Geocaching Australia

Morning all.

There has been some interest from people, in the forum and in face-to-face discussions regarding having the GCA GPX files delivered to your door.

I can see that i! are extremely busy so I have created a utility that sits on my own website whereby you can arrange to have the GCA GPX files delivered in your email. These files are pulled directly from GCA at the time of sending the email, so they will be as up to date as possible.

As the files are pulled from GCA, I cannot set up any PQ like functions to filter on found, not found, terrain, difficulty, etc. You get the whole file.

At the moment (for volume purposes) it is running each morning around 4:00am. This will go to weekly (Friday) when I am satisfied that it is working. Probably sometime next week all things being equal.

In the interim, please only select those states that you feel would most benefit you. Please don't select all states just yet. I can't really predict what the bandwith useage will be and I don't want to blow my limit and add expense to my site charges.

There are approximately 1,000 active cachers in Australia. If 10% requested every single state then each mail run would take around 100MB. Over the four week period in a month this is half a GB.

If 20% requested every state then this doubles to 1GB per month. Still OK, but getting rather heavy.

So, please just select the states you are interested in for the time being, especially as the files will be generated DAILY while I see if there are any problems.

From the wiki:
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/GPX# ... _GPX_Files

An alternative and much easier method for obtaining GPX files from Geocaching Australia http://www.geocaching.com.au is to use a new utility built by caughtatwork http://www.caughtatwork.net.

At caughtatwork's GPX Mailer Utility http://www.caughtatwork.net/geocaching/gpxmail/ you can enter your email address and make a selection of the states you wish to receive a GPX file for.

These files are compressing using WinZIP reducing the overall size of the file to be delivered to you.

Each Friday morning (currently DAILY at approximately 4:00am AEST) the utility will send you a copy of the GPX files for the states you requested.

This allows you to process the GPX files into your waypoint management software in preparation for a weekend of caching fun.

It also means you don't need to remember to access the site to gain the Geocaching Australia http://www.geocaching.com.au GPX files, it will all happen automagically.

You can change your preferences at any time, including removing yourself from the utility:

Note: This selection will override any previous selections you have made.

Examples:

If you have previously been receiving VIC and NSW and wish to add SA then please select VIC, NSW and SA.
If you have previously been receiving VIC and NSW and no longer wish to receive NSW, then select VIC only.
If you have previously been receiving VIC and no longer wish to receive any GPX files, do not select any states.

This utility is provided free of charge.

Regards.
caughtatwork.

Thankyou very much. Signed up for WA.

Regards
Andrew

Thanks caw

With this and a automated 'Getmail' macro when GSAK starts, it's becoming much easier to keep data up to date.

Thanks C@W - excellent service.

wow, excellent stuff, thanks!

Excellent work C@W, a big thankyou....

another great service to the australian caching community from CAW, and just in time for xmas!! Careful the flow of good karma doesn't flood your place

<P>Thanks CAW!

Have signed up for Vic.
Thanks for your hard work C@W.
It is greatly appreciated!

My first email arrived this morning!

Now I have to go modify my GSAK mega-macro. I hope I don't break it!

The email goes out with virtually the same subject as the GC PQ email.

ie. [GEO] Pocket Query:

If you left the GSAK macro unchanged from the default, it should just work without intervention (or so I've been told).

caughtatwork wrote:If you left the GSAK macro unchanged from the default, it should just work without intervention (or so I've been told).

Default? DEFAULT?!?! I'll have you know that I'm a beta-testing, macro-coding nerd and DEFAULT setings just don't cut it anymore!


I have a couple of PQs coming in and only one of them's designed for my regular macro, so I have the getmail set to be pretty specific.
It's not a big deal, just a matter of getting around to it.

Frankly, the rate of new GCA caches, especially ones that I'd bother looking at, is so low that loading them manually isn't a problem.
The 7 of them don't take up a whole lot of space on my gadgets...

What would you like as the subject. I can make it anything you like so you can continue to test your macros

How about the Bear_Left Macro Nerd GPX File Thingy?

caughtatwork wrote:What would you like as the subject. I can make it anything you like so you can continue to test your macros

How about the Bear_Left Macro Nerd GPX File Thingy?

Tempting... but no.
The macro's been expanded and is almost working.

The problem is that I can't filter out the silly ones that just require me to buy an American burger or climb a random hill or whatever.

Type "other" is something I don't want to filter out (I like puzzle caches!)
Was there something about infringing the Secondary Site's rights by using "locationless" and "virtual" tags in the GCA GPX format?

Given that this is pretty well under the radar, could you maybe map the tags, C@W?

Not sure I understand the problem.

The Groundspeak namespace for a virtual is:
<groundspeak:type>Virtual Cache</groundspeak:type>

The GCA namespace for a virtual is:
<type>Virtual</type>

GSAK has the ability to read and understand both the Groundspeak and GCA namespaces. So when I load the vic.gpx file into GSAK it quite happily identifies a GCA Virtual and tags the record appropriately with the little ghost icon.

Is it possible that you are running an older version of GSAK from before the time ClydeE included the GCA name spaces?

Or is this something else?

I shan't be rewriting the GCA GPX files as they come across as all I am really doing is providing an automation facility for the files that GCA provide.

If there is something more specific that you need doing with regards to the content of the GCA GPX files, I recommend starting a new thread for an enhancement request on the GCA site.

Bear_Left wrote:
The problem is that I can't filter out the silly ones that just require me to buy an American burger

I have not seen any that require this????
The emailed gpx works very well for me, thanks
Andrew