niemeyer

Nice site. Thanks for adding support for Geohashes. I've made some improvements to geohash.org as well, adding support for geocoding of addresses (streets, city names, whatever), implemented a bookmark and a mapplet to help using it from Google Maps (check Tips & Tricks), and also documented the supported query parameters, in case someone would like to build custom tools (in the same document).

The point of the service is offering a short URL to link to a given location, so that instead of pointing people to a pair of numbers, you point them to a convenient place where they can more comfortably act on the location. FWIW, I've built a service primarily for my own use. I'll be happy if it helps other people somehow, but the primary goal has already been met.

HTTP is also compatible with any programming language. Here is a working sketch, in Python: from urllib import urlopen def get_coords(geohash): return urlopen("http://geohash.org/%s/text" % geohash).readline() def get_geohash(coords): return urlopen("http://geohash.org/?format=url&q=%s" % coords).readline()

Source code isn't available yet, but it should be trivial to get programmatic access to the system. If you access http://geohash.org/c216ne/text, you'll get a plain text latitude/longitude pair, and if you access, e.g. http://geohash.org/?q=49.26,-123.26 , you get the geohash URL back. It'd be awesome to see some client libraries available. Let me know if you need any help with that.

Here is an explanation about the algorithm used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash Hopefully this establishes prior art and allows people to use it for whatever they want.

Bits from the latitude and longitude values are mixed. I'll write a detailed article, when I get some time, to explain details of the algorithm used. I want to make sure that it stays within public domain, rather than being patented like other algorithms have been.

Yesterday I've put online a service I've been developing for quite a while, but just recently I've managed to finish it (it's not a big system, but the time has been on the short side). Basically, http://geohash.org is a site that allows a pair of latitude/longitude to be encoded as a short string, in a way that enables it to be used in references pointing to specific places in a practical form. The person following the link can check where the place is located (through embedded google maps), go to another site for more details (including nearest caches, in geocaching.com), download a GPX waypoint with it, or even send it directly to the GPS (with Garmin Communicator). As an example, at http://geohash.org/c216ne we can find Mount Hood, in Oregon, and from there geocaches around it, Google Maps, etc. I've tried to make the input box quite flexible, accepting pretty much any reasonable format of latitude/longitude. If it doesn't work with your preferred format, please let me know. Nearby places will present similar geohash prefixes, and characters may be stripped from the end of the hash to get a shorter string (and gradually less precise). Enjoy!

Garmin just answered my support inquiry stating that none of the trail units support speed alerts. I've replied explaining that this is not true and they'll get back to me in a few days.

Has anyone tried to use the speed alarm for Custom POIs on the Garmin Colorado? I've just made a test with some loaded POIs and even though it correctly displays the alarm information when looking at the POI details (40km/h, 100m), it didn't emit any sound nor displayed any visual warnings about the upcoming POI.

Indeed. I've personally seen a 60CS getting water in.

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Would you mind to post a picture of it?

Looks like a clever design indeed. From these pictures I just can't understand how the rolling "translates" into the unit.

Thanks for the information, Anders. But is the 300 able to at least show the map in perspective, even if maps with more detailed altitude information aren't available (say, when using a City Navigator for instance)?

I'm curious about how the reception of the new device compares to the SiRF-based models. Has anyone tried out both devices in a few different circumstances (like indoors, under heavy foliage, etc), just to check if they're really close or if one outperforms the other? I'm also curious if the issue where the GPS would report movement while standing in some cases is still the same or if it has improved somehow.

Game over.

Hey, I'm not trying to "sneak" anything in, and that's why I'm asking here. I won't be doing any screen-scrapping to retrieve information in an unsupported way. If GC.com is not interested, even though it'd be actually giving them more traffic, I won't include that feature, and that's all.

You've lost the bet. ;-) I would just like to have that information available in a site, with a link pointing to the actual cache information in GC.com. I don't think this would be threatening GC in any way, since the service provided here is valuable enough to highly encourage anyone interested to actually visit the site, and grab additional information. I also wouldn't have an index of all cache IDs, which means I can't just "steal" information and run away (there are better ways to do it, if that was the intent). Would anyone know the mail of technical people in geocaching.com whom I might talk to about this? Thanks!

Sorry, let me try to be more clear. I'm asking for a way to automatically (with software) get the position (read, latitude and longitude) of a given cache ID (say, GC1234). Would anyone know if this is possible?

Is it possible to query the location of a given cache ID programatically (without screen-scrapping)? Thanks