Help: PDAs and Cellphones
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- Can I use my web capable cell phone to browse AQ ?
- How do I download and install Plucker?
- How do I transfer clues to my iPod?
Can I use my web capable cell phone to browse AQ ?
In this day and age most basic cell phones are capable of surfing the web, although some carriers may charge extra fees to do so. These cell phones are capable of using Atlas Quest. This comes in handy when you are out on the trail and want to look at clues, search for boxes, or just needing to catch up on recent posts on the message boards.
Ryan has programmed Atlas quest to be a very fast loading site. In fact he created, manages, and updates the site over a dial-up connection! There is very little pictures and multimedia stuff to bog down a cell phone's simple Internet browser. This means that things should load fairly quickly. With that being said, Ryan does not guarantee that any feature will in fact work over a cell phone, as the site was never created for, and/or tested using one.
Some problems you may encounter while using a cell phone
- You may have to log in using the insecure login page as not all cell phones are able to connect to Atlas Quest securely.
- Drop down menus may or may not work, including the menu bar found on the top and bottom of all AQ pages except clue pages.
- The screen will most likely be displayed in an unconventional manner as it is simply too small to display the pages as they were meant to be seen.
- You may not see the images in Atlas Quest's Themes
- Raised clickable "Buttons" such as the "New Post" or "Write Mail" type buttons might not work. This could possibly prevent you from submitting any form info such as message board posts or AQ Mail. Sometimes it just requires you to get creative in how to get the information you are looking for on the site without using the clickable buttons. This is by far the biggest problem with surfing over cellphones. It can prevent a lot of things you would like to do.
Premium members have an additional feature available to download clues to their cell phone or PDA. This particular feature is designed specifically for use on cell phones and PDAs but is limited only to downloading clues and information about events you plan to attend.
Help Home > Atlas Quest > PDAs and Cellphones
How do I download and install Plucker?
Plucker is a program that scans and downloads webpages to your computer that can then be pushed onto your Palm device for viewing, and premium members can download clues from their favorite searches and events they've signed up for directly to their Palm handheld device.
Plucker has three distinct sections: The viewer is installed on the PDA and is used to view Plucker documents, the distiller is the program that fetches HTML pages and coverts them into a Plucker format, and the desktop is a graphical interface for editing configuration files that you could tweak by hand.
To install all three components of Plucker for a Windows machine, follow these directions:
- Go to the Plucker Downloads page
- Under the Plucker Desktop section, download latest exe version of of Plucker. The desktop section contains all of the components you will need. As of this writing, the latest Windows version is 1.6.2.0, but you should check that is still the latest version.
- After the file is done downloading, double click it to run the program.
- Follow the directions Plucker provides. The default settings should usually work fine.
- After Plucker is installed, run the desktop application to create a channel for Atlas Quest. Set the link depth to 4, check the setting so Atlas Quest will not pull in pages from other websites, and copy and paste the personalized URL from the PDA Downloads page and start the plucking!
At this point, Plucker is installed and working properly. Now you need to download clues!
- Go to the PDA Downloads page, located under the Toolbox menubar option. (Only premium members will see this.)
- Check the boxes for the favorite searches and events you want to download to your PDA and save them. To save time for yourself and hardship on Atlas Quest, only download the clues you'll need. You can always change which favorite searches and events to download as necessary.
- Download clues to your desktop through the Plucker Desktop application
- Sync your PDA to get to the clues on your handheld device
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How do I transfer clues to my iPod?
- Highlight and copy the clue you want to save.
- Paste it into TextEdit, or another word program that can save things in the plain text format (.txt). Save it in the text format. (On a Mac, in TextEdit, this is under the Format heading, and says, "Make plain text.")
- Name the file with the town and name of the letterbox.
- Make sure your iPod is on manually "Manage Songs & Playlists" mode. Plug your iPod into your computer. From the summary tab, select "Enable disk use" or "Manually manage songs and playlists."
- Drag this file into the Notes folder of your iPod.
- Now it's available on your iPod on the trail! (In the Extras category, under Notes)
References
Storing and Reading Notes with your iPodHelp Home > Atlas Quest > PDAs and Cellphones