough information or options. Of course I might be used to using GSAK and having all the power. But that does lead me to ask how much more information, beyond the basic, do we need? (the little addicted geocacher on my shoulder screams “WE NEED ALL THE INFORMATION…YOU STUPID MUGGLES…THE CACHE IS MY PREEECCCCCIIIOOOOUSSSSSSS!!!”.)
Sorry about that, he hasn’t been caching much lately.
The second app I downloaded is the IGCT Geocaching Toolkit. The app boasts a number of very useful tools for out in the field:
Waypoint Calculations
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– Conversion of degrees, minutes and seconds to other formats
– Conversion between WGS84 and UTM coordinates
– For my Dutch friends the RD coordinates are included
– Also the Swiss grid is supported
– Show the entered Latitude/Longitude using the iPhone map application
– Project a waypoint by specifying distance and bearing
– Calculate distance and bearing between two waypoints
– Intersect two lines using two waypoints and bearings
– Intersect two circles using two waypoints and distances
Text Calculations
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– Calculate the sum of the character values in one or more words
– Choose between a=1, b=2 etc., the inverse a=26, b=25 etc. or the phonepad abc=2, def=3 etc.
– Also calculate the sum of all digits of the result
– Repeat summation of digits until 1 digit remains
Hint decryption
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– Decrypt encrypted hint text to plain text
Roman numbers
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– Convert between roman numbers and decimal values and vice versa
The third app, and my current favourite, is iPlunder HD. For me this was an app that truly delivered and not just because of the awesome pirate theme. It has a great interface and contained more information than Geocache Viewer (like Travel Bugs present in a cache). Best of all it has an excellent mapping function that shows you all of the caches in the filter on a google map. Was surprised me most when I took it out caching was that the app had saved the map data and had it available for me despite having no network access. At the point I looked it up I was a little lost and unsure of whether I was on the right road – using the app very quickly gave me an understanding of the roads in the area and I was back on track. This immediately made me think that this app would be an excellent tool to have on a big day of caching or when travelling along a route. A GPX of caches along the route would be easy to generate in gc.com and then exploring the route in iPlunder would mean that all the mapping you needed would be there. The large display makes it far easier to read than on your GPSr, whose batteries you can then save until you are closer to the cache.
Overall I found the iPad to be a dream to use and iPlunder, along with the Geocaching Toolkit, to be highly useful apps. Geocache Viewer is a little simple for my tastes but may be of use to those who have a basic GPSr and want to cache paperless. If you’re thinking of getting one I can highly recommend it!
Related Articles
- The Best Free Online GPS Tools – Free GPS Maps and Geocaching Tools (brighthub.com)
- Apple iPad 3G 16GB available on T-Mobile (dialtosave.co.uk)
- Android Geocaching (brighthub.com)
- “Apple iPad 2 To Get Dual Cameras, Retina Display & A Memory Card Slot; Just Another Rumor?” and related posts (tnerd.com)
Open for Business
Hours after Garmin’s new listing service went live last week, Auckland geocachers Kiwifamily published the city’s – and the country’s* – first opencache.
Though Super Center (Code: OX2K407) has yet to be found at S 37° 00.452 E174° 53.220, its owners say setting up their first opencache was simple. “No dramas at all.”
The drive-by hide is a camoflagued mint tin secreted on the grounds of the sprawling Manukau Surgery Centre, in Auckland’s Manurewa suburb. Using Opencaching’s new rating system, this size 2.6 cache has a difficulty level of 1.6, a handicapped accessible terrain of 1.0 and its awesomeness level is a sweet 3.5.
KiwiFamily patriach Glenn – who also runs the geocaching website/blog T4TC – says the real reason for listing Super Center on OC.com was that “the reviewer knocked it back from Geocaching.com”.
Originally called Awareness, the cache aimed to be a cancer preventative – after one of his relatives had treatment for breast cancer at GZ – but was deemed unsuitable under Groundspeak’s ‘Caches that Solicit’ rule, which disallows those perceived to be posted for religious, political, charitable or social agendas.
“In all fairness, though, I guess it was for a valid reason – although my personal thoughts had been I didn’t intend this to be for my own personal gain.”
With an altered description, it has now been published on GC.com too, under the code GC2K407. And although still unlogged as an opencache, it has been found four times in its geocache form.
However, Glenn’s hoping for a FTF log on OC.com very soon. “Here in Auckland there are hard-core bunch of people that love the FTF so I’m a little surprised they haven’t yet logged it!”
He and the rest of the KiwiFamily began caching in October 2009 and, despite owning four Garmin GPSr units between them, they haven’t yet decided whether they’ll switch permanently to the new site. The lack of membership fees appeal. “If people use the service, I would certainly look at switching.
“Seeing as the service is only new, I’m hoping there will be a lot more to come in the near future. Being able to add photos will be a bonus. It will be interesting to see how it goes, as I assume a lot of the geocachers enjoy seeing there stats go up and their count really count.
“With the new service, I gather [the tally] won’t count as your total due to the different services. I haven’t followed the saga between the two companies but I’m guessing they’re locking horns so to speak. I keep getting reminded that geocaching is a fun thing so why is there a need for the two services to get upset with each?
“Good healthy competition is all it is!”
Five other Auckland opencaches have since been listed since last Wednesday, four by Kev’s Team and the other by TRIPODTIM.
UPDATE: Manawatu, Nelson, Christchurch and Central Otago also have at least one each now. If you’ve found or seen any other Kiwi opencaches, let us know.
* if you discount Cumbyrocks’ test Newbie cache.
Okay, who narked to opencaching?
I blogged yesterday about the potential for over-saturation of caches to occur in opencaching as no reviewer meant I was able to publish two caches with the same coordinates. Now either someone has dobbed me into opencaching.com or Garmin are avid readers of It’s Not About The Numbers as both have been pushed back to draft stage. At this point I prefer to think the later, though I have my suspects for the former.
I don’t care that they were pushed back to drafts. However, I am a little bugged that there is no note or log telling me why. That’s another example of why we need reviewers – they tend to communicate about these problems and let you know about them so you can fix what you did wrong. Ultimately I should never have been able to publish two in the same place to start with!
Related Articles
- Game On: Garmin’s OpenCaching.com Beta is launched (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
- In light of the reviewerless Opencaching.com – An ode to the gc.com reviewers… (itsnotaboutthenumbers.wordpress.com)
- Garmin launches OpenCaching community, pushes caching closer to the mainstream (engadget.com)
- Garmin creates free geocaching community called OpenCaching (slashgear.com)
Cumbyrocks
kjwx
It's Not About The Numbers 