[Team Deejay]

For some reason, the last period’s list did not delete properly from the website. It is fixed now. I’m not deleting the few reports on these caches, as I believe they were sought in good faith. Sorry for the mixup.

[Team Deejay]

@LMcGisme wrote:

although I must admit that’s what it looks like and I’d change it if I could.

Lisa

Groundspeak became much more liberal about a year ago with regard to name changes. Just drop a note to [email protected] and ask for a name change. I’m pretty sure they will do it for you.

[Team Deejay]

@LMcGisme wrote:

although I must admit that’s what it looks like and I’d change it if I could.

Lisa

Groundspeak became much more liberal about a year ago with regard to name changes. Just drop a note to [email protected] and ask for a name change. I’m pretty sure they will do it for you.

[Team Deejay]

I tried to stay out of this, but that counties macro is very old. It still works, but has a lot of unnecessary overhead. To add the counties to the County column, create a text file with one line that reads:

$updated = GetCounty("y")

Save it with the name “counties.gsk”. Now go to GSAK and run it from the main menu (Macro | Run/Manage). Presto, your counties are filled. And you just wrote your first GSAK macro! When I last checked, this macro requires that the state and country field be filled (they will be if you use pocket queries), and only work for the following countries: Austria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, USA, UK. Any other countries, you are on your own (actually I can help you, but it won’t be easy.)

[Team Deejay]

I suspect they were underwhelmed by the number of tourism boards and chambers of commerce setting up Wherigos to show off their communities, etc. This was supposed to be a commercial program for Groundspeak and Garmin, but I think the limited market penetration of the hardware has put it on the back burner.

To be honest, I think most of their development work these days is focused on the Iphone and other smartphone platforms. Don’t hold your breath waiting for an upgrade.

[Team Deejay]

Milwaukee area forecast for Saturday night….

Saturday Night
Mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of light rain and light snow through late evening…then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the upper 20s. West winds 5 to 15 mph.

Don’t need to go north to find snow in Wisconsin, unfortunately.

[Team Deejay]

I spoke with Groundspeak about the “Offline PQs” page. They accidentally left the instructions out of the last update, but it is probably not what you think it is. The Geocaching app for the Iphone allows you to download your PQs to the phone to use off line (say you are going somewhere without cellular service). Some people wanted instead to upload their own custom GPX file for later download to the Iphone app. This new page is specifically for this purpose. If you don’t have an Iphone, it is worthless. If you have an Iphone, but aren’t going somewhere with no service, it is not so great either. If you want to send your own GPX to your Iphone (rather than just reading the information off the network when you need it), this is for you.

Edited to add that if you wanted to upload corrected puzzle coordinates to your Iphone app, I think this would do the job. I think this would only appeal to those who use the Iphone as their sole GPS for geocaching (I know of only one experienced person doing this.)

[Team Deejay]

In a global free market economy (such as the internet), you can’t really ask the question “Should X have a competitor?” and expect a reasonable answer. The only thing stopping competitors is the cost of setting up a competing website and marketing it (effectively) along with the cost of developing the expertise to deal with GPS companies, phone companies, and wacky geocachers. Any entrepreneur is allowed to give it a shot if they desire. Unfortunately, the probability of success today is probably close to what it was in 2001 when the site was started. It is just that that probability is not very high. This is what is known as a natural monopoly, where no one chooses to try to compete with the big player. I somehow doubt that the FTC would be interested in pursuing a lawsuit against GS.com, but then again, with this current group, you never know. I suspect they are busy suing Intel, Microsoft, and Google.

[Team Deejay]

The guts of that macro are the same as mine, although it has forms and all that fancy stuff. The one difference is that it locks records after you run it. The effect of locking a record is to prevent a pocket query from updating the cache record (except for new logs). This means that if you load a new pocket query on top of the old database (I do this because I like to keep a lot of logs), those locked records will not change. If someone moved the cache, changed the description, name or hint, it would not update. On the other hand, if you are deleting everything before you load, you will have to rerun the macro again in either case. Once you delete all the records, there is nothing left to “lock”. If the records are deleted, GSAK cannot “remember” that you changed the name and locked it.

If you want to modify my short macro to lock the records after changing them (not really needed, given your process) you replace:

$d_name = regexreplace(Long,$d_Name,Short)

with

$Found = RegEx(Long,$d_Name)
$d_name = regexreplace(Long,$d_Name,Short)
if $Found
$d_lock=true
Endif

The first line searches the name for the “long” string and sets $found to true if it find it. The third through fifth lines just set the lock flag.

[Team Deejay]

Miata,

You might not have noticed, but the newer versions of GSAK include a way to “force” substitution of common phrases with abbreviations when computing the smart names for the cache. (Smart names are unique identifiers for each cache in your database, so they can be used instead of the GC Code, for anyone not using them.) From the main menu, select Tools | Options. On the dialog box, you set the conversions in box marked “Conversions” (go figure!) and enter them in the format “Long text=abbreviation” separated by semicolons. Here is a link to a picture. With these settings, a cache named “Wisconsin Spirit Quest – St. Mary’s Cemetery” has the smart name of WSQStMarysCeme if you use 14 character smartnames.

If you really want to go whole hog, you can use a macro to change all occurrences of repetitive text in the NAMES in the database. Here is a link to a macro file which does exactly that. Link to text replacing macro.

Just save this file to the macro directory (or anywhere you like, really), and then run it using Macro | Run from the main menu. The macro will prompt you for the long text, the abbreviation, and then do the replacements. Note that if you then reload the gpx file, the names will be changed back (unless you lock those changed records, which is NOT recommended). Some suggestions for replacement would be “One Degree of Separation”, “Another Walk In The Park”, “Wisconsin Spirit Quest”, etc. Anything so long that it makes it difficult to go paperless. For you techies out there, this program also accepts regular expressions in the long text entry, so for example, you could say “One Degree of Sep[ae]ration” to take care of those who don’t know how to spell.

[Team Deejay]

I can’t speak to “protocol and ethics”, but the guidelines require that you delete any logs that are not legitimate, including the one you mentioned. You can ask the owner to do it, but if they tell you to “go pound salt” or just ignore you, you will need to do it yourself.

[Team Deejay]

I can’t see why there would be any issues, unless you structure your puzzle to somehow promote or discourage hunting. Simple fact lookups would not be an issue.

[Team Deejay]

Same as the policy for all other DNR properties. Go to the wi-geocaching.com/hiding page for more info.

[Team Deejay]

I hate to be Captain Obvious, but how about parking at the next road crossing to the east? That is where we parked for Collectibles Cache.

[Team Deejay]

@Lostby7 wrote:

@Lostby7 wrote:

@RSplash40 wrote:

Look up Cemented in Wisconsin virtual…gotta be on the list.

I just placed one at the Stone Elephant a couple of days ago…it’s in the book.

Oh did I forget to mention it is a 3.6 mile hike to an EarthCache….. 😈

You know, Gary, it is only 3.6 miles if you use your parking coordinates.

[Author]

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