shacker

Oops, thanks for the response and sorry for the delay - I had set the forum to send me email when replies were made but I never got them for some reason. I'll DM Eartha with the details right now. Thanks all for the suggestions. Scot

Almost two years ago, my geocaching go-bag was stolen, including a few travel bugs belonging to other people, which I intended to move along. At the time, I posted notes on those TBs' pages saying sorry, these will need to be decomissioned. But nothing ever happened and they STILL show up in my inventory. I'd like to get them out of my inventory. What's the right way to go about it? Thanks.

@The Leprechauns - All good points, and yes there are issues with privacy, safety, and data duplication when you get into this stuff. But you have to deal with the issues on a case by case basis and solve them with appropriate barriers. For example, why shouldn't Geopher for iPhone be able to access coords (for a logged-in user) through an API? And why shouldn't I as a player be able to choose to share out an RSS feed of my recent finds? Each user could decide whether to allow syndication of their finds. Why shouldn't I be able to obtain a feed of recently published caches in my area? Coords wouldn't have to be in the feed - just summaries and links back to the site, where the coords are protected from non-players. All of these things are solvable - it just takes some thought and the will to participate.

tozainamboku - That's *excellent* ! Many thanks for the link. It's odd though - since Groundspeak obviously has the capability to do this, why don't they just use elegant URLs native to the site, and handle the hair internal IDs invisibly. Mysterious, but great to know this exists.

All of this has got my wheels spinning, and I've posted more thoughts on the lack of APIs and open-ness in general at geocaching.com here. Comments welcome.

Help! I'm getting nothing but blank HTML pages! My IP has been banned! Guys, think about it for a second. If I was building a scraper based on this technique, I'd already have to have a list of all of the GC numbers. And where would I have gotten those? From scraping the site. And if I had already scraped the site, I wouldn't need this technique, would I? Not wanting to sound snarky, but I don't appreciate being made out as a ne'er-do-well after asking a really simple and straightforward question. Yes, I'm building something. And yes, I think a lot of people are going to find it interesting and fun. No, I'm not scraping, and no, I'm not going to consume any server resources from this site. Just wanting to automate some of the links from my project back into geocaching.com - no big whoop. Maybe someday geocaching.com will have a cool open API and thus give rise to a cottage industry of 3rd party satellite sites - the same kind of openness that has made Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and all the other Web 2.0 success stories so successful. This is an amazing database, and the possibilties for external sites to interact with that data are wonderful to imagine. For now, geocaching.com is still stuck in a Web 1.0 world where everything is still assumed closed, and interoperability with the rest of the web is virtually impossible. I still can't get a basic RSS feed of my recent finds, for godsake! Geopher for the iPhone can't even automatically get cache coordinates based on current location, thanks to the geocaching.com terms of service. That's really sad. For now, when someone asks a simple question about how to do a tiny bit of semantic interoperation between this site and another, the assumption is that he's a bad guy, not a developer thinking of creative ways sites could work together. In 2008, interoperability between sites needs to be encouraged, not discouraged. Sad that geocaching.com's traditional closed-ness has created this kind of culture. There are many things I'd like to do with my project that I won't be able to do as a result. But I do plan to respect the geocaching.com terms of service, even if I don't agree with all of them.

Bingo - thanks Dino! No not as elegant, but as long as the cache identifying string is present, I'll be able to use this for my ... special purpose Cheers, ./s

geocaching.com doesn't, unfortunately, subscribe to the "URLs are architecture, and should be elegant / readable / meaningful" philosophy. Still, I'm wondering if they at least support some kind of shortcut URLs. For example, is there any way to link to a cache page from another site in a simplified / cleaner way, e.g.: http://geocaching.com/cache/GC15N63 If not, can that be a feature request please? Thanks, Scot

My house was broken into recently, and I lost my geocaching go-bag, among other things. Inside the go-bag was my 3-month-old Colorado 400t. I had had a love/hate relationship with the Colorado for all the same reasons discussed here ad nauseum. But I loved the integrated paperless so much that I kept using it - that was worth a lot to me. I'm debating whether to buy another Colorado when the insurance check arrives. And simultaneously debating whether to get an iPhone when the new ones come out June 9. They're supposed to come with a true GPS (different from the cell tower triangulation pseudo-geo in the first rev iPhone). And the whole iPhone application platform is about to be opened up. In combination, iPhone 2 could become a great geocaching device. Wondered what your thoughts where, or if anyone has heard anything early that might weigh for or against a decision to not get another Colorado and just see how well paperless is integrated in iPhone 2. Thanks for your thoughts, Scot

I've you're a Mac cacher, I know that gpsbabel can write directly to the POI format, so that is something you might want to look into as well (assuming you are comfortable playing with the command line). Absolutely - I'm the author of gpx2ipod I'll give it a shot. Thanks again for the tips, all.

Honestly, now that I think about it more, I realize I don't need to have found caches listed - I'm just used to it because that's the way things worked with the Vista by default. When I switched to the Colorado this seemed like missing functionality - something that worked before but no longer did. I do think the CO should be smart enough to mark a found cache as found (that's pretty basic), but I'm realizing after reading this thread that it isn't really something I need - just something I'm accustomed to. The only time I really need to have found caches is when I'm taking kids or visitors to caches I've been to in the past, but that should be easy to solve with POIs. The "GSAK (or, presumably, MacCaching) site mirror" technique sounds really interesting. I'll try out that workflow.

Marky - Interesting idea. If I try that method, will the POIs show up in the Found Caches list on the Colorado?

Yep, that does seem to be the best way to do things, and yes, that works fine. With my Vista Cx, I could more or less treat the GPSr as "in sync" with geocaching.com and think of them as mirroring each other. I kind of like having all my found caches listed in the GPSr, at least in my local area. You can still do that with the Colorado, but only if you're willing to manually mark everything you've ever found as found again (and either trust your memory on that or pull up all of your old logs on the site to confirm). The plus side is that by excluding found caches from your PQs, you use less space on the unit. Ah well, I'll operate this way unless Garmin changes this behavior in the future. Do you think GPSBabel and other tools will ever be able to communicate with the Colorado, or does this disk storage mode way of operating mean that it's fundamentally a different type of beast?

The latest firmware update looked like it had finally made geocaching support solid enough, so went for it and got a 400t the other day. Downloaded PQs for local caches, dropped them in Garmin/GPX, and .... all appeared as "Not Found." I can mark ones I've found as Found and this works fine, but would really like to automate this. Tried doing two separate PQs: One for found and another for not found, but no dice. The Colorado just doesn't seem to know what a found cache symbol means. I'd like to think this will be solved in a future firmware update, but am wondering whether this has something to do with the storage mode. I can't talk to the unit with GPSBabel; the only way is through the Finder. I don't mind that, but wonder if the Garmin's inability to recognize a found cache is due to a firmware bug or to its storage method (i.e. does the fact that it can only be communicated with through the file manager affect its ability to recognize found caches?) Thanks, Scot

I think your best bet would be to use GPSBabel to convert GPX files to plain text. Then you can do whatever you like with them.

Agreed. Compression is a good thing, but there's no reason MapInstaller shouldn't be able to decompress the tarball internally and on-the-fly. A lot of software does this, and there are plenty of open source libs available to developers for accomplishing this. Good point. Shame on Microsoft for inventing .cab when plenty of free and open archiving algorithms already existed. And shame on Garmin for adopting .cab when they could have chosen .zip, .gz, .rar.... any of half a dozen archiving formats that would have served just fine. Now they're locked in a bad place by bad historical decisions. Proprietary solutions will always come back to bite you in the end.

First of all, let me just say thank you Garmin, for creating a native version of MapSource for the Mac, and for making it more elegant than the Windows version. Even in its beta state, it's far smoother and more pleasant to work with than MapSource, and it's really great to be able to work without Parallels. Great job so far. I've just gone through the MapConverter process, and found it cumbersome, to say the least. WHY is MapConverter a Windows app rather than a Mac app? Why can't I run a MapConverter for Mac which reads the CDs natively and converts to Mac maps? This requirement to either have access to a Windows machine and transfer converted maps, or to purchase and run Parallels to go through this process seems unnecessary. This all needs to happen natively. Actually (and this is just a curious question), why is MapConverter even necessary? Data is data. What exactly is Windows-specific about the map data? Why can't I just stick in a CD and get started? However, I will say that MapConverter for Windows created maps that work perfectly in Bobcat. The end result is really good. Second: Can you please not include a bunch of sample waypoints for Kansas and the Grand Canyon, etc.? I shouldn't have to go through deleting these one by one manually. Make loading of the sample data an option, maybe at first launch. And then provide an option to delete all of it in one step. Finally: Can you change the default behavior of double-clicking on a waypoint or track in the left pane? It's annoying to have to double-click and then click View on Map when 99% of the time, view on map is the first thing you want to do. At least make it a preference (with "view on map" being the default). Aside from those quibbles, fantastic job on this. Feels fantastic not to be a 2nd class citizen at last. Thank you.

I'm the author of gpx2ipod, which is a solution to get .gpx logs, hints, etc. into the Notes feature on an iPod (MacCaching added this capability after gpx2ipod). When the iPhone came out, I asked a "Genius" at an Apple Store about the Notes feature on the iPhone, and he said that there were no plans to support Notes, like all previous iPods had done. This stinks, since it means that if you want to use an iPhone for paperless caching, you'll have to use one of the apps that puts logs and descriptions into the Address Book, rather than Notes. And in my experience, that's a terrible solution. No hints, no logs, caches mixed up with all of your existing contacts.... just terrible. Then there's the non-GPS cell phone tower triangulation thing they're doing since the most recent iPhone update. My advice: Forget about the iPhone for geocaching. These two pieces of news have put to bed any prospect of the iPhone being the perfect geocaching device. Get a Colorado and a cheapo phone instead.

Just to clarify terminology, there are THREE libraries: - /System/Library/* -- the system library - not modifiable - /Library/* -- the library shared by all users - IS modifiable - ~/Library - each user's library You guys are referring to /Library as the system library. This is not correct. /Library/ -- the shared library -- is the right place for the maps, so they can be shared by all accounts on the machine. But that is not the same as the system library.

I just posted a pretty detailed article on my experiments with geocoding images on the Mac: Experiments in Geocoding Should answer most of these questions (and raise some more . Feedback welcome.

If you have an iPod, don't forget gpx2ipod!

At least one user has gotten gpx2ipod working under Cygwin for Windows. But that's a lot of work if you aren't already running Cygwin.

These are great, thanks much for the links. Not sure how we'll proceed on this, but this is a useful start. Much appreciated.

Ah, nice solution. No, that's not the one I had in mind, but that would be a good solution. Thanks for the link.

I'm gearing up to help teach a class that will involve geotagging a lot of photos. I'm aware of the software options for combining timestamped track data with digital photo timestamps. What I'm looking for is the cheapest way to get timestamped track data I can use with that software. I've seen the $150 Sony screen-less unit made for this purpose, but am looking for something in the $50 range, if such an animal exists. I thought I had seen one online once and bookmarked it, but can no longer find the bookmark. Does anyone have recommendations on small, cheap screenless units that record timestamped track data? I may need to buy 8 - 10 of them. Thanks, Scot