November 27, 2011

Shopping or Caching? - It's A No-Brainer

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, my daughter and I joined many of my college buddies and their friends and family for our annual Post-Thanksgiving-Day hike in Las Trampas Regional Wilderness in the hills west of Danville, California. Being somewhat of a shop-a-phobe, there really is no where I'd rather be on Black Friday than surrounded by nature and a few friends. While the weather was a little on the cool side by California standards (65 degrees F), it was still a perfect day for hiking and picking up a few new geocaches along the way. Here are the details of the hike from EveryTrail.com:

Las Trampas Post Turkey Hike at EveryTrail


Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Cache On!

November 20, 2011

Fall Caching

While anytime of year is great for geocaching, there's something extra nice about caching during the fall. The temperature is perfect as it is never so hot or so cold that you're miserable. And the disappearing foliage makes it much easier to find that cache that's eluded you all summer. Here are a few shots from my outing yesterday to get you in the mood:






So get out there, and Cache On!

November 13, 2011

GSAK Version 8 Released

A major upgrade of GSAK was released this past week, and includes many new features as it now takes advantage of the geocaching.com API. This allows the user to load cache data into their GSAK databases directly from geocaching.com. No more dowloading pocket queries to you hard-drive and then loading them into GSAK. Other new features in the version 8 release include support for custom data (virtually unlimited number of fields) and a newer, more modern look and feel. The full list of new features can be found here.


Since this is a significant upgrade, it does come with a cost:

  • Brand new users (those that have never owned a previous version of GSAK) - $30
  • If purchased V7 after 10/01/11 - Free
  • If purchased V7 between July 1st and September 30th - $5 for the upgrade
  • If purchased V7  between February 1st and June 30th  - $10 for the upgrade
  • If purchased V7  between 10/01/09 and 01/31/11  - $15 for the upgrade
  • If purchased V7 before 10/01/09 - $20 for the upgrade
  • Version 6 users can get a token discount of $5, so $25 for the upgrade to V8

On a completely unrelated note, I hope everyone had an enjoyable 11/11/11 and was able to attend a cache event somewhere honoring our veterans. I attended a flash mob event in the tiny town of American Canyon (appropriately named), where a good, but brief, time was had by all.


Cache On!

November 5, 2011

Cloudy Skies Ahead?

A year ago, I was somehow lucky enough to convince Google that I was a good candidate to test their prototype Chromebook, an all-web laptop:



Since then, the device has become my primary computing tool. In fact, I rarely use my old, slow, virus-prone, Windows XP desktop PC anymore. Since almost everything I do is on the web, from Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets to mint.com for monitoring finances to Picasa for photo storing and sharing to listening to music on internet radio stations like Pandora. In addition to a heavy reliance on web-based applications, most of my files (documents, spreadsheets, images, mp3's) are stored in the cloud as well; meaning I have access to them at anytime from anywhere.

There is barely an application I use now that requires a Windows PC. The only reason I even still have it: geocaching. In fact, that's all I use it for. Since my Chromebook does not recognize my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx device, I cannot load waypoints on to it, nor extract GPS tracks from it. And until some genius creates an HTML 5 version of GSAK, I'll continue to be wedded to my XP behemoth. As I cannot live without my GSAK.

Cache On!