Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

I can't find this info nor can I even figure out how to phrase the problem well. Sorry.

Say I'm in Paris, which I don't know well. Some nice person takes me home for the night; I walk outside the following morning and I promise my new friend that I'll come back at the end of the day. I wander all over the city, and in the evening I want to get back there.

Assuming I had previously downloaded maps of Paris, is there something I could have done in the morning when I left my friend's house -- create a custom POI or a Waypoint or what? -- such that, in the evening, even without internet access, I could find that spot on my map and see where it is compared to my current GPS-indicated location? How, in the evening, do I look up the point that I took a reading on in the morning? (I'm not talking about having a route laid out, which I know requires internet access; I just want to be able to use MM to show me where on the map my friend's house is.)

Or, say I go for a day-hike in a huge park. I have pre-loaded great satellite maps of the park. I park my car somewhere around the perimeter of the park. While I'm standing next to my car, I do something (but I don't know what) in Maemo-Mapper with my N810 and its GPS function. Then I wander all over the park. Later in the day, I want to find my car. What should I have done with Maemo-Mapper when I first got out of my car, and then what do I do when I want to find my car at the end of the day?

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Tap and hold, choose Waypoint, then Add POI. I think that should do what you want - mark a location on the map.

Though in Paris, I'd just ask my new friend where the closest Metro is and remember how to get to (and back from) that.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

And then how do I look up that Waypoint/POI in the evening?

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Hmm, not sure. In fact my suggestion above doesn't work the way I expected either. You could enable logging your track, and then follow your path back to where you started I suppose.

Or just use the Metro suggestion ;)

Anyone else have any ideas?

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

You can enable tracking which will follow your path with a red line on the map. Tracks can be saved and restored.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

This seems like such a simple and basic function! I don't want to have Maemo-Mapper and my GPS receiver running all day just to track my steps, and I don't want to re-trace my steps if I've wandered all over the place like a cartoon character.

It seems I ought to be able to set a point in a map using GPS and have some way to look up and rediscover where it is, even days or weeks later. If MM doesn't have that function, it seems to me it certainly ought to. Gnuite could call it the "Hey, Dude, where did I park my car?" function.

I suspect that Maemo-Mapper does this, and I just haven't figured out how yet.

(For that matter, it seems to me that I ought to be able to look up and find any number of self-created-and-labeled points. Like if I was in Istanbul last year and I ate at a great restaurant, I ought to be able to finish the meal, step outside, mark where I am on an already-downloaded map of Istanbul by using the GPS, label it "Istanbul Restaurant," and find it next time I'm in Istanbul, if I still have all my data and can remember the label I used.)

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

I see I'm not remotely original in my naming.

Garmin has a "Dude, where's my car" function.

There's an iPhone app called "Where's my car?"

Here's a little "Homing Device" that does what I wish MM did. (OK, less than I want MM to do, but at least it points the direction and says how far; it just doesn't have any maps at all.)

BTW, what I'm actually thinking about is finding my way back to hotels in strange cities or being lost and looking for my car in large city or national parks -- unaided, I've had problems with both of these. I have a terrible sense of direction, and this is what I (ignorantly) figured all GPS devices did and what I figured MM would do.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Tap and hold for a few seconds and it will bring up a menu click tap point, add POI. You can then enter details such as category, Restaurant, hotel, business, etc. This will add a purple square on your map that you can navigate back towards, to find out where you are now turn on tracking and then click the "centre" button. As long as you have a GPS signal it will tell you where you are.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Thanks, Rassilon7. I've done that; where I'm stuck is: how do I look up that specific POI to find it again? If I already know where it is, I can look for it. But in a big city, do I have to drill down to a relatively close-up level and scour the whole area? Or is there a look-up function?

Similarly, other than poking each little purple square, how do I know I have the correct POI if many are displayed? Actually, I guess I've already answered that: I've made a special Category of POIs for the ones I create, and I can uncheck all the other categories.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Hold stylus on point on map (where your GPS says you are), choose "Tap Point", choose "Add POI".

The Add POI window opens, touch "Edit Categories", touch "Add". Create a label for your new category. How 'bout "Stuff I can't remember". Make sure Enabled is checked.

"OK" back to the Add POI window and enter a descriptive name for what it is you can't remember. Maybe "Last Night" or "Ishkabibble's", choose your new category and touch "OK".

Because you chose to "enable" your new category, whatever it is you labeled will show up on your map when the area is panned in M/M.

If you want to find your tryst (or whatever, LoL) again in M/M, go to menu; choose "POI", choose "Browse". When the Browse POIs window opens; select "Use GPS Location", select your new category. When the POI List window opens hopefully what you saved will show up, select it, touch "Go to", enjoy another night in Paris. :)

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Once saved as a POI you can go to POI-Browse Use GPS location select the category that you saved the information into. The list of categories comes up and you select the one you are after and click goto.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

YoDudes answer is better, and he beat me to it :)

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

But, Rassilon7, wouldn't you know YoDude would be the one to answer a "Where's my car?" question! :)

Thanks, YoDude. Maemo-Mapper is doing just what I'd thought it should be able to do. When I'm in Paris, I am clearly going to have one tres romantique rendez-vous after another! And if I should establish a circuit, where each one wants me, say, every third night, by golly, I'm gonna get to each and everyone of them. Even if they wisely won't give me their addresses. :)

(BTW, what I was doing wrong was clicking and holding on the map and then selecting "POI" (rather than "Tap Point"), which gave me a choice of Add Route Point or Add Waypoint, but did not give me a choice of Add POI (which is under the Tap Point menu, not the POI menu). So then I was browsing POIs by putting in the Query box the names I had given to Waypoints; hence I wasn't finding them.)

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Shameless plug: wouldn't cyborg seem appropriate for this sort of thing? I used it once or twice for finding my parking place, back when I commuted by car, though I use it more when cycling in unfamiliar parts of town.

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

Benson, I feel like I clicked on your link and walked onto another planet. (And, by God, there was Qwerty12!) I'm like, "What are these Linux guys saying to one another?"

I had no idea from that thread what cyborg does, so I don't know what drew Qwerty12 or fizze to it (unless they'd heard of cyborg.py); but following the link to cyborg.py, I gather this program periodically tells you something like "You are going northwest 26 degrees at 3 miles per hour"? If that's what it does, why would I want to walk around or go biking and be told this refrain?

I clicked on the .deb (why not?) and installed it, but didn't have any idea what to do next (or exactly what to expect). So I typed into Xterm at the $ prompt, got told it was an error. And stopped.

So as I sit here, I guess I still don't know what direction I'm going or at what speed. (Though Texrat, RIP, whose location was handbasket/hell, or hell/handbasket, may have a pretty good idea.)

Re: Maemo-Mapper: How return to arbitrary GPS location without Internet?
 

No, no, it tells you the remaining distance, direction, and approximate time to some target location, e.g., your Parisienne's front door. Telling you your current heading would be much less useful as a constant drone. (It does show that on the screen, though.)

gpsd-clients is a package containing a number of useful tools, one of which, gpspipe, is needed to make cyborg.py go. I was kind of assuming anyone who would use this had already read about in the xkcd blag, so my instructions may have assumed too much.

Basically, you need to install gpsd-clients (you did this), and download both cyborg.py and cy.sh. Copy cyborg.py and cy.sh to somewhere on your $PATH; I put it in /home/user/bin/ and added that to my path, but if you haven't done (and don't want to do) anything different from stock, you'll need to be root and put it in /usr/bin or such, e.g.:
Then, with gpsd up (i.e., with some GPS-using program active, such as MM, speedometer, or even the GPS location applet from the Control Panel), you can start it with [code]cy.sh <latitude> <longitude>[code]
Or if you've saved the target GPS location in a file, Typical use would really involve something clever to stuff current gps location into a certain file, say /tmp/gpsbeacon (the hard part is automatically starting gpsd and getting a lock; once a lock is obtained, gpspipe makes it easy), and then set up a launcher (osso-statusbar-cpu, Personal Menu, Personal Launcher, etc.) to call that command as "Drop homing beacon" and cy.sh /tmp/gpsbeacon as "Activate homing routine". I'm such a command-line junkie that I hadn't messed with any of that previously -- it was "good enough" for my use -- but I'm happy to help figure it out for others.

Right now, I added these to Personal Menu, and they seem to work; for "Drop beacon" I have:(This fails if you don't have gpsd up already -- it ought to have either an added program, or to be rewritten as a standalone program, which starts the GPS and waits for a fix.)

The second one should work as written above, but I was too lazy to mess with environment variables and implemented directly without cy.sh:Change the path appropriately for your installation...