Welcome to NJScuba.net, a website dedicated to exploring the New Jersey / New York region underwater -- "Wreck Valley". Here you will find information on dive sites, marine biology, artifacts and activities, gear and training, and many other subjects.
It appears that I have unintentionally and unknowingly infringed a copyrighted image, and I am being threatened with legal action if I do not agree to their terms. After finding the accusers all over the internet, I see no other choice.
The way these guys operate is basically entrapment. It should be illegal, but instead it has been made highly profitable by insane copyright laws. They leave things lying around on the internet with no notice, and then sue anyone who picks them up. They have even sold CD-ROMs full of images and then sued the buyers for actually using the images. Apparently the terms are buried so deep no one can find them. They have destroyed businesses and livelihoods. The even sue governments.
I really cannot afford this. Covid has ruined my health and left me unable to work. I am living off my savings and praying that somehow I get better, but after two years, I have little hope. I am not one to put my sob stories online, but there it is.
Dutch Springs has new owners and a new name. The aqua park is gone, but here’s when divers might return to popular quarry
By Anthony Salamone The Morning Call Lehigh Valley News Jul 27, 2022
Divers by a sunken boat called the Silver Comet at Dutch Springs, a 50-acre water park and scuba diving site since 1980 that features a 100-foot-deep water filled quarry, north of Bethlehem, Nov. 23, 2021. The Dutch Springs quarry has been acquired by a pair of owners, who plan to resume scuba diving at the Northampton County site next year with a new name: Lake Hydra. (Michael Turek/The New York Times)
Nearly a year after news leaked about its potential sale for warehousing, the Dutch Springs quarry has new owners and a new name.
Former Northampton County Council member Kenneth Kraft and Jim Folk have bought the water-filled quarry from Trammell Crow Co., which acquired most of the land off Hanoverville Road in Northampton County to develop two warehouses. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Today I got over 5000 images and media files loaded into WordPress. Most of the work was done by several utilities that ran unattended. WordPress made its usual mess of things, but it is all cleaned up now.
I finished the Dives Sites section of the website, the biggest and most complex part. I also finished the central 'hub' of the site and made some inroads in the Artificial Reefs and Biology sections. I'm also fixing things as I go, like broken weather forecasts.
And none too soon - the old site has become rather balky since I stopped paying attention to it several years ago. For one thing, it will not run on the latest version of PHP. Rather than figure that out, I'll put my efforts into this. It just took five minutes to load a page.
I also added Google Earth integration, which will let you zoom in on land-based sites. Not much point in setting it up at sea though, my 20-year-old wreck charts are still better than anything.
This site is now running on WordPress, with everything stored in a database. That gives a lot of flexibility. I don't really care for WordPress sites, they're usually ugly slabs with no structure. But I've buried WordPress so deep in here that you can't even tell it is there.
I finished the Artificial Reefs section of the website, probably the second-largest piece after Dive Sites. These two are also the most complicated sections, since they involve geography and spatial relations. Again, no more clickable charts. That would be a huge job, and I would have to get awfully bored to want to tackle it. WordPress is doing a very nice job of handling all the relationships between pages and subjects.
Using WordPress taxonomies, a site no longer needs to 'belong' to a particular chart, it can belong to several at once. That was something that had to be hand-coded before. There's an old programming adage: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." Look up that quote if you are interested.
WordPress tells me that Artificial Reefs worked out to 235 pages, while Dive Sites is 425.
Finished the Artifacts section, which turned out to be more work than expected. Although the page count is only 69, many of the pages are long and complex, and some of them even have calculators on them. Needless to say, WordPress didn't like any of this, and balked at almost everything. I've been making use of the 'html' block rather than try to do complex things in WordPress' ham-fisted editor.
Finished the Biology section, which ended up being 261 pages. This easily surpasses Artificial Reefs to be the second-largest section after Dive Sites.
Waded into the last section - Dive Gear. Did a lot of long complex pages, and even got the decompression program working by a couple of quick-and-dirty hacks. I think I will make a plugin of it.
I just received my signed copy of this new book, and I must say I am very impressed. It has over 400 pages of information, charts, images, and GPS numbers. This is a must-have for any New Jersey wreck diver.
If you can drink it, then your tap water is probably OK to use in your aquarium. This is especially true if the water comes from a municipal supply. If your water comes from a well, this is less certain. There are several factors to consider in water quality: pH, hardness, chlorination, and other chemical contents.
