Harv
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Posts posted by Harv
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If you'd love to see it fixed, use an application that deals correctly with UTF-8 encodings. What you're describing as "curly quote characters" are teh UTF-8 escape sequences for representing Unicode characters.
The web pages uses hex escaped encodings and that's legal.
The GPX downloads use "real" UTF-8 encodings and that's legal, too.
If you're viewing either with tools that don't understand the expressiveness of their various transports, you will be bummed.
Thanks, Robert. I've verified what you said. Sorry for the false bug report.
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I created a password for geocaching.com that was 20 characters long and used letters, numbers, and symbols. Geocaching.com accepted that password, and I was able to log into the site using it.
However, that same password would not work here in the forums. I believe that here in the forums either the password must be something less than 20 characters, or symbols are not allowed--I'm not sure which. Only after I changed my geocaching.com password to a length of 10 characters consisting of only letters and numbers (no symbols) was I able to log into both sites with the same password.
Obviously, now that I've figured that out I'm going to leave my password the way it is, but I thought I should at least report the problem. Now that both sites use the same login info, they should both have the same limitations with regard to password length and allowed password characters.
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The geocaching.com website presents web pages, including cache information pages, in UTF-8. GPX files also use UTF-8 as the character encoding. However, somewhere in the process of creating pocket query results, the character encoding is messed up.
Take for example GC198ZA. The web page shows the cache hider's name is ADØOR, and later on the page curly quote characters are used. “Like this." However, the .gpx file that I get as the result of the pocket query shows the hider's name as ADØOR and shows curly quote characters “like this.â€
I'd love to see this fixed.
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Kietc, I don't have an iPhone yet (maybe waiting for one with a built-in GPS), but I'm very interested. Is the above method still the procedure you use, or have you found improvements that can be made to the above procedure?
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Oh, and you don't need to BUY a program to merge the PQs. There are several free programs out there that can do it. As a programmer you would probably like GPSBabel the best, since it can be run from a command line.
His GPSr came with a program that will do that for him. Might take 3 steps but it's still pretty simple!
Thanks Mopar and ODragon. I'll look into those. Come to think of it, there was a CD that came with my GPSr that I never opened.
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OK, so maybe "newer" wasn't the right word. How about low-volume.
129 finds in six years has been just right for me. It allows me to hunt a cache when I have time, but still have a life.
Actually, if you'll think about it, my casual attitude toward geocaching is a good indication of exactly why I want my PQ search to be simpler. If it gets too complicated, it's just not worth it to me.
And Groundspeak probably gets about as many dollars from me as they do from you. So, I can't make a feature request unless I have a lot of finds? It was a simple feature request. I never meant to start a holy war.
Large numbers of caches in an area downloaded into your GPSr aren't because you expect to look for all of them. It's because you don't know where you'll be when you find yourself with a few minutes to go caching.Yes, exactly! You get it. And 500 caches just doesn't cover my local roaming area anymore.
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Jeremy has said many times that the 500 limit is here to stay (bandwidth, details, etc., etc.).
But - How about another option that might actually make some sense to this discussion? Since the GPX files and the details included are the culprit in the bandwidth, what about about an option that if you choose a LOC file instead of the GPX, the query results were 1000 instead of 500? It would still count toward your 5 PQ for the day, but this would give cachers the opportunity to get 5000 caches daily, but only LIMITED information about them.
My largest GPX from a PQ recently sent was 463 points at 2.44MB. I just did a "save as" as saved it as a LOC file. Size was 124KB. In many instances, I'd be willing to get the files as LOC or even a "reduced GPX" with a very limited number of caches if it meant more per PQ.
I like your idea, but I need the details that are in the GPX. I wrote a program that converts the GPX to a format I can load on my Palm so that I can see the cache notes, hint, and most recent log entries.
Maybe the best way to deal with the 500 cache limit is to allow us to set the desired results to be greater than 500, but with the understanding that every time the results cross a 500 cache threshold, we will get an additional email and lose another credit that day toward our 5 query max. So, my pocket query with id=16667 will send two emails with 16667a.gpx and 16667b.gpx if I ask for 1000 results.
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Create one "nearest query", with caches placed before a certain date and one "nearest query" with all caches after that date. You'll have to experiment which date gives you around 500 results for the first query.
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This should give you almost the same result as the 1 1000 caches query.
Thank you. I'll give that a try. I think that's the same thing Stunod suggested. I guess the trick is finding the right date to make the radius of the two circles close, and then coming back to adjust as necessary so I don't get a lot of drift over time.
...And if you also exclude found caches your query range will expand over time due to found and/or archived caches....
Ha ha ha! I *wish* I had enough time for geocaching to make that statement true. The fact is that new geocaches are placed in my area at a much faster rate than I find them or they are archived. At least that's been the case for the last several years.
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You want the site changed so you don't have to run two queries. Are you sure that it's TPTB that are lazy?
Hmm. It's not clear to me at all that I can get the 1000 caches closest to my home with only two queries. Yes, I can get 1000 caches that way, but not the 1000 I want.
I shouldn't have used the word lazy. But as a programmer myself (see, I have an excuse for having no tact), I'm aware of some of the shortcuts we take sometimes. We don't want our servers to get hammered, and we know we need to limit bandwidth, so we go for the easy way of solving that problem. The kind of flexibility I'm asking for in the PQ limits (and others have asked for in recent threads) would take more work and more thought/design to implement. And it's not the kind of feature where people ooh and aah like with Google Earth integration. So features like this get put off.
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I know it's not what you are asking for, but dividing PQ's by DATE PLACED is a much more efficient way of covering a large area with NO overlap of data.
That's a good tip. I'll play around with that.
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When I lost my GPSMap 76 last month, I upgraded to a GPSMap 60c. The primary difference, as far as Geocaching is concerned, is that I can store 1000 waypoints now.
I'm pretty basic in the way I use Geocaching.com...I pay a membership to get a file I can upload to my GPS that has the geocaches that are closest to my house. Caches are kind of dense along the I-15 corridor in northern Utah, so it doesn't make sense for me to try to monitor multiple areas. I just want the 1000 closest to my house. Going from 500 to 1000 caches is going to increase the radius from my house by a few (very few) miles, but that's exactly what I want.
I know that I can do four or five pocket queries of 500 caches each in some sort of expanding pattern from my house, and then buy a program that will let me merge them together and select the 1000 closest to my house, but that is really more complicated than I want. Geocaching.com setting the PQ limit to 5 queries of 500 each seems a little lazy. I only need 1 query each week, so why can't I do 1000?
Please, Jeremy and crew. Consider this. You've added feature after feature (Waymarking?) when all some of us really want is an improved Geocaching experience.
Thanks.
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I get the error too, on both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I'm leaving on a road trip in the morning and wanted to use this feature on the trip.
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quote:
One pair Church ShoesI noticed the towel, and was going to make a Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy reference, when I saw that someone else already had...but then I noticed the Church Shoes! That's got to be the funniest thing I've heard of. What do you keep them in your caching backpack for?
I've got to admit, however, that a towel is an incredibly useful item. I need one in my backpack.
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This is the precise reason I got Garmin's GPS Map 76 rather than one of the eTrex models. I had read beforehand that it has a more sensitive internal antenna, and I can verify that it really does quite well even with tree cover.
I know that probably doesn't help you, but maybe someone else is reading this and hasn't made a decision yet...
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I'm interested in going after AI5811 which shows up on the www.ngs.noaa.gov web site, but not on geocaching.com.
I suppose I COULD go after ones like this without logging them, but what Jeremy and Elias have done with these on geocaching.com is so cool.
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I'm interested in going after AI5811 which shows up on the www.ngs.noaa.gov web site, but not on geocaching.com.
I suppose I COULD go after ones like this without logging them, but what Jeremy and Elias have done with these on geocaching.com is so cool.
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I just logged my first benchmark find. I was curious, is this something that some official agency actually wants our help with, or is it just for fun?
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The Big Elk Lake cache has one of the roughest 4x4 roads I've ever been on. My truck enjoys being able to legitimately use the 4x4 low gear from time to time.
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The Big Elk Lake cache has one of the roughest 4x4 roads I've ever been on. My truck enjoys being able to legitimately use the 4x4 low gear from time to time.
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I've been maintaining data files containing Utah geocache information, and I decided to put them up on a web page for others in case anyone else finds them useful.
I use them to import cache data into my palm pilot, as well as into my GPS and mapping software.
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I just bring my cell phone, but that is in case I get stuck or stranded somehow--not because I'm afraid of meeting some dangerous killer in the woods.
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I just bring my cell phone, but that is in case I get stuck or stranded somehow--not because I'm afraid of meeting some dangerous killer in the woods.
False Discoveries - This is getting old!
in Trackables
Posted
OK, well, this explains why a travelbug that I released 11 years ago, and hasn't been seen at all for 10 years, is suddenly getting "discovered" log entries. The entries always use the same wording, "Discovered it. Thank you for sharing." which fits with what people are saying in this thread about some program automatically making the log entries.
I'm not as annoyed as disappointed. When I got the first one I was really hopeful that maybe it actually had been found and was in circulation again. Not so. I can't see how making bogus log entries helps anyone. Why do people even bother to do it? What value is it?