Saturday, April 19, 2008

The devil (in the form of GSAK) made me do it.

I am running Windows XP on my Mac laptop. There, I said it. Such was the level of my dissatisfaction with MacCaching. Get out of my dreams, GSAK, and get in to my car.

I installed VMware Fusion and Windows XP and it works like a charm -- dragging files between operating systems is nice, especially when GSAK generates a .pdb file for my Centro and I drag it over to my Hotsync manager on the Mac side of the fence. (I can't run everything in Windows, or else there'd be no reason to have a Mac.)

Now I have to deal with that pleasant but dissonant feeling that I don't know 10% of what GSAK can do. But I did do this for fun, now that I have all this waypoint-managing power:

I set up pocket queries by cache release date to get all caches within 50 miles of home. (Why 50? Because I realized very quickly that 100 would take forever.) It took 10 PQs.



Using GSAK solves these small but irritating problems: now, cache records in CacheMate will contain the name of the cache owner and the size of the container; for some reason, MacCaching left those things out of the .pdb file. Also, I like the profile page stats that the FindStatGen macro for GSAK creates better than the INATN stats; plus, ITATN was down the last time I checked.

For some reason, I only realized two days ago that my 60CSx holds 1000 waypoints. I think it may have been because a PQ contains at most 500 waypoints that I thought that the 60 held only 500.

All together, using GSAK with my (mentally) upgraded 60CSx makes it less likely that I'll be caught out without coordinates or PDA information.

I'd like to hear how you use GSAK!

Last Sunday knowschad, meralgia, Millah, and I met up to hide the container for B2K: Bobcam's 2000th find. By the end of the day Friday, Bobcam had 1988 finds, so Saturday morning was time to submit.

In a nice coincidence, Bobcam called me this afternoon to thank me for the cache as I was leaving a cache of his in Marydale Park in Saint Paul.




(L-R: knowschad, firstbass, meralgia, Millah)

5 comments:

Randy said...

You can use 'custom points of interest' generated by gsak and transfered to the 60CSX by using the USB connection to the memory card. I will email you later with info I sent to some other cachers.

firstbass said...

Thanks, R. I wonder if I can load custom POIs if I have the microSD-preloaded Garmin City Navigator maps in there (don't ask why I do)?

Now that I'm using XP, maybe I should sell the microSD maps and get the DVD (I think Millah told me that the new update is coming out soon). Is the point that you put some subset of the US on your 4GB card and then leave room for your custom POIs?

I gather that you use your geo-* tools as an add-on to GSAK?

firstbass said...

Sorry, R... in the third paragraph of my previous comment, I mistook you for another R.! Anyway, looking forward to any more GSAK wisdom you have.

firstbass said...

This link to a thread called Silly Garmin POI tricks in the GC forums seems relevant.

Randy said...

I run 16 PQ's per week (based on date placed, soon to be 17 PQ's) plus 1 "inactive" PQ for the state of MN. There has been some discussion on mngca.org about this. I am waiting for the day the max number of caches per PQ goes way up, more PQ's per day, or whole states at a time... asking a lot I know. 1B, I sent you an email with my Garmin POI method. Hope it works for you. Let me know.