FAQ.txt

======================
Questions and Answers:
======================

Table of Contents:
------------------
* How do you enable friendly waypoint id names?
* Geocaching Swiss Army Knife complains about the GPX format. How do I make them compatible?
* What software can you use the GPX files in?
* Why is there no GUI for GeoToad?
* So what about that "Fav Factor"?
* geotoad.exe gets relative paths wrong in Windows
* I cannot login with a name containing an umlaut ("ÜbercacherXY")
* What about country and state searches?
* Is there a list of attribute IDs somewhere?
* How to contact developers?



---------------------------------------------
How do you enable friendly waypoint id names?
---------------------------------------------
These synthesized names are a feature named EasyName.
Set your maximum EasyName length (--waypointLength or -l,
for Garmin we recommend 16), and they will be enabled.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geocaching Swiss Army Knife complains about the GPX format. How do I make them compatible?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't use EasyName waypoints.


-------------------------------------------
What software can you use the GPX files in?
-------------------------------------------
Here are a few software products I have found that make use of GPX
files. If you have any to add, please e-mail thomas%stromberg.org

Windows:
 - Geocaching Swiss Army Knife http://gsak.net/
 - GPX Spinner     (Free)    http://www.gpxspinner.com/
 - EasyGPS         (Free)    http://www.easygps.com/
 - Utopia          (Free)    http://home.earthlink.net/~msargent2/ch/
 - G7ToWin         (Free)    http://www.gpsinformation.org/ronh/
 - GPSbabel        (Free)    http://www.gpsbabel.org/

Mac OS X:
 - GPS Connect     (Free)    http://www.chimoosoft.com/gpsconnect.html
 - FlightTrack     (Free)    http://flighttrack.sourceforge.net/
 - GPSbabel        (Free)    http://www.gpsbabel.org/

Linux/UNIX:
 - GPSbabel        (Free)    http://www.gpsbabel.org/
 - GPSMan          (Free)    http://www.ncc.up.pt/gpsman/

Android:
 - CacheMate       ($8)      http://www.smittyware.com/droid/cachemate/
 - c:geo           (Free)    http://www.cgeo.org/
 - DroidCachebox   (Free)    http://getcachebox.net

PalmOS:
 - CacheMate       ($8)      http://www.smittyware.com/palm/cachemate/

Symbian UIQ (Sony Ericsson, Motorola):
 - GPS-Navigator   (€16)     http://www.wohlfahrt-edv.de/
 - PowerNavigation ($20)     http://www.symbianware.com/product.php?id=powernavigation_uiq
 - SmartGPX        (free)    http://www.smartcaching.de/smartgpx.html

Symbian Series 60 & 80 (Nokia):
 - AFTrack         (Free)    http://afischer-online.de/sos/AFTrack/
 - PowerNavigation ($23)     http://www.symbianware.com/product.php?id=powernavigation80
 - SmartGPX        (Free)    http://www.smartcaching.de/smartgpx.html

Windows Mobile/CE/Pocket PC:
 - CacheMate       ($8)      http://www.smittyware.com/intro/cachemate/
 - GPXView         (Free)    http://strandberg.org/gpxview/
 - cachebox        (Free)    http://getcachebox.net
 - G7ToCE          (Free)    http://www.gpsinformation.org/ronh/


--------------------------------
Why is there no GUI for GeoToad?
--------------------------------
Because we haven't gotten to it yet. There have been some
failed projects by 3rd party users to produce one, and we are
looking for developers to give us this capability in a future version.


--------------------------------
So what about that "Fav Factor"?
--------------------------------
Fav Factors, like their Fun Factor predecessors, are a "synthetic" rating
based on the number of favorite points given and the total number of
"Found it"s.

Currently, the formula used is "5+ln(favs/total)", the number
obtained is trimmed to one decimal place, and cut-offs at 0.0 and
5.0 are applied. This will give the "super duper everyone's darling"
cache a rating of 5.0, and an "average" cache (which gets its 1 of 10
share) will end up very close to 2.5.

There are a couple of pitfalls though:

 - Favorite points were introduced around Feb 1, 2011. This means that:
 - Old (but "gold") caches won't get their corresponding share anymore.
 - Premium-Member only caches will get some advantage over normal ones.
 - Only a few output templates support Fav Factor output.

The situation is similar to Fun Factors: you have to believe in the
algorithm as there (at the moment) are no means to track what's going
on, except using debug mode. But on the other hand, it doesn't depend
on "training", and will work everywhere on Earth, independent of language.


------------------------------------------------
geotoad.exe gets relative paths wrong in Windows
------------------------------------------------
GeoToad for Windows in the past was packaged by rubyscript2exe,
which seems to forget the current working directory. Because of this,
if you are using a relative path, it will default to the directory
that GeoToad is installed to, rather than the working directory it
was launched from.

Since rubyscript2exe has been abandoned by its author, and doesn't
work any longer with recent Ruby versions, we had to change the packaging
to Ocra (a Ruby gem).
With the new packaging, unfortunately, we see GeoToad crash if it isn't run
in the installation directory.
This crash (which may have been fixed by now?) was related to funfactors
which were replaced by favorite counts.
As a workaround, we suggest to make sure GeoToad is run from its own directory.

----------------------------------------------------------------
I cannot login with a name containing an umlaut ("ÜbercacherXY")
----------------------------------------------------------------
You're probably using Windows.
(For unixoid systems, check your _locale_ setting $LANG for UTF-8.)

It seems to be impossible to use UTF-8 in a Windows cmd.exe environment;
there is a "Unicode" codepage (65001) which apparently uses UTF-16
(encoding each character into two bytes) which isn't suited for our purposes.

To enter non-ASCII characters within user/owner names,
you will have to look them up in
this table (=> http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?number=1024)
(you may have to scroll further) and prefix each two-digit hex number from
the third column with a percent sign, as in %c3%9cbercacherXY.
_(If you use the search page to list caches found by "ÜbercacherXY", geocaching.com will use the same encoding.)_

To enter a percent sign in the name, please use %25.

Don't be worried if you see strange characters in the TUI.


--------------------------------------
What about country and state searches?
--------------------------------------
Some previous versions of GeoToad already allowed country/state searches.
The code now has been rewritten to some extent, to handle the ambiguity of
names, and is in advanced testing state.

There's no reasonable way to clarify ambiguities when you're running the
command line version, and therefore, instead of giving a _name_ it is now
required to submit a unique country (or state) _ID_ (a numerical value).

Since there are more than 250 countries and about 400 states in
the list, and the lists are constantly changed by Groundspeak,
GeoToad's TUI helps you find out about the ID you are looking for:

 - Enter the Text User Interface (by running GeoToad without any parameters)
 - Select the search type ("country" or "state", from the list)
 - If in "country" mode, enter a name pattern for "country":
   - For "Sweden", "swe" will do; for the United States, "state" will give you a selection between "Vatican City State" (213) and "United States" (2).
   - Use the numeric ID for your "-q country ID" command-line query.
 - Note that "country" queries will fail if geocaching.com has "split" the country into states (regions, provinces, etc.) - proceed to "state" query in that case!
 - If in "state" mode, you will have to prefix the state pattern with a country pattern and a slash:
   - "swe/sterb" will return ID 374 for Sweden/Västerbotten; "ger/bra" will, through a country selection from Niger--Nigeria--Algeria--Germany (Germany, of course), lead to to Brandenburg (138).
   - To select from a full list of states (regions, etc.) of a given country, you may use a pattern like "France/.*".
   - Note that the patterns are "regex" style.
   - Use the numeric ID in your "-q state ID" query.

Country and state lists are kept in your file cache for about 2 months.

-------------------------------------------
Is there a list of attribute IDs somewhere?
-------------------------------------------

Here's what I collected from my cache files:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| ID |        no (append "-")           |              yes                 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  1 | No dogs                          | Dogs allowed                     |
|  2 | -                                | Access/parking fees              |
|  3 | -                                | Climbing gear                    |
|  4 | -                                | Boat required                    |
|  5 | -                                | Scuba gear required              |
|  6 | No kids                          | Kid friendly                     |
|  7 | Takes more than 1 hour           | Takes less than 1  hour          |
|  8 | No view                          | Scenic view                      |
|  9 | No significant hike              | Significant hike                 |
| 10 | No difficult climbing            | Difficult climbing               |
| 11 | -                                | May require wading               |
| 12 | -                                | May require swimming             |
| 13 | Not 24-7                         | Available 24-7                   |
| 14 | Not recommended at night         | Recommended at night             |
| 15 | Not available for winter         | Available in winter              |
| 16 | -                                | -                                |
| 17 | No poison plants                 | Poison plants!                   |
| 18 | -                                | Dangerous animals!               |
| 19 | -                                | Ticks!                           |
| 20 | -                                | Abandoned mine nearby            |
| 21 | -                                | Cliffs/falling rocks  nearby     |
| 22 | -                                | Hunting area                     |
| 23 | -                                | Dangerous area                   |
| 24 | Not wheelchair accessible        | Wheelchair accessible            |
| 25 | No parking available             | Parking available                |
| 26 | -                                | Public transit available         |
| 27 | No drinking water                | Drinking water nearby            |
| 28 | No public restrooms              | Restrooms available              |
| 29 | No telephone                     | Telephone nearby                 |
| 30 | No picnic tables                 | Picnic tables available          |
| 31 | No camping                       | Camping available                |
| 32 | No bikes                         | Bikes allowed                    |
| 33 | No motorcycles                   | Motorcycles allowed              |
| 34 | No quads                         | Quads allowed                    |
| 35 | No off-road vehicles             | Off-road vehicles allowed        |
| 36 | No snowmobiles                   | Snomobiles allowed               |
| 37 | No horses                        | Horses allowed                   |
| 38 | No campfires                     | Campfires allowed                |
| 39 | -                                | Thorns!                          |
| 40 | No stealth required              | Stealth required                 |
| 41 | Not stroller accessible          | Stroller accessible              |
| 42 | -                                | Needs maintenance                |
| 43 | ?                                | Watch for livestock              |
| 44 | -                                | Flashlight required              |
| 45 | -                                | Lost and found (?)               |
| 46 | Not truck driver/rv accessible   | Truck driver/rv accessible       |
| 47 | No field puzzle                  | Is field puzzle                  |
| 48 | -                                | Uv light required                |
| 49 | -                                | May require snowshoes            |
| 50 | -                                | Cross country skis required      |
| 51 | -                                | Special tool required            |
| 52 | Not night cache                  | Night cache                      |
| 53 | Not a park and grab              | Park and grab                    |
| 54 | Not in abandoned structure       | In abandoned structure           |
| 55 | Hike greater than 1km            | Hike shorter than 1km            |
| 56 | Not medium hike                  | Hike between 1km-10km            |
| 57 |                                  | Hike greater than 10km           |
| 58 | No fuel nearby                   | Fuel nearby                      |
| 59 | No food nearby                   | Food nearby                      |
| 60 | -                                | Wireless beacon required         |
| 61 | -                                | Is a partnership cache           |
| 62 |                                  | Seasonal access only             |
| 63 | Not recommended for tourists     | Recommended for tourists         |
| 64 | No tree climbing required        | Tree climbing required           |
| 65 | Not in front yard                | In front yard (with permission)  |
| 66 | No teamwork required             | Teamwork required                |
| 67 | -                                | Is part of a GeoTour             |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note the semantics of the -a and -A options:
-a will select only caches which have the attribute set explicitly.
-A will drop caches which have the attribute set to the opposite.
An appended "-" (minus) will check for "crossed-out" attributes.

Example:
To avoid hikes longer than 1km, and select only caches which are suited for
wheelchairs, you'd use  -a 24 -A 55-:56:57
-a 24:55 would select only those caches which are suited for wheelchairs
and explicitly flagged as "shorter than 1km". Notice the difference!


--------------------------
How to contact developers?
--------------------------
If you think you found a bug, please check the ReportingBugs (=> Wiki:ReportingBugs) wiki page
for some instructions.
You may now reach us via Twitter: @GeoToad_ (note the underscore at
the end of the twitter name!)