August 25, 2012

Death of the PC Greatly Exaggerated?

For months, even years now, so called "experts" have been predicting the end of the PC era, as people opt for tablets and smartphones. One critical aspect this latest article fails to mention is the all-important hard drive. The most storage you can get on an iPad is 64GB, and that'll cost you over $800 (with cell data service). You can get a decent PC desktop or laptop for half that much, and these units include huge amounts of storage space now. And if, for some reason you need even more space, you can always add an external hard drive to your PC. Something you can't do with an iPad. Hardly a reason to switch to tablet.

Some will argue that hard drives are not so crucial any more now that there are so many cloud storage options available. Tell that to tech writer, Mat Honan, who lost everything on iCloud. Yes, hard drives can fail, but cloud security is becoming a serious issue. Personally, I've got hundreds of gigabytes worth of irreplaceable digital photo, video and music files on my PC's hard drive, and I'm not about to pay, or trust, an online cloud service to host them for me. Instead, I bought a 300 GB external hard drive for about $60 that I use to back up my data every week.

Of course, there is one more very important reason I'm not ready to trash my PC just yet: Geocaching. I use a combination of GSAK, Base Camp, Google Earth and other PC programs to upload waypoints to, and download tracks from, my Garmin GPSmap60CSx. This is something that just can't be done on a smartphone or a tablet. And no, I have no intention of ever trading in my GPSr for a cell phone running the geocaching app. In fact, I'm actually looking around for a new desktop (or maybe a laptop) to replace my agonizingly slow, 10-year old, Dell desktop unit.

So if you're a geocacher and someone tells you it's time to trash your PC, take their advice with a grain of salt.

Cache On!

August 18, 2012

Happy IGD!

Happy International Geocaching Day! Now get out there and get a cache and a souvenir.  And don't forget to pick your geocaching.com iPhone app update while your at it.

Cache On!

August 12, 2012

More Vlogging

According to Wikipedia, "video blog, sometimes shortened to vlog (pronounced 'vlog', as opposed to 'v-log') is a form of blog for which the medium is video, and is a form of Web television." Whatever you call it, more and more geocachers are getting into the act. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned one that I particularly liked, the GeoGearHeads. Today, I discovered a fairly new entry into the fray hosted by the Ultimate Caching Quests. Below, you can view their latest v-post, which includes an interview with hard-core cacher, JT3Halls.




Enjoy, and Cache On!

August 4, 2012

Got The Jitters?

According to AppleInsider, the new maps that Apple will be serving up in iOS 6 will leave Google Maps in the dust. They claim that Apple's new vector-based maps will refresh faster and look cleaner than Google's image-based (raster) maps. Of course, Google Maps still offers many other features that the new iOS 6 maps may not, such as street view; voice prompted, turn-by-turn navigation features; and 3-D building models.


Of course, if you use the geocaching.com app. on your iPhone, you'll still see ground zero displayed on a Google Maps map (if you are a premium subscriber). But if this presumed "jitteriness" of Google Maps is too much to handle, then you might just want to enter the cache's lat/long. coordinates into the new Apple map and let it guide you to that next cache.


Cache On!