I’ve been doing my geocaching the old fashioned way. I login to geocaching.com, search for the zip code I want to cache in, browse through the results, printing out the ones I want to go find, and manually key those coordinates into my Magellan SportTrack Map
It’s time for a change. I downloaded the highly acclaimed EasyGPS program to transfer waypoints to my GPSr, which will probably cut my Geocaching prep time by about half. That’s a decent improvement – But Wait, there’s MORE!… I also found an open source command line program called GeoToad that actually queries all the info from geocaching.com without ever having to visit the website:
GeoToad lets you perform on-demand queries against the Geocaching website, and export the matching geocaches to numerous devices and over 20 file formats. You tell it what you want to see, such as:
Geocaches that I have not found within 15 miles of 27513 with travelbugs.
or if you are a little more demanding, something like:
Geocaches in Texas with a difficulty of 3 or higher that have never been found, match the keywords river, or stream, but not any caches owned by Elvis.
You can then take these query results with you on a nice long print-out, import them into EasyGPS, transfer them to your GPS unit, or even save the results onto your cellphone!
GREAT! …but I don’t like the amount of delay time they specified between grabbing cache information. No Problem! The source code is on the same website and it’s written in Ruby. So, I downloaded a Ruby editor, popped open geotoad.rb and changed the “Sleep” value (line 406) to a much lower value than 15, and BINGO!
NOTE: Although you can set this value to 0 (and I did for fun) this is not such a good idea for getting say, all the caches in Florida. It’s fun to watch it go, but I’m sure it puts a major strain on the Geocaching servers – especially if there are a lot of people out there using GeoToad.