Paperless geocaching - Palm, GSAK and iSilo

From NzGpsWiki

This little tutorial probably needs a "use by" date, given how quickly computer technology outdates itself. This is true for computers in general, but it's even more the case for palmtop computers, also known as Person Digital Assistants or PDAs.

One of the myriad of uses that you can put a PDA to is paperless caching. The number of times I've printed out a cache description on bits of flattened dead tree in the last couple of years could be counted on one hand (the one not holding the PDA, naturally) and only for specific reasons that I'll cover below.

There are two main camps of PDA families you can buy; Palm and PocketPC. I've been a Palm user almost since they started, so that's what this tutorial is based on. But you can still find it useful if you own a PocketPC device. All you need to do is throw it away and buy a proper Palm PDA.

Apart from the religious issues, one thing that makes Palms more suitable for caching is that you can pick up a cheap one on TradeMe or wherever for much less money. For abut $100, you get a device that'll hold information on all the caches in the country, as well as your address book, appointments, to-do list and so on. You might even squeeze in a game or an e-book or two for those times when you're waiting for Muggles to leave the area you want to search!

A Palm IIIanything (IIIe, IIIx, IIIxe), an M10anything (M100, M105), any Zire or any Tungsten will all suffice for caching. If you want to use it for other things, do some research and select appropriately. If it'll mainly be the cache companion, then cheap is good. Avoid Palm Pilot Personal or Professional models; they may not have enough memory and the screens aren't very good outdoors. (The Zire72 seems an ideal caching machine; plenty of memory, great hi-res colour screen, 1.3megapixel camera, MP3 player, bluetooth, and an expansion card.)

OK, but how do you get the information onto it? Read on...

There's two programs and two payments you need. The programs are GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) and iSilo. GSAK is currently free, iSilo isn't. You also need to be a Premium Member on geocaching.com, which is a good thing to do anyway.

GSAK is wonderful now, and will almost certainly be even better by the time you read this! ClydE, the author, is a cacher himself and releases new versions regularly. If he ever charges, I'll pay it! (The Help file is particularly good, and should be consulted before asking him any questions.)

iSilo is a method of reading Web pages on your Palm and comes in two parts. There's the iSilo reader on your Palm (which has a free version that misses a few features) and the iSiloX conversion program on your PC. (Windows assumed here, but MacOS and Linux options exist.)

So, download and install those programs (they have trial periods, so you can try before you buy.) I'll wait...

OK, now you need some raw material to work with. There's a limit of 500 caches per Pocket Query, so I split it into North and South Islands. Give it a descriptive name (e.g. "All GC in South Island"), fill in 500 to the "Show me xxx caches", select "With States/provinces" and choose "North Island" or "South Island", and select the .gpx option. Untick the ebook option and choose zipped if you want to reduce the size of the email. The days of the week to get the file sent to you is up to you.

Once you have the .gpx file emailed to you, run GSAK and import it. Select "clear database" the first time, I'd recommend.

Set up the filter the way you want (only unfound caches, only caches within 100km, whatever) then go to "File" and "Export html" The next box will ask you where you want the files to be created, you might as well leave it as the default (c:/program files/GSAK probably.) Click the boxes the way you want them, then hit "Generate" and wait a bit.

Now there's a folder called "cache" in the folder you chose above, which has heaps of .htm and .jpg files.

OK, that's that part finished.

Now, open iSiloX and click on "new" if it's not blank. Go to "Document", then "Add". Give it a name like "All GC in South Island" or whatever. This is what you'll see on the list in iSilo on your Palm.

Tick the "Go to the document properties dialog next" box and click "Next". Under the tabs do this:

Source: Add a URL. Click "Browse" and navigate to "C:/program files/GSAK/Cache/" (unless you changed that path) and choose "index.htm"

Destination: Click "Hotsync" and choose your user name. If you have an SD card, tick that.

Links: Set "link depth" to 3 and untick all the boxes.

Images: Leave the defaults, but have only "8 bit (256 colors)" ticked in "Colors"

Leave all the other tabs to defaults.

Now, click OK and go to "File", "Save As" and save this file as something you'll remember in somewhere you'll remember! (I have a folder called "c:/Geocaching" and I call this file "All GC in South Island.ixl" for example) In the future, you can skip straight to the next step by double-clicking on this .ixl file.

Click on the "Convert All" icon and wait while it does its stuff.

Then Hotsync and open iSilo on the Palm and it should be in the list!

GSAK will also export your selected caches to your GPSr, if you have a data cable or memory card. I leave the details of doing that as an exercise for the reader!

You now have all the selected cache descriptions on your Palm, along with the last five logs for each. What you don't have is the images, as they're not in the GPX file in the first place. GSAK will eventually get around this, but in the meantime you need to take another path.

One of the nice things about iSiloX is that it can put an icon on the Internet Explorer toolbar which will let you export the Web page you're on immediately. This will include the images displayed in the page, but possibly not of a high enough resolution for the "triangulate from the pictures" type caches. (This is one of those rare instances when I'll take an actual printout with us.)

To grab one page, set it up the way you want to take it (all logs displayed, clue decrypted, etc.) as the links won't work on your PDA the way we're going to do it.

Then click on the "iSilo Clipper" icon in the toolbar, edit the name if you want, choose the destination, tick the "show images" and set the "Follow links to a maximum depth of" to zero. (If you set it to 1, you'll get the hints and the linked photos that you want, but you'll also get everything else that's linked to the page. Try it and see how big the file is!) Click on "Convert", then Hotsync to load the file.

So there you have it. See something on the GPSr radar and know that you have the details, close to hand. This is the way caching is supposed to be!

(The versions of the above programs that these instructions apply to are: GSAK v3.03 and iSiloX v4.01)

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