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March 22, 2006
Cold, Hard (Geo) Cache
Now that it is starting to get a little warmer, I would like to start taking advantage of Columbia, MD's pathways and trails again. When Columbia was first built (by Edward Norton's grandfather, no less), they purposely planned to have these pathways throughout the entire city. It makes it very easy to walk from one place to another and also allows me to get some much needed exercise.
Since I am also a technology buff, I have recently started getting into Geocaching, which allows me to exercise and use technology at the same time.
In the activity of geocaching, someone hides a 'cache', which is typically a plastic container full of a few trinkets and a log book. They then post the latitude and longitude of the location of the cache (found with a GPS) online at a site like geocaching.com. Other people will then plug the coordinates into their own GPS and try to find it. Once found, they can sign the log book, swap out a trinket for one of their own, take a picture, etc. They would also post online that they found the cache.
There are many variations of geocaching and they are found all over the place. For instance, there are 64 caches listed that are 5 miles or less from my house. The closest one was about a 10 minute walk.
I highly recommend this activity and hope to find about one cache a week for the duration of the Spring and Summer. You can track my progress by looking up user ChuckCaplan on geocaching.com.
Here are some other links that I recommend:
Maryland Geocaching Society
Reading a GPS using Java
Posted by Chuck at 12:23 PM | Comments (2)
March 10, 2006
The Acid2 Browser Test
Digg recently had a story on the front page about the latest build of Opera passing the Acid2 Test. I decided to verify this for myself, as well as check how Firefox and Internet Explorer did.
For those who don't know, the Acid2 Test tests how well web browsers conform to certain standards. If the browser passes, the page should like like a smiley face. Otherwise, it will look bad. How bad depends on how well the browser conforms to the tested standards.
Opera Build 8265 (Looks great!)
Firefox 1.5.01 (Disappointed)
Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 (Looks HORRIBLE)
On the bright side, I have heard that the IE 7.0 beta passes the test and I am sure that Firefox won't be far behind.
Posted by Chuck at 02:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack