Flashes of Panic

As a Mac-using geocacher, I’m somewhat outside the geocaching technology mainstream. GPSRs which play nicely with Macs are few and far between; apparently the GPS architecture is wedded to serial ports at a very low level, and USB connecters are dicey. (I’ve got a USB adapter for my GPSR; it doesn’t work. Maybe I should buy a new one, with Bluetooth?)

The result is that I can only add cache waypoints to my GPSR by keying them in or by taking it to work and sending a batch through the serial port of my Windows box there. This can be a drag, because it makes spontaneous caching nearly impossible. Ideally, in any given location, I’d have a few dozen nearby waypoints already in the GPSr, and when I had a spare hour, I’d check to see which is closest. I can do this for places like Fayetteville, which only have eight or ten caches handy, but what if I’m going to Boston? How can I decide which caches I’m actually going to hunt?

This brings me to the next hint: there’s more to the cache than the coordinates. There’s other data, ranging from a description of the container to an encrypted hint for the hide. If I’m looking at a limited number of caches in an area (or I’m planning an expedition from home,) I print the pages from the website and haul the paper along with me. But this weekend I’m going to be in a cache-rich environment, and don’t know where or when I’ll have the time to go looking. I can’t print them all out.

Enter Pocket Queries, which are a paid feature of the geocaching.com website. Anyone can download search results as an XML file (a format they call .loc) but paid members (like me) have the option of getting search results as an e-book. Coincidentally, the e-books can be loaded on Palm organizers… and I happen to have one handy. So I’ve got several dozen description pages loaded up and ready to go! I’m unnaturally pleased with this.

Even better, of course, would be if I could have the descriptions on the GPSR itself. I suppose if I was determined enough, I could parse the .loc files into the XML format for custom Google maps and overlay the cache markers on a satellite photo more-or-less automatically.

(This is exactly the sort of geeky thing that makes people glaze over when I talk about it, so I have to post it here.)