The HikerJamz Geocaching Talk Show

The HikerJamz Geocaching Talk Show was brought to this blogger's attention via a "who to follow" link at his personal Twitter account (not the OpencachingNA account). I followed @hikerjamz, and quickly saw that his profile mentions his radio show. Turns out that like this blog, HikerJamz, with the "Jamz" being pronounced "James", his first name, is also a March, 2013 entry into the big world of Geocaching media. The show airs live every Saturday, at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on the Blog Talk Radio website. And of course previous shows are archived and available for listening. He was nice enough to agree to be interviewed by this blog.

ROVE: New bluetooth gadget for instant Geocaching & trail sharing

ROVE, shown above, was brought to our attention here at the Opencaching North America blog on April 4th, 2013 via a press release on PRweb.com that came through on a Google news alert for the word Geocaching. ROVE is a GPS accessory that instantly shares trail maps across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. ROVE pulls multiple geocaches from geocaching.com right to your GPS, anywhere there is cellular or WiFi service. Advanced functionality includes tracking distance, time, elevation and speed for accurate trail maps.

ROVE is manufactured in Atlantic Canada by Sparkyard, Inc., a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia based IT start up company. The company has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise money for increasing production (please note per the Indiegogo site that there is an initial short production run, and ROVE can be ordered right now). We at the OCNA blog contacted Janet Wilson, Visual Designer for Sparkyard through their website at www.gorove.com, who was nice enough to set up an interview for us with Jonathan Layes, the inventor of ROVE, and founder of Sparkyard, Inc.

News about this Blog

This post is not being promoted or announced via social media. Some may have noticed in the very first blog post, I threatened to "host the blog on our own server". That statement isn't entirely accurate, the blog has actually been redirected to the URL blog.opencaching.us. I could post a link, but that would be rather redundant, wouldn't it? We didn't do this right away, because I was not the owner of the domain names opencaching.us, opencaching.ca and opencaching.mx for a few weeks after coming on board as the replacement 3rd admin.

As long as we continue to use Google's Blogger software (and I'd have to say we're pretty happy with it so far), the original URL, http://opencachingna.blogspot.com will always work, and no existing bookmarks need to be updated. Go ahead and try that one; you actually see blog.opencaching.us in your browser. There was a somewhat humorous glitch associated with this redirect though. I created some Address name records, commonly known as "A records" at our web host. One of our other admins noted that suddenly, you needed the "www" in any URL on our website, or you would get an error page. In other words, http://opencaching.us wouldn't work, for example. Go ahead and try that too, it works now. Once I was informed, I knew exactly what happened, and this error was fixed within 2 hours at most, and happened in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

There is no set schedule for posts to this blog, and that's a good thing too, who likes deadlines? But we have generally been posting once a week, and usually on Wednesdays. That seems to be working out pretty good. That being said, we may be a little late this week! Thanks for reading, readership has gone up every single week so far, according to the statistics we can see in the Blogger control panel.

Sporadically featured OpenCachingNA Cache: A Virtual Made in the Mist

Welcome to the first "Sporadically featured OCNA Cache", a feature promised in the very first blog post. Above is a picture of Niagara Falls, more specifically, the American Falls, as taken by the blog author from the Maid of The Mist tour boat. If you've never been to Niagara Falls, you can read about the three waterfalls collectively known as Niagara Falls on Wikipedia. The task of visiting Niagara Falls from below, which can be accomplished only through one of four "paid" access options, is the object of the Virtual Cache A Virtual Made in the Mist, created on July 6th, 2011, by Opencaching North America Admin DudleyGrunt.

Editors note: Like virtually (pun intended) all the "alternative" Geocaching websites, we at Opencaching North America list Virtual caches. But we always like to add the disclaimer that you should review the section on them in our terms of use first.

A tribute to the late Steve Love, AKA Sven, of the Geocache Spoilers YouTube Channel

This was not a scheduled blog post. On April 2nd, 2013, someone started a thread in the Geocaching.com forums asking for advice on great Geocaching videos on YouTube, and of course Steve, known as Sven to Geocachers around the world, was one of the first names that came up. Two of the first eight or so posters to the thread had seen some of the videos, but were not aware of Steve's passing on February 4th, 2012. So I figured a tribute post at a blog that was started a little over a year after his death was in order. The photo below is one of his family's favorites from his Geocaching adventures, and was chosen and provided by his Mother (Username: Svensmum), and used with permission. Click to enlarge.

Steve hailed from the East Midlands region of England, joined Geocaching.com on June 2nd, 2011 (Username: Sven&Cup), and started his YouTube channel only 6 days later. The YouTube channel, incidentally, is actually called Everything about Geocaching and his username was Geocachespoilers, but almost everyone referred to it, and still does, as the Geocachespoilers channel. Now if it sounds to you like he started that channel very quickly, with little experience, you would be wrong; Steve was already a YouTube celebrity, having started the Sven's Motorcycle Fun channel in April 2007. Sven's passion was off road biking, or Dirt Biking, as it's called. This blogger especially likes the helmet cam videos, one of his more humorous and popular ones of which is embedded at the bottom of this post. Sven's Motorcycle Fun channel currently has 17,000,000 views, while his Geocachespoilers channel has "only" 3,000,000 views.