Happy Together

We were out doing a multi today and were wondering the exact same thing - and this thread pointed us in the right direction. One additional tip -- on the "add waypoint" screen, if you click on "New Waypoint >" then you can give each added waypoint a unique name (and a fairly lengthy description - stage 1 by the swing, stage 2 under the park bench, final location by the lamp) and you can then associate several "flags" with the cache and navigate to any of them. thanks for the tip... B&E, Happy Together

Mission accomplished... We Saskatchewanians are a pretty helpful bunch of people... And SK is a really great place to spend Christmas too ) B&E, Happy Together

FYI -- although the MAP view only shows North America, the Satellite view DOES show the entire globe (with varying levels of zoom resolution)...

One of the Saskatchewan Tourism sites I visited recently has GPS coordinates prominently listed for the various tourist locations => http://interactive.usask.ca/ski/tourism/secrets/ Certainly brings these spots up a notch or tow in my books. Not only am I more motivated to go check them out, but I may actually stand a chance of finding some of these spots... (most are much bigger than the standard tupperware caching containers ) Elaine & Bruce, Regina, SK

You can download waypoints from S&T (the 2002 version at least) to your gps by first exporting to PocketStreets (use "Export Map for Pocket Streets"). This will create (among other things) a pushpin file (*.psp) that GPSBABEL can read and convert to ... just about any other format. I've used this on S&T 2002 to import city street addresses into S&T, have S&T plot these as waypoints, and then export, convert and download the waypoints into my etrex. (In this case, the street addresses were locations of garage sales downloaded from our local newspaper's classified section) There appears not to be a way to export routes directly, although you could mark waypoints along the route and export them. Not elegant, but perhaps useful in some situations.

GPSbabel provided the missing link for doing this for me... I could import a csv file of addresses into Streets and Trips (using the import data wizard) and have it match addresses to points on a map. This works like a charm. But until GPSbabel, I had no way to take these push pins and *do* anything with them (like download them to my gps). It was always a manual effort to use the 'location sensor' tool and try to pinpoint the locations, and then manually transcribe the coordinates... Now, I export the map area I'm interested in using "Export for Pocket Streets and Trips". This createa a map file (.mps) that I don't really care about (I don't have a pocket pc and microsoft doesn't like talking to palms), but this export also creates a pushpins file (.psp). The psp file is what we want -- because it has all the pushpin information for the map area (including latitude and longitude for each pushpin). GPSbabel will read this psp file and convert it to a .loc or .gpx (or any of many other file types) that can then be loaded into Easygps or Expertgps and downloaded to my gps. Bruce

When you installed plucker to your palm, there should have been an optional option to install zlib compression (a separate prc) at the same time. You need to have this on your palm if you want to uncompress/view zlib-compressed documents. Zlib should be in one of the plucker directories (pluckersyszlib.prc) or you can download it separately from http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ and install it to your palm...

tried this on some .gpx files I had and they work really slick... Palmreader displays the document fine, but unfortunately, as you indicated, PalmReader doesn't seem to recognize the 'normal' palm doc bookmarks. Palm has a "dropbook" for creating PalmReader files -- which can automatically generate a table of contents as well. I took a look at using stylesheets to transform the .gpx to a .pml marked up input file - but haven't spent much time on it at all. What I was looking to do was less complex than directly creating the compressed palmdoc files but would require a couple additional steps. Cool... B&E Regina, SK

There seems to be a general sentiment of palm users not really being thrilled with Mobipocket -- and I must admit that I had installed it in the past, and found it cumbersome - and removed it in favour of PalmReader or CSpotRun or ... ... .. (or Avantgo but let's not go there). But on the other hand, it didn't take a heartbeat to decide that now was the time to a) sign-up for charter membership; and reinstall mobibook on my palm. As several people have indicated, you don't need to keep all the extra 'stuff' that Mobibook installs on your pc - you only need to keep the reader on your palm and just use the Palm HotSync manager to install the xxx.prc files. (And you can send these to your SD memory card -- Mobibook will find them there fine) Another "feature" that some *may* find interesting is that there is a MobiPocket Reader for PC which allows one to use the same (albeit somewhat clunky) reader on your windows pc to view the same ebook (.prc) files directly on your pc -- including all the extra stuff that isn't included in the .loc files. So am I likely to remove Mobi from my Palm anytime soon -- not very likely...

hmmm -- the data for this is out there somewhere -- see http://www.mapgraphics.com/marketing.html for a snippet of a larger map of all the Tim's in Canada that they did for Tim's that was apparently published in Macleans magazine? now I'm really gonna need a new gps with room for LOTS more waypoints...

Regina, Saskatchewan -- things are a little quiet out here on the prairies, but we're close to the trans-Canada highway, and assuming winter ever gives up (we've had more snows in March and April then we did in January and February), we should be able to generate some interest out this way...

Regina, Saskatchewan -- things are a little quiet out here on the prairies, but we're close to the trans-Canada highway, and assuming winter ever gives up (we've had more snows in March and April then we did in January and February), we should be able to generate some interest out this way...

Another alternative that *may* fit in with various requests in other forums... the .LOC files that are downloaded for EasyGPS are really .xml files in disguise... (just open one up with Notepad, or rename it to a .xml and open it with Internet Explorer) SO... IF... 1) these .loc xml files could be expanded to include additional data fields (such as cache type, date hidden, date last found, difficulty, terrain, description, hint, ...) - if EasyGPS is properly written (and some very brief testing seems to confirm this is the case) it should not care about any additional xml tags in the file. *AND* 2) if the number of entries on a page could be specified on a search so that one could retrieve a page with, say, 50 or 100 or ... cache entries. Right now you can specifically code queries to geocaching.com - something like - http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest_cache.asp?origin_lat=55.44444&origin_long=-111.11111 -- all that would be required would be to add an additional argument "num=100" to the query - the same syntax that many other search engines support. THEN if you hit "check all" (the script for this might need some reworking?) and then download to GPS... you would have all the info you needed in an xml format on your pc to do whatever kind of 'post processing' you wanted... I would *love* to be able to do this for any of several reasons -- to put into an excel spreadsheet; to print a short summary to carry around; to load into Streets and Trips; to download to my palm in memopad format (or in any of several searchable database formats); or to download to my palm as a series of stripped down html pages like Brian has done at pathetique.com. We have the technology (or rather, Jeremy does) B