Paperless Geocaching
As most of you probably know, in my free time I indulge in geocaching, a nice sport/hobby where you seek hidden "treasures" in the wild or in urban areas with GPS and lots of other techno gadgets. In a nutshell: The perfect hobby for me 
Normally you simply log on to Geocaching.com, you pick a cache to go after and print out the description with the coordinates. But if you do it with style, you plan you trips on the computer, automatically upload all waypoints to your GPS and take all the info and pictures with you on a PDA or Smartphone. There are a couple of gadgets and software tools I use, which I want to share with you today.
Well first of you need a GPS receiver. Preferably a Garmin (OK some people prefer Magellan, but I prefer Garmin). I use a GPSMap 60 which is very nice. There are hundreds of guides and forums out there about what GPS to buy. An example is here. But that is not the issue here. I assume you already have a GPS. Now you need to get the waypoints on it. If you are a basic member, you can download LOC Files from Geocaching.com. These files simply store the coordinates of one cache. If you are premium member (which I strongly advise if you want to take full advantage of the software tools) you can get GPX files which also contain all the info, logs and hints of the cache. You even can generate pocket queries that automatically send you GPX waypoints in a specified area by email. Read here on how that works. Now you got a bunch of GPX waypoints. What to do with them? I use a tool called Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (or short GSAK). That tool can import these GPX Files and manage them in a database. The advantage is that you can sort and filter the caches in every possible way and you can use them offline. That comes in handy when you have your laptop with you but no internet available. GSAK can also manage the above mentioned LOC files but without all the extra information (because the only contain the coordinates). GSAK also has tons of ways to export your waypoints. You can convert them into Mapsource, Ozi Explorer, Fugawi, Microsoft Streets or Magellan files. If you have a TomTom car navi, you can even create overlays. To get the waypoints onto your GPS you can use a upload feature that uploads all waypoints in one go. So you always have all your waypoints with you.
But it does not end here. Unfortuantely the GPS cannot save much more info then the coordinates and a one-liner with condensed info. So I rediscovered my old Palm IIIe which was actually already stored in my scrap box. It turned out to be quite perfect for geocaching. It only has 2 MB (ROFL) but enough for a nice little tool called Cachemate. Besides if it happens to drop its not a great loss since its value is probably less the 10€. Cachemate is the perfect Palm PDA tool for taking all the cache descriptions with you. You can export the waypoints via GSAK and upload them via the Palm Sync software.
The last tool for this post is Spoiler Sync. What it does is downloading all spoiler pictures from caches you specify and storing them on your harddrive. To push the envelope, there is even a macro for GSAK that lets you select the folder with all the spoiler photos you retrieved with Spoiler Sync and add them automatically to the cache descriptions in GSAK. If you have a better PDA then me that has a color display (OK mine sucks, I admit it ;-)) you can also upload the spoiler pics onto the PDA.
I hope you got some ideas about paperless caching. However this is only a very brief overview over the tools I use. I like this combination, because all the tools work hand in hand quite beautifully. There are many more tools out there. Just try Google.
