GeoIngenuity - Clever solutions for Mac Geocachers.

Recently, I bought a Magellan CrossoverGPS.It’s a very nice unit that supports both turn-by-turn navigation and offroad mode, which makes it quite versatile for Geocaching.   You’ll notice that GeoJournal (and GPSBabel) does not have direct support for this unit.  This unit is actually a version of the Magellan RoadMate (Model 2500t), which still doesn’t have direct USB support.However, the Crossover does have an SD card expansion slot.  

Using an SD card, you can make your CrossoverGPS compatible with GeoJournal!

In a nutshell, do the following:

• Under preferences, select Magellan and Explorist 210 (actually any Explorist module will do).
• Select “USB Storage” and “NO NAME” as the volume name. Note: When you mount the SD card on your Mac, this name should match that.  By default, a blank card will show up as “NO NAME”.
• Save the settings.
• Mount the SD card, and open Finder and navigate to the main folder.
• Create a new folder called “My POIs”
• In GeoJournal, when you export to GPS, select “Magellan Point of Interest” as the Waypoint type and click export.
• Your geocaches will be saved in the “My POIs” folder as a .upt file.
• Unmount the SD card and put it into your Crossover.
• Import the waypoints on the Crossover by going to the Outdoor mode->Options->Import Data->Waypoints
• Your geocaches are now in the unit!  You can navigate to them in Vehicle Nav mode and in Outdoor mode…  

On July 31st, the GeoIngenuity server crashed. Hard.

That’s exactly 1 day after the release of GeoJournal. Just in case you thought otherwise, I can tell you first hand that Mr. Murphy is still quite alive and well, and keeps the most impeccable timing…

Luckily, I use VMWare to virtualize the server, which makes it handy if the underlying server hardware goes kaput. You just upload the server image to a new VMWare server, and bring it up just like nothing happened…

Well, I did have a backup, but what I didn’t account for was the pathetically slow upload speed of my Comcast cable modem. They tout 384k upload speeds, but in reality it was more like 80k. Wonderful. It took about 3 days, on and off, to upload the image to the new temporary server. Hopefully, I will have new server hardware and I can transfer the image back to the new hardware. I wasn’t expecting the new hardware expense, but Murphy doesn’t usually let you know when he’s coming for a visit, so it’s just one of those things…

Why is this important to you, the GeoJournal user? Well, simply put, the Google Map feature of GeoJournal must communicate with this server initially before it accesses the map data from Google. This is a requirement based on Google’s terms of service and program API. When my server goes offline, the maps will not work. The good news is with DNS changes I can redirect the map queries to another server, and that’s what I did when the server died. I had map calls redirected within a couple hours, while the hardware was down for days (and is still down, actually).

I’ll post a new announcement when the new hardware is going in. I promise it wont take days to upload this time…