Geocaching

I enjoy playing with my Garmin eTrex GPS. If you have a GPS and a mild sense of adventure, I heartily recommend geocaching, the search for "treasure" stashes that other folks with GPS's have placed around the world. Go to geocaching.com, enter your ZIP code and you'll see the caches near you. Then simply enter the coordinates of a stash into your GPS and follow the arrow to your goal. The caches I've hidden are here.

If you'd like to get fancy, you can hook up your GPS to a laptop PC, and use a program like Microsoft Streets & Trips to navigate. You'll see your position in real time as a little "car" on the screen. If you have Streets & Trips 2001, I recommend patching the program so that it updates your position every second, as opposed to every 15 seconds.

There are two ways to patch the program. Those less technically inclined can run a little program that will modify the Streets and Trips program. I offer these without warranty on a "use at your own risk" basis. The Streets and Trips patches:

Please note: If you're having trouble downloading these, please retry using Internet Explorer as your browser.

For those at home with a hex editor, I found the procedure below in the USENET newsgroups. It works perfectly.

How to patch Streets & Trips 2001:

In the file Streets.exe dated 3-10-00 22:25:24, with file size of 2580534 bytes, at offset 0x60E13 change the value 0x98 to 0xE8 and at address 0x60E14 change the value 0x3A to 0x03. This will set the update rate to 1 second. This location is identical between Autoroute Express 2001 and Streets & Trips 2001. The surrounding bytes look something like this:

00060E00 5E 5B C3 8B 4E 10 85 C9 0F 85 87 00 00 00 33 DB 

00060E10 8B 08 BF 98 3A 00 00 53 57 6A 01 FF 76 08 50 FF 

00060E20 51 4C 85 C0 7C D9 8B 46 04 53 57 6A 02 FF 76 08

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