shacker23

I asked at the Apple store the other day about how the Notes featured worked and learned, to my horror and dismay, that the iPhone does not support storage mode at all! Without a storage mode option, gpx2ipod can't work at all - that's fundamental. Bummer. On the bright side, maybe a future iPhone will have a GPSr built in and become the platform of our dreams.

gpx2ipod has been updated to 1.1 with a pair of bug fixes: No longer generates errors when encountering caches with slashes in their names. Now works properly when installed in a path containing a space (such as "/Applications/GPS Apps"). http://www.birdhouse.org/software/gpx2ipod/ Please let me know if you find this software useful! The new iPod Nanos have *perfect* screens for gpx2ipod

Wow - that would really take some doing for this script. I'll file the feature request, but no guarantees. I'll have to think about this one a bit.

Oops - If you downloaded this last night and found that there was nothing double-clickable in the folder, it was because you're using StuffIt Expander to unzip your .zips rather than OS X's built-in unzipper. To get around this problem, I've repackaged gpx2ipod as a .dmg. If it didn't work for you last night, please try again.

About a month ago I posted here about a shell script I had written called gpx2txt, for Mac-based paperless caching with an iPod (using the iPod's "Notes" feature rather than the Address Book, which I think is a cleaner and more flexible solution). I've rewritten that script from the ground up and renamed it gpx2ipod. What's changed: - Now double-clickable -- no command-line experience required - Now injects generated text files directly into the iPod - Menu-driven - choose whether hints should be encrypted, whether to archive source files, etc. - Now stores user preferences for future runs - Now uses gpsbabel's "splitoutput" feature rather than unix "cut" (which was limited to 99 files). Thanks Robert Lipe for this feature. The script requires gpsbabel 1.3.4 or higher, and can be downloaded either with or without gpsbabel bundled: http://www.birdhouse.org/software/gpx2ipod/ For me, it's been a very fast way to reduce prep time before going caching. A future version will feed gpx files to the gpsr and text files to the iPod in the same run. Please let me know if you find this script useful!

Yeah, I did write the owner, but haven't gotten any response, so thought I would ask here. I'll wait a week to hear from him and then drop it elsewhere if I don't hear back. Thanks.

I retrieved a travel bug from a cache recently because I'm planning a trip later this summer in the direction the bug wants to go, and thought I could give it a big bump toward its destination (1500 miles closer). But after I retrieved it, I questioned whether I should have retrieved it, because I won't be leaving for three months. Is that too long to hold onto a bug? Is this bad etiquette? Maybe I should drop it in another cache so I'm not "hogging" it. What's considered best practice in this situation? Thanks.

Solved! Replying to myself, for the sake of the archives. On Parallels' "Devices" menu, I found a "Garmin" entry, which offered to install the correct driver. In the process of doing that, it said it couldn't find C:\Garmin\USB Drivers\grmnusb.sys I searched for this file and found it at: C:\Garmin\USB Drivers\i386\grmnusb.sys Altered the path to it in the wizard, continued the installation, and came up golden. GPS switched to "Connected" and the Unlock Wizard was able to find the device.

I just installed Parallels because I can't wait any longer for a way to load maps onto my eTrex Vista cx. However, MapSource can't find the eTrex on the USB bus through Parallels. When I click Find Device it says that I may need to set the Interface for the GPS to Garmin or Host. But in Setup, Interface, I can't select anything -- nothing is choosable. I'm using Win2K under Parallels. Which Windows are you using? In Device Manager, Windows did not recognize anything on the USB bus. I had it re-install the USB drivers, and now they show up properly in Device Manager. Rebooted. But the GPS still says "Not connected" and the Unlock Wizard still says the GPS is not connected. Did you have to do install any additional drivers or anything, or did it just work right away?

Wow - I had no idea track resolution was generalized on save. That's disappointing. But thanks for the headsup on that. I wonder why they do that - these XML files are miniscule amounts of data.

Today I realized that when you select "Clear all tracks," it will give you a clean break. I had previously not wanted to select that because I thought it would also clear my saved tracks. But it actually leaves saved tracks intact and just clears the current track log. Not a perfect solution, but it makes this process a lot easier (if you only want to work with a single track). Found my first cache today! (GCHTEQ)

Wow, what an amazing community this is. michigansnorkeler: Yes, the Legend lets you save separate tracks, and that's what I did, but it STILL appends them to one another, which kind of stinks IMO. Others here are recommending doing all of this in software such as MapSource, but that's what I'm hoping to avoid - first because it's a pain to try and locate a Windows machine and Garmin still hasn't released much in the way of Mac software (I've spent the past five years getting all of my family, all of my clients, and my entire school off Windows and onto the Mac, only to enter the GPS world which turns out to be completely Windows-centric; I do have an old Windows laptop in the closet, but am not eager to haul it out every time I want to edit a track) and second because it just doesn't make any *sense* that tracks should be appended to each other even after saving the previous one - I feel like I must be missing something, but maybe that's just the way the unit is programmed. I'll try turning the unit on and off and see if that helps. Thanks all for the great responses.

Hi all - I'm just getting started, and am having a bit of trouble getting the Tracks feature to work the way I would expect it to work (I have a Legend CX). I would expect that I could say "Start tracking" when I set out and then "Stop tracking" at the end of my hike, and that I would get an independent, named track for future reference. What actually happens is that when I save a track, it's appended to the previous track, even if I toggle the On/Off switch in the track interface. If I bike to work and save a nice 5 mile track, then bike home again and save that track, the 2nd track registers 10 miles, and shows up as a double line when I export the .gpx file. I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here - there must be a simple way to make tracks independent of each other. The manual says you can save a "partial" track by clicking on start and end points, but that's really unwieldy and unintuitive - all I want is to be able to tell it when to start and when to stop tracking, and have it be a discrete unit, not appended to previous tracks. Or is this just the nature of the beast? Thanks, Scot