Gareth's Place Online!
Gareth
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Homepage: http://www.gsellis.com
Posts by Gareth
Update
May 11th
Currently quite busy with the last few weeks on my PGCE course and job applications.
Hopefully going to spend some time soon when all this has eased off and update the site with posts and also a new theme 
GSAK Macro
Jan 23rd
GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) is a powerful waypoint management tool for storing, filtering and managing geocaching waypoints.
For the past few months i’ve been holding a database of all the Geocaches in the UK. This requires me to keep renetering pocket queries which each contain the information for upto 500 geocaches.
These are filtered by date placed, and currently there is about 110 different queries requried to cover the whole of the UK. As a premium member it is possible to queue up 40 pocket queries.
With this in mind, I set about a way of speeding up setting up these queries.
Firstly, as there are caches being archived all the time I needed a way to get a complete list of the current caches, this I achieved by making a macro in GSAK as follows:
#*******************************************
# MacVersion = 1.0
# MacDescription = PQ Date Creator
# MacAuthor = Gareth
# MacFileName = PQCreator.gsk
# MacUrl =
#*******************************************
$output=""+$_NewLine
$output=$output+"
MFILTER Expression=not($d_found) and not($d_Archived)
SORT by="placeddate"
$start=$d_PlacedDate
$i=1
$ended=false
While $ended=false
Goto Position=500
$end=$d_PlacedDate
#PAUSE Msg=DateFormat($start)+" - "+DateFormat($end)
MFILTER Expression=$d_PlacedDate>=$start and $d_PlacedDate<=$end and not($d_Found) and not($d_OwnerName="gse1986") and not($d_Archived)
SORT by="placeddate"
If $_FilterCount>500
$end=$end-1
#MsgOK msg="checked if filter"+DateFormat($end)+DateFormat($start)
MFILTER Expression=$d_PlacedDate>=$start and $d_PlacedDate<=$end and not($d_Found) and not($d_OwnerName="gse1986") and not($d_Archived)
SORT by="placeddate"
EndIf
IF $_FilterCount=0
#PAUSE Msg="No waypoints in filter, action cancelled"
endIf
If $i<10
$out="00"+NumToStr($i)
Else
If $i<100
$out="0"+NumToStr($i)
ELSE
$out=NumToStr($i)
EndIf
EndIf
$output=$output+"
$output=$output+"
$output=$output+"
$output=$output+"
$output=$output+"
SET $Data = PutFile($_Install + "\PQ.XML",$output)
$i=$i+1
$start=$end+1
MFILTER Expression=$d_PlacedDate>=$start and not($d_Found) and not($d_OwnerName="gse1986") and not($d_Archived)
SORT by="placeddate"
IF $_FilterCount > 0
ELSE
$ended=true
ENDIF
EndWhile
$output=$output+""+$_NewLine
SET $Data = PutFile($_Install + "\PQ.HTML",$output)
IF Left($Data,7) = "*Error*"
Pause Msg="$Data"
Cancel
ENDIF
Snow Day!
Jan 5th
Woke up this morning to find moving the car quite interesting (I moved 3 foot and then got stuck!). Finally heard off the school it was closed today because of the weather so 4 months in to teaching and already a snow day 
Today now need to do some lesson planning and also try and solved some of the issues with wordpress on the explorer website. Despite this site and the explorer site being set up identically, the explorer site seems to dislike being updated…at all.
Hopefully will be able to find a solution
Gareth
Update again
Jan 2nd
I’ve moved over to wordpress completely, instead of part wordpress/part pure php.
From simply a content management side of things, it makes everything a lot easier
Hopefully more content will follow
Unfortunately moving over the blog has meant all the photos I had uploaded are gone….will see if i can fix that
New Car!
Dec 24th
I picked up my new car today – a 2005 Ford Focus Ghia. It’s really good and works a lot better than my old fiesta 
Will put some photos up once this snow budges….
Oooh!
Dec 19th
Just been messing around on iPod touch and found the WordPress 2 app!
Looks good, as far as writing and comment admin goes. Would be good to be able to add and update plugins etc. But is good anyway.
I’m hoping to try and keep this blog up dated a little more, and also move my site over to wordpress completely, instead of just using it for the blog part.
Hopefully will update again v soon!
Gareth
More caches!
Oct 29th
Today we spent time in Ambleside and grabbed a few caches there. There is a few older caches and some newer ones, the first one being Ambleside Amble. We weren’t too sure what this would be like given some of the DNFs that were on the cache page. Luckily we had it found within a minute of getting to GZ. We signed the log and moved on, getting some numbers for a multi that we’d part worked out at home. There was 31 places to visit in Ambleside, but given the fact we didn’t have too much time we cheated slightly and managed to narrow it down to two locations to visit – the Market Cross and the Salutation – each opposite each other. When we got to the Salutation there was two possible locations for the cache – one near the Stock Ghyll Cache and one near where we parked – perfect.
We headed off upto stock ghyll and got the cache there and had a quick search to see if we could find the multi cache at the coords we’d worked out. It wasn’t there so moved off to near where we parked and found the cache within a few minutes of searching.
On the way back to the car we grabbed Post Haste Ambleside and drove to Hayes Garden World for lunch. After lunch went on a bit further down the lake and grabbed the new YHA cache, which wasn’t well hidden at all, and also the Galava Fort cache.
This was all for today, so headed off back to Low Briery
Geocaching in the Lakes
Oct 26th
We’re up in the Lake District for a week so are doing some Geocaching whilst here. Sunday we managed to grab a few in Keswick, which we missed last year. Nothing too much to say about these as they were just micros, although one, Post Haste Keswick GC14E4K did have us searching for a while as the coords brought us to a bridge over a road so we weren’t too sure which level to be looking on!
Today we got some around Whinlatter (A Taste of Lakeland GC14E4K) and then a few near by including GC14E4K where there were some fantastic views!
Finally we tried for another drive by micro, but were too many muggles nearby to attempt. Maybe next time
FBCal
Jun 3rd
Like a lot of people, I use Google Calender to organise and store all my various calender items, and when I found that Facebook allows users to export their events feed in ICS format I thought this was great.
However, after a few weeks I noticed that on my phone (which is synched with Google Calender) a lot of events started showing up as just “busy” rather than telling me what the event was.
After looking into this I found the problem being that for “non-open” events they were listed as private in the ICS feed. This isn’t a problem for most applications, however Google Calender decides to not display the linked information.
Anyway, I came up with a quick PHP script which sites between Facebook and Google calender, allowing Google Calender to display the events properly
$ical="http://www.facebook.com/ical/u.php?uid=".$_GET[\'uid\']."&key=".$_GET[\'key\'];
$file=file_get_contents($ical);
$search="CLASS:PRIVATE";
$replace="CLASS:PUBLIC";
$output=str_replace($search,$replace,$file);
header("Content-Type: text/Calendar");
// Give the file a name and force download
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=calendar.ics");
print_r($output);
You then simply link to the page ie http://www.host.com/calender.php?uid=
You can find your UID and Key by logging in, clicking “See All” on the right hand side of the home page, under events and then click “Export” at the top of the page.
Blog Is Back
May 6th
After a rejig of the website and moving the blog to a subdomain (blog.gsellis.com) a number of the features (for example media) stopped working. This was a bit annoying as i’d modified the theme I use accross the website to that of the blog for a bit of a better look. Anyway with all the work I had on I didn’t have time to go through and change all the references so i’d left it until now. I first tried a reinstall, but as I had to reimport the old database I still had a few things to change, which are now sorted.
The theme is not finished for individual post views, but I hope to sort that soon – it shouldn’t take too long, but I want to finish off the uni work before i do anymore
Gareth
