Huga

Wow, didn't we do well? The sale of my Mk2,3,4 and 5 Tim&June bears on eBay raised a total of 129.52 (50.27, 26.00, 20.00 and 33.25 respectively)! I felt a bit guilty about charging £1.50 p&p for each, so I added that on to the donation (since I managed to scrounge envelopes and stuff from work anyway!) too. Thus on Tuesday I made a donation of £135.52 to the DEC Tsunami/Quake appeal: Thank you very much to everyone that made a bid, now go and bid on the other T&J bears for sale!

OK guys, bidding on my 3 remaining bears is going well, BUT NOT WELL ENOUGH! If people don't bid more I shall be very upset! This is for charity, y'know There's less than 24 hours left on the auctions for my T&J bears Mk2, Mk3 and Mk5. So get over to eBay and bid - if the bids reach over £100 collectively, I'll even post for free! Can't say fairer than that, right? So go on, what are you waiting for? Mk2: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT Mk3: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT Mk5: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...me=STRK:MESE:IT

Darn, I've always wanted one of those Mk1 bears... The Mk2 is up to £16... But the Mk5 is languishing on 99p - come on guys, you can do better than that!

Hi guys, I am holding the auctions in aid of the Tsunami appeal, as I was clearing out and realised I didn't really do anything with my T&J bears. The bidding currently stands: Mk2: 10.50 Mk3: 10.00 Mk4: sold - BuyItNow for £20.00 Mk5: 0.99 I suggest you good chaps go out there and bid on the little critters if you want to complete a bear collection or even start one! I'm particularly impressed with the cacher who paid £20 for the Mk4 - well done!

The link is valid - I found it earlier on today: http://users.adelphia.net/~rschoolf/geoclipping.htm It rocks! Cheers!

I have a Palm Vx, and my usual methods are: For multiple caches, I generate a pocket query (GPX) of the nearest few hundred caches, run the GPX through GPXSpinner and then into Plucker onto the Palm. For single caches, GeoClipper is great - I paste the clipped text into a note in Outlook and it shows up on the PDA. GeoClipping *is* still available at: http://users.adelphia.net/~rschoolf/geoclipping.htm I found GeoClipping today and it rocks - nice and quick and easy for single caches.

In Mapsource there's an option for the proximity of a waypoint....what does it do? Is it possible, for example, to have proximities set for waypoints, and for the GPS to flash up a message when coming within the proximity circle of any waypoint (useful for speed cameras)? I have a Garmin eTrext Vista, BTW...

Cool, if you could, that'd be great. Hmm, how to mung my email address appropriately (are these forums harvestable/spiderable?).... My domain's www.iancowley.co.uk - send the email to huga@

Imagine the scenario: I'm at work, have got my GPs and realise there are some nearby caches I could walk to at lunch. I want to get a couple of caches into my Palm V so I can go do them. I have <10 minutes to do this. Now, my usual way of doing caches on the Palm arevia Pocket Queries, then through GPXSpinner and through Plucker. Obviously doing a PQ for a couple of caches is going to take ages to set up and do, and I don;t really want to set up Plucker hings for each cache (takes ages I think...?) So is there an easy, quick way to get a single cache (or maybe two) into the Plam V? Cheers

Ah yes, have just worked that out. Hmm, I've added a status bar to the EasyMPS window, and that uses the Microsoft library comctl32.ocx. Hmm. I never like writing programs with too many dependencies, and havign to say "download this, install this, blah blah" to get the program to work for other people... comctl32.ocx is a pretty common library, I'm surprised you don;t already have it. if you don't, you can get it here: www.iancowley.co.uk/caching/comctl32.ocx and then run the regsvr32 command detailed above. Sorry for the inconvenience and I hope the new features and easier layout are worth it!

A sort of continuation of this thread and this other thread... A new version of EasyMPS, 0.61 build 215 is now available at www.iancowley.co.uk/caching There have been a lot of changes, although not all are obvious, since I last updated you all, so here's a rundown of the most exciting and significant: * Added menu bar * Removed spurious code that caused odd things to happen sometimes * Removed file association check box (now in options menu) * Added status bar, removed labels, changed some labels and frame captions * Significantly rewrote the routine for writing GDBs - now more robust * Significant rewrite to Read_LOC and Read_GPX - again, more robust * Changed GDB output files to Mapsource 6.1/6.3 format (were 6.0 beta something) * Tidied up the last/current imports labels thing so they're more consistent * Added export modes into File/Export.. Menu * BUGFIX: URLs wouldn't auto-generate for GCxxxx waypoints if name/description swap was enabled * BUGFIX: Shouldn't now crash if importing a GDB/MPS with no waypoints as the first file. * BUGFIX: "Last import" number now works for all import formats * BUGFIX: Swap names/descriptions with some duplicate descriptions gave an invalid file output * BUGFIX: Waypoint times are now written as UTC, not local time * BUGFIX: Wasn't preserving detected times for waypoints * Update: For GPX files, the preserved time is the cache-hiding time. For GDB files, it's the last-modified time of the waypoint. * BUGFIX: Fixed crash when trying to import non-waypoint files as first file (such as .bmp, .doc from drag'n'drop) * UPDATE: 13-second difference applied to time to make it GPS time Again, if there are any bugs you find, features you want, comments or questions, please let me know. EasyMPS is freeware - totally free to use. However, if you find it mind-bogglingly useful and feel a deep-down desire to part with money, there's a Paypal link on the download page to help satisiy your urges. clicking on the adverts there will generate a few cents to keep me ticking over with coffee while preparing the next bunch of new features

It's a common problem with eTrexes, and one that Garmin recognises. I contacted them via their website query thingie, and got an email back asking for me to send it to them for inspection. 3 weeks later I got my Vista back, fully functional and all repaired for free. because it's a common fault, i think Garmin recognise it's a manufacturing fault and fix it for free

Indeed, I use Plucker and GPXSpinner with my Palm V and Palm Vx, and it works a treat. Now if only I could get Ordnance Survey maps into my Palm, I'd be laughing...

EasyMPS (link) and GPSBabel (link) will merge LOC files for you. GPSBabel is very powerful and wil ldo lots of conversions from one type to another, whereas EasyMPS is aimed at GPX, LOC and Garmin Mapsource MPS/GDB files. EasyMPS is also easier to use if you're less familiar with command-line driven programs.

You seem to have the datum set to Ord Surv GB or similar. Co-ordinate systems need a datum (the shapes of the earth-model) and a co-ordinate on that nearly-sphere. If you have your datum set to Ord Surv GB and use co-ordinates measured using the WGS84 datum (as is standard for GC.com), then you'll end up about 90-100 metres east (or west, can't remember) of where you should be. The OS grid numbers given on the GC pages are defined in Ord Surv GB datum, so they work if your GPS is in that datum. So you need to either set your GPS datum to WGS84 and use the lat/long, or set to Ord Surv GB datum and use the Landranger/grid co-ordinates. There, I hope that's clearer than a bucket of mud

Yeah, I agree that Javascript is evil in all its forms, but what about PHP? PHP is a server-side script, exactly like the .asp that generates cache pages in the first place. Server-side scripting such as this *cannot* do anything nasty to the user browsing the page, as all it does is generate HTML. Can we have PHP enabled maybe? That would also circumvent the PQ issue (I think...), as the PHP generates the relevant HTML whenever it is accessed from the server.

I recently set up a cache for a bunch of caching friends at a barbecue, that can be seen here: http://www.iancowley.co.uk/caching/cachepage.shtml. If you refresh the page, you'll see that the clues for the multi are different every time. The page is generated by server-side PHP embedded in the shtml file. Basically, there's a list of clues that the script can select from to get each required digit, and thus the page is randomly generated, but still correct. The idea behind developing this was so that when 20 people went off looking for the cache, they all had a different journey. Now, I've turned this cache into a permanent GC.com one, but I can;t get any active content to work. I've tried JavaScript, PHP, SSI (shtml stuff) and none of it works. So for the time being, the cache has become a traditional. So my question is: Is there any way to get active content into GC.com pages? I guess in this case it's static active, but you know what I mean...

Marvellous, cheers

Has this been postponed? The .LOC files are still labelled as iso-8859-1.

Yay! Thankyou.

I've noticed that the encoding i nthe header of .LOC files is incorrectly stated as iso-8859-1 when the files are in fact UTF-8 encoded. This really confuses XML parsers such as the MSXML one, as it reads the encoding and believes it. This causes a problem when caches names, descriptions etc contain non-ascii characters such as en- and em-dashes, as they are encoded in UTF-8 as about 4 bytes which are read as a string of nonsense characters. All it takes to fix this bug is to change the header (NOT the encoding - UTF-8 is the XML standard, and the file is correctly encoded) so that XML parsers can get it right. for example: Cache GCJTN5, .loc file <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <loc version="1.0" src="Groundspeak"> <waypoint> <name id="GCJTN5"><![CDATA[somebody's poisoned the water hole! by jjn2]]></name> <coord lat="52.16595" lon="0.13485"/> <type>Geocache</type> <link text="Cache Details">http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCJTN5</link> </waypoint></loc> OK, so you can't tell that that one is UTF-8, but it is. Now, the GPX file of the same cache is headed correctly: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <gpx xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" version="1.0" creator="Groundspeak, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.Groundspeak.com" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd http://www.Groundspeak.com/cache/1/0 http://www.Groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0"> So, can someone at GC.com pelase chaneg the header of the .loc files so my application that uses the MSXML parser doesn' read garbage characters? Cheers

Whoops. EasyMPS was trying to extract the hint and geocache type from the GPX file, which GPXSpinner had carefully stripped out. And silly me forgot to have error checking on that bit of the file. Fixed for build 201 (now the default download on the website). Silly me!

I've updated my EasyMPS program to manage the new Mapsource 6.1 GDB files. get it at www.iancowley.co.uk/caching With it, you can drag'n'drop a GDB Mapsource file onto it to import all the waypoints, then set the categories on the third tab (and uncheck 'Keep' as that will preserve the detected categories), set any other options you want (that'll be mostly 'Keep' or 'Preserve', and select "Open in Mapsource (GDB)" from the drop down list or "Make GDB file". Hope that helps!

A sort of continuation of this thread and this other thread... A new version of EasyMPS, 0.60 build 200 is now available at www.iancowley.co.uk/caching There have been a lot of changes since I last updated you all, so here's a rundown of the most exciting and significant: * Support for importing and exporting the new Garmin GDB file format that comes with Mapsource 6! * Added new /g and /6 command-line tags for saving to GDB and opening in Mapsource 6 respectively * Support for new waypoint features in Mapsource: Time, category, URL and so on * New layout * MUCH better import and export code (mostly internal) for MPS and GDB files * More buggering around with cache names, descriptions and hints * Lots of usability additions * LOTS of bug fixes, especially with importing files The main thing is Mapsource 6.1 support. So go get it! And donate some money too!

I know that there's a big user-base in the UK, so I'll post over here too. A sort of continuation of this thread... A new version of EasyMPS, 0.60 build 200 is now available at www.iancowley.co.uk/caching There have been a lot of changes since I last updated you all, so here's a rundown of the most exciting and significant: * Support for importing and exporting the new Garmin GDB file format that comes with Mapsource 6! * Added new /g and /6 command-line tags for saving to GDB and opening in Mapsource 6 respectively * Support for new waypoint features in Mapsource: Time, category, URL and so on * New layout * MUCH better import and export code (mostly internal) for MPS and GDB files * More buggering around with cache names, descriptions and hints * Lots of usability additions * LOTS of bug fixes, especially with importing files The main thing is Mapsource 6.1 support. So go get it! And donate some money too!