Slashdot Mirror
Internet Communications While At Sea?
ubergamer1337 writes "Next semester I will be participating in a college study abroad program known as Semester at Sea. The gist of it is that over four months 600ish students sail around the world on a converted cruise ship, visiting diverse port cities while taking classes when we are between ports. Debates about its educational merit aside, my internet options while I will be at sea will be severely limited. We get just 100 minutes of internet access for the entire voyage, and once thats gone the only internet access we have is a university email address, which is limited to messages under a megabyte with no attachments. I have been pondering different ways to staying in contact with friends and family back at home without running to an internet cafe in every port, and I have already decided that I want to set up a blog that can be updated by email, but I wanted to ask the collective wisdom of Slashdot if anyone knows of any other ways to transmit more then just your standard message through email. Some things I would be particularity interested in being able to figure out would be a way to send photos (encode them as text?), and a way to get Wikipedia pages etc. emailed to me."
That works out to 55.5 seconds, roughly, per day. Do they calculate the time you use the computer hooked to the internet, or do they calculate the time actually used to transmit and receive data?
My wife and I love cruising, but she runs her own business and can't be away from email for that amount of time. Thankfully there are options now :)
Most ships these days have cell towers on the ship connected by satellite that usually provide GPRS data (and it looks like the SAS one does as well). The problem is they're considered international roaming, which costs tons of money. However, T-Mobile has an unlimited international 'email' option for blackberry for $20/mo that we've discovered includes BIS traffic through the web browser and even tethering (though we've heard conflicting reports about tethering, we've never been charged for it while at sea). There's always Mobi-shark for routing laptop traffic through the BIS, if tethering is a problem.
So we either tether to her laptop, or just use blackberry and a wireless keyboard and end up with a reasonable means of staying connected (granted, at dial-up speeds). Of course there's also the expense of the blackberry and monthtly plan, but that's only going to add ~2% to the cost of the semester.
There's also the option of paying for the wifi access on a per-minute basis. The latency sucks, but if you're using a fat email client (thunderbird, etc) it only takes us 1-3 minutes to sign in, send and receive messages, and sign out. On commercial cruises they charge somewhere around $.50/min, so when there's cabin based wifi we generally opt for that route, since it's way less hassle than the cell option, we don't have to worry about T-Mobile changing their policies on what's included, and $1.50 a day is not a huge price to pay relative to the cruise.
If they're limiting your email to text based only with no attachments, it's probably at their computers (since I'm not sure how they'd restrict you to that on theirs), which means your options for doing funky encoding stuff to get around it will likely be limited. If not, and you can use your own computer, there are tons of ways to convert anything to text (after all, that's what your email client has to do to send attachments, too). The downside is the receiving end would have to be smart enough to know what you're sending.
For wikipedia, I'd say take a copy with you.
Surf the RMS way: set up some kind of server at home that you can email a link to and it will wget it and return the content back to you via email. Since you have seemingly unlimited email access, this might be the most efficient way to surf.
You can also encode images into base64, don't know how big an image it would take before you hit the 1MB limit, but it's possible.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Assuming that at least half of the places you visit will be fairly modern cities, you should take advantage of the opportunities for internet access while you are in port. Investigate places that offer free or low-cost WiFi service in the ports you'll be visiting. That will at least mitigate the low access levels you are limited to on board ship.
We are the 198 proof..
Learn it.
Isn't the point of something like "Semester at Sea" to immerse yourself in the program, and become involved deeply in the studies and the people you're traveling with?
What you're wanting to do is like ordering escargot in a French restaurant and smothering them in ketchup.
Man. you're going to be SOL, my friend.
;)
Your problem of only 100(125 according to TFA) minutes for a 4-month cruise will be compounded by a super-slow internet connection, compounded further by the extra speed-lag of wireless. From the looks of things, your computers will be all windows and probably use IE as the browser, which means no ad or script blocking. The best thing to do in this case would be to bring plenty of analog reading material and other distractions(read: pr0n, booze, or dope) aboard the ship and hope that you get laid.
The first thing you should do is wean yourself from constant gratification through the internet. When you do use the on-board internet, chances are that pages will load slow as hell so try to use "hypermiling" techniques like stopping the page load as soon as the link you want appears(don't wait for the whole page to load), then do that again and again until you get to the content you want. As far as the blog thing goes, use your free official E-mail addy to send plaintext to somebody else who will maintain your blog for you and send you plaintext wikipedia articles as desired, and do that as much as possible so that you can save your precious 125 minutes - It won't be a real-time thing, but that's one of the whole points of being at sea(or camping, for that matter). An alternate suggestion would be to do everything yourself onboard, then release it all at once when you hit shore. Either way, best of luck to you, because cruises are nowhere near as exciting as the commercials make them out to be
Temporarily cutting off contact will be the best thing you ever do for yourself.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Supposedly Stallman doesn't surf the web - he sends an email with a URL and the email is returned with the page...
You can also look into maximizing your 100 minutes - cache a lot, don't get images, don't get ads, etc. Maybe team up wtih a few other people, so common interests/needs can be cached instead of downloaded once for each of you.
What about wireless access via PCMCIA card or cell phone? May work when closer to the coast, would certainly work in-port (depending on where you are in port of course). May even be able to make some $ off other students by setting up your own network, etc.
And of course you could always social engineer someone elses time away from them for non-identifying use such as fark, slashdot, etc. Save your minutes for your educational needs :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Did you consider that the limitations on Internet usage are in place for a reason? It may not be the bandwidth, it may be to force participants in this program to get away from their computers and interact with each other. The limits they place sound pretty reasonable to me.
With that said, I'd say satellite is an option while at sea. Otherwise depending on where you go perhaps a tethered cell phone would do the trick. Expensive either way!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Why not whip up some code that will wait for you to send an email to it containing some sort of pass code and a URL, then it fetches the page and all images, lzma and yEncs it, and then emails it back to you. It may not work so nicely with complicated sites, but for things like Wikipedia it would work great. I'm willing to bet however, that with enough effort you could write a fully fledged proxy. Latency may be really crap, but it would be undeniably cool. Also, have a look at programs such as http://code.kryo.se/iodine that allow you to run IPv4 over DNS.
It's an interesting alternative - although the time taken to get a license good enough for maritime mobile operation may be prohibitive, along with the equipment and you still need permission of the ship's captain to transmit. Apart from that....
Screw your email.
Sounds like heaven.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I know some guy who went without email access for a whole month. Mind you, he ate his own head.
Still if you're not one of those types who defines himself by being "l33t" or a "gamer" you'll be ok.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
So, you have unlimited access to email and yet you still don't how you're going to keep in touch in friends and family? Is e-mail "only for old people" now?
If your concern is sending pictures back, a small JPG file should only be a few dozen KBs and will easily fit in your 1MB attachment limit. Keep the high resolution originals on your computer and promise your friends you'll send them the high resolution versions once you get back on shore.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Iridium modems.
Yes, it actually is good for something, albeit slow as old-school dialup.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
That's a ridiculously good point. Applications like Gallery 2 have remote applications that I'm sure can be tuned to your disconnected-mode needs. Simply get everything ready to upload before you login, then when you're online all the human slowness will be taken out of the equation.
55.5 seconds per day doesn't seem like a lot, but if their internet connection is worth their (sea) salt even a 1mbit satellite link is almost 7 megabytes of data per day... assuming everyone else isn't doing the same thing at the same time of course.
If you're really interested in the process, check out Message Queuing. The idea is asynchronous communication between client/server so that you can do stuff when disconnected from the network, and saving your precious "almost" minute per day :)
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Why not share the internet connection with everyone. 100 minutes for 600 people is alot. Setup an intranet or even a wireless network. Combine the minutes and you will have close to 42 days of internet access for everyone. ((100 minutes * 600 people) / 60 minutes) / 24 hours = 41.666 days.
If you limit the internet conection to evenings, lets say to 12 hours, then you can double that to 83 days.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
What? Am I the only old-timer here? There's an RFC standard that fits this PERFECTLY
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
"1 April 1990: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers"
Thomas Dzubin
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Check out how to Post to your wordpress blog using email. or possibly Internet Access Via Email, Get Web Pages to deliver web pages via html formatted email.
That is all.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
100 minutes is longer than you may think.
Compose everything offline and minimize the size of any images.
If you limit your online time to simply uploading/sending all your pre-created content and try to limit your online time to 2 minutes each session, you could get away with it.
It's simply a case of getting all your ducks in a row.
Aside from that, there's a chance of bartering with other shipmates for online time.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
There is pretty much next to nothing you can do. Since you are at sea you won't be able to use your cell phone to connect to the web.
A satellite phone with a very very slow dial up connection is your best bet, but too cost prohibitive. Here's a company that does its job fairly well http://www.globalstar.com/
The only way you'll have affordable and uninhibited internet access is to wait until you get to port.
However, for wikipedia you can actually download an offline version of the entire database. For a wikipedia like experiance follow the instructions on this website
http://www.blindedbytech.com/2006/08/31/how-to-install-wikipedia-for-offline-access/
Also the raw dump for the english articles is here:
http://download.wikimedia.org/
Oh you can also download a DVD version of Wikipedia from that link above. Definitely worth looking at!
Good luck! And definitely have an awesome time. That program sounds interesting and I will look into it as well since I'm a 2nd semester college freshmen.
Back when Chapman University ran it, we called it "The Love Boat," so immersion and deep involvement with fellow travelers, yes, the studies, not so much...
Unfortunately short of hanging a satellite dish out your cabin window there really isn't a way for you to get a TCP/IP uplink. RFC 1149 does specify a TCP connection modality which could be suitable to transmission of data over long distances at sea, but it was last implemented in 1991 and the engineers responsible were never able to get it to send more than a few hundred bytes of data. YMMV, but I think it's probably your best shot.
Get some GUNS.
I this helps your grades.
Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout
What you're talking about really seems like they're going to be conducting some sort of study involving you guys. At least, I sure as heck would if I was going to have the oppurtunity to put 600 people to sea for 4 months. I'm betting that what you do (and how well you do in the classes) is going to be monitored much more than you seem to think, and if this internet thing is part of their rules, it would be a good idea to stick with it. I could be wrong, I just can't see a university letting a chance like that for their psych/soc department going to waste. If I was a professor in either of those departments I'd be all over this program like white on bread.
For upload, write your emails/replies before hand (in your cabin) and have them ready to send.
You want fetchmail and a local SMTP server with modified queue times.
In essence, you want what used to be the norm back in the BBS days - queued up mail. When you go to port, you get a connection and fetch all your mails, then reply to them and send the answers at next opportunity. 15 years ago, that was how mail worked, whether it be Usenet or FIDO or others. The tools are still around.
And you want to become accustomed to not having a 24/7 connection for a change. I know it can be hard, but if you're doing something it's a quick change. I was without any Internet at all for 5 days in a row twice last summer, and I barely noticed except by the amount of mail that had piled up when I came back. So: It ain't that bad. You can live without Internet. It's doable. :-)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The limitation that the university email account can only be used for mail under 1MB with no attachments is probably not a technical one. I think it's meant to prevent exactly the kind of data traffic that you have in mind. You're likely going to use a very expensive satellite link to the internet which is low-bandwidth and billed by the kilobyte. Except when you're close to land, there is no other option. You can try 3G or GPRS connections while you're in port or within a few miles of the coast, but that's still going to be much more expensive than internet cafes due to roaming charges. It's probably best to collect pictures, messages, voice recordings and whatever else you want to send, package it up before you enter a port and send it to a server in one go, so that you won't be wasting too much time in internet cafes. When you've done that two or three times, you'll probably realize that you're really not approaching your time on the high seas the right way.
BTW, Wikipedia has an offline DVD version which you can download for free.
Just get an iPhone with the biggest data plan they offer. Seriously.
I normally get modded down for my opinion of Apple, but in this case, it seems like the optimal solution... A portable, fairly efficient all-in-one platform for communication, including at least basic web browsing and multimedia capabilities, and most importantly, including its own built-in means of getting to the 'net (at least when in port, anyway).
Just drag a ELF transponder behind the boat. Bandwidth kinda sucks though :(
The easiest way would be to see if you can find an archive tool that can save your file to ASCII text so they can archive+split the files, copy+paste it into a mail and send it. Then you paste it into a new text file and you should be able to open it as an archive. Another way is to see if you can find a converter that can convert your binary .7z archive (e.g.) to readable ASCII.
But more specifically: Wiki pages can be saved as html which are already in ASCII format so just copy+paste html code from the mail to a text file, save it as .html and open it in a browser.
For pictures you can resort to the several (hardly known) picture file formats that use ASCII encoding.
I hope this helps you a bit but the important part is to enjoy the trip! Generally a minute/day should be enough to send stuff through a gmail anyway :)
When I was on Semester At Sea, in the late 80s, we were totally cut off except for the one phone line that cost something like $25 a minute (If it was available) which few people used and then there was the ability to send a one page fax for something like $5, but you could find a way to write a whole heck of a lot on one page. We were totally cut off in ways I doubt you will be cut off now. We had one movie night a week, but other than than we had nothing. This led as another poster said to us playing a lot of board games, poker and backgammon. It was like rolling back to the 1940s before the age of television. We interacted with one another in ways that, due to the colossal time suck that television is and the internet has become, just do not happen any these days. It was refreshing and that seldom seen level of interaction and involvement with the other students has stayed with me to this day. You might find a way to keep in constant internet communication, but be wary that burying your head in your lap top tethered to your cell phone will likely deprive you of one of the best parts of the experience. Enjoy!
There are 600 students, most of which will probably bring a laptop, and want to stay in touch, just as you do.
Seems like it could be an idea to bring a satellite uplink, provide services to the students at a small upmark in your costs, and use the earnings to pay for your own bandwidth use?
Alternatively set up a proxy;
Charge the others for their used bandwidth, on their side of the connection. If two people download the same URL, you're charging them twice, leaving earnings to cover your own use.
Be honest with them about that though, so nobody feels cheated.
Another thing to consider is to go to a satellite provider and simply ask if they want to provide you with equipment and/or some bandwidth for free, or at a reduced cost. It's a great way for them to market themselves to the 600 students, which throughout their careers might need a similar service, and guess which provider they'd think of first? Surely the one that helped them out when they were students.
The three options can be combined offcourse. If you can borrow equipment for free, get slightly lower bandwidth fees, and a flexible payment plan, so you don't get stuck with a huge bill, you could be set for the duration. :)
Terje Elde
Surgemail Mail server supports Blogging via email. You may want to check it out. For personal use 5 user system it is free.
http://www.netwinsite.com/
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
You're welcome.
davejenkins.com |
Technically: you say "messages under a megabyte with no attachments" and ask for "a way to send photos (encode them as text?)". That's UUCP. Setting up a mail/web server that receives a mail with text followed by uuencoded images and posts that to a blog if and only if there's a password in the header or subject sounds like a 50-line perl script.
However, you don't say that you get to take your own computer along; if you can't do that a lot of your options are shot.
Socially? My advice: live with it. Make a website later. Make the most of the cruise, spend time on your homework^Wcabinwork. OK I'm extrapolating, I know Internet access at sea is extremely expensive and that that's probably the reason for the restrictions, but it probably isn't a good idea to spend time circumventing your Internet restrictions to update your blog while the guys who devised said restrictions to get you weaned off your Internet addiction are wondering why you're not socializing ;-)
Amateur radio ticket + HF QRP Rig + TNC + Dipole + Ocean = RTTY and AMTOR all night.
A data transfer protocol described numerous times...
send messages in a bottle! Seems to work, search Slashdot for rubberduck stories!
http://www.automatiq.se
Now, before you leave, and see how it works for you. Disclaimer: have not tried it myself; googled it.
http://emailweb.us/
body massage!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In essence, you want what used to be the norm back in the BBS days - queued up mail.
Actually, this is still the way email works. It's just that, with the connection always up, you never see stuff waiting around in your outbox anymore as it gets sent right away.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There is a free email option. It requires a HAM license (note: morse code is not required anymore) and a SSB transmiter and a hundred foot antenna. A good SSB unit is around a thousand bucks.
It is only for text based non-commercial emails but functions anywhere (under most weather conditions).
Doesn't sound like a solution for a students desire to surf the web for free anywhere/anytime but email is available and pervasive just about anywhere.
Well.....
I'm probably going to get laughed at, but so what. This is /. ....
If you are using a GUI-based system, you have no chance in Hell of trying to stay within the time constraints. Pictures are large, no matter what compression scheme you are going to use. T-mobile is expensive. Satellite is even more expensive (last I checked, it was about USD 10.00/Min).
Get a text-based e-mail (mail in *NIX). That sends EVERYTHING in ascii. Nice and small, but picture attachments are still HUGE, especially if you have a high-res camera. If you have the skilz, go with a *NIX OS and cron the e-mail to send after you update your blog file locally (grab the copy and send it every other day or so. For the big stuff, run into the Internet Cafe at what ever port you are in and send the pics off of a thumb drive. ...my $0.02...
rental a satellite phone or satellite terminal.
I think you can find a satellite terminal for about $10/day and $7 or so per MB. So let's say you are at sea for eight weeks, or 56 days. Assuming about $20/day (a bit more than 1MB per day), it's going to cost about $1,120, which isn't bad at all if it really is important to you. I imagine business is bad so you might be able to talk them down for publicity purposes.
Other solutions probably take more time than you want to spend. The obvious one would be to get your Ham license. It'd take time, cost about the same, but then you'd have your license and the related equipment. Alternatively, I've looked at self-contained container tracking units that have a limited telemetry transmission capability. Imagine sending your data as a series of SMS messages spaced apart every ten minutes or so. That's enough to update your blog, but you aren't going to be able send anything but the lowest res pictures in less than a day.
You could probably find a satphone rental for less money, which is intermediate in cost and capacity. You can send data at something like 2KBaud, but you'll have to work the details to see whether you come out ahead for your planned transmissions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here be Pirates.
Get a flash drive and download Portable firefox. With that you can run adblock, noscript, and all of the other wonderful firefox extensions you like. Make sure you turn off images as well. You can definitely get a TON of internet browsing using only text.
internet through email proxy. i wonder if instructions exist on how to set this up yourself so these operators aren't monitoring everything you do.
also many of the sites listed are very (very) old.
A couple I Know just completed a world tour and used this site I believe its free. Sound like a great learning holiday have fun. http://www.getjealous.com/
and you will have enough Internet spewing all over the place for everyone!
[n][i][n][e][d][i][c][e]
Let's see if I understand you correctly on the email thing, putting aside the 100 minutes of regular Internet access. The way it sounds, you can send and receive an unlimited amount of email messages, so long as each message is under one megabyte in size. It also sounds like this is probably not a web-based email, because if it were, you could access the rest of the web. So this is what you should do if you have some time available to you prior to the commencement of this voyage. You should hack up a tun device that sends each packet as a single email message to a specified email address, or converts an email message received from this address back into a packet. Then you run OpenVPN and have it use this hacked tun device. You set up a computer at your or someone's home and in addition to running this tun device and OpenVPN on it, you also install packet forwarding rules that NAT the "normal" interface over to the tun interface. You set up OpenVPN accordingly on your laptop. It will probably be very slow, but the advantages are that you will have an unlimited amount of access through this system, and you will be able to access any part of the Internet through this system that you would be able to access from your home. And if it works, it would make a good magazine article for Linux Journal, too.
The severing of your electronic tethers is a luxury not to be taken lightly, my friend. Relax and enjoy the ocean breeze and various ports of call.
You might want to check out sailblogs. It allows you to blog with a few nice travel related extras such as your gps location if that info is available to you, and I think it's pretty friendly to limited bandwidth issues.
as a professional captain,
a personal bgan terminal is around $1000
it does work under way at sea, just needs a little alignment when the ship moves.
then all the broadband you want. for $6/Mb.
the ship is probably using similar connections (sold as FleetBroadband with a stabilized antenna) all run by inmarsat, they're just paying the bulk rate, which works out to around $3/Mb instead.
or you could spend your time with a captive audience of college girls by the pool.
I'd go for option #2
Richard Stallman has already figured out how to surf the web via email:
"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."
http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Org
instead of fetching wiki pages throughout the trip you should consider downloading the entire site onto your laptop. the content won't be up to date but for the most part it won't be that outdated either. i believe the entire corpus is under 5 gigs.
I can't help with the majority of your question but as far as maintaining a blog, look into Posterous, really easy to set up an account and you can update it through email as well as have it automatically forward your updates to other various services.
Get the cruise line to install a descent high-speed internet antenna. Cost for a super-fancy rig, (specifically, a 2.4meter C-band steerable stabilized antanna) installed, is about $150,000, and Bandwidth and service charges are not cheap. However, this is one heck of a lot cheaper than the setup they currently have (which sounds like old-fashioned Inmarsat.)
$150,000/600 = 1500/6=$250. At $10/mo per student, you have $6000/mo for bandwidth charges.
If the cruise line is reasonable, they will not force your group to carry the whole cost of the antenna: after all, they will keep using it after you guys leave. In addition, the ship can move a lot of its current traffic from the expensive Inmarsat (pay-by-the-minut) service to the much cheaper (fixed cost by bandwidth) service, and actually save a bunch of money. $6000/mo should buy about 6Mbps, continuous. Not good for 600 people doing movies, but way the heck better than nothing.
One such service is Intelsat NBS.
There rae cheaper services that use Ku-band, but these are subject to rain fade, which can be a problem at sea.
I am not sure of the range but you might be able to set up a packet radio at home and be able to pick it up at least part of the way course this would require a an outlay of cash as well as a shortwave license. My guess is it would be slow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio Give it a try...it clocks a blazing 1200 bps yes, that's bits
There is life without the Internet.
Learn how the human race lived during the last century - get a short-wave radio and some good books and discover for yourself how a simple life can be a deeply satisfying life.
What?
Not to threadjack, but this is related...
A friend of mine is stationed in Iraq with a similar problem. I went looking to see if there was something here I could buy and ship there so that he would have something more than just enough time and resources to send a couple of mails a day.
The only thing I could find was a compay called TS2 Satellite, they want 4K for their equipment and then about $900/mo for service. I mean I love the guy but I can't shell out that kind of dough (especially as he's there till Dec)
Anyone know of any other solutions?
Hope they have an STD clinic on board. 600 students stuck on a cruise liner...
Get a HAM radio license and a portable radio (like the VX-7R or whatever works for you).
While you likely wont be able to make worldwide contacts (unless you bring a 30+ meter long antenna with you as well), you should be able to contact many people while you are near the shore.
Believe me, it's much more interesting than surfing the web. And in case of an emergency, you have some means of backup communication.
About blogging: Don't blog. At least not "online". If you really want to blog (a some sort of diary), do it offline but spend as little time as possible on it; just take quick notes. When the semester is over, take that notes, refine them into articles and release them part-by-part over some time. This way, you don't waste precious time of your semester AND you have much more leisure time to really release refined articles.
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
If you decide to try any of the things suggested, remember that shipboard power can be rather, ah, interesting. There may be restrictions on what can be connected, and/or on how much power can be used. That second one may be no big deal, but shipboard power and electronics do not always play nicely together.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Maybe I'm getting old, but we used to use a nifty thing called uuencode back in the usenet days.
You can send any file you like via a text-only medium.
I don't know of any implementation that will automatically decode it and post to a blog for you, but
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to create with the proper skill set...
or a buddy on the other side to decode and post it for you.
Have a safe and productive journey!
=-D
uuencode - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencode
you'll have to ask for something and get it converted into several messages of text, save it and uudecode it back to it's binary format.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
With the size of microSD these days, you might be able to send really big packets too...
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Hi:
Why don't you forgo internet access and just immerse yourself in the experience?
Just get a HAM license, and use WINLINK/AIRMAIL and you can have all the free email you want.
http://www.winlink.org/
http://hamradio.arc.nasa.gov/meetings/HFradioatsea.html
You can run winlink over HF using any HF radio ($200+) and a decent wire antenna on the ship.
Its very popular for sea and also use in remote locations by Missionaries in Africa etc..
You can also use APRS to do automatic position reporting for your ship over HF Radio as well and your family would be able to track your location on a map. http://www.findu.com/
There are also various 'nets' where people all get together on a particular frequency and exchange messages etc. HAM's sill provide national message traffic passing services (Aka TELEGRAMS) for health and welfare messages for people. This is one of the main function that HAM's provide for RedCross, disaster locations etc.
You can come to the net and pick up and messages, and send a telegram to any family friends via HF voice.
http://www.cruiser.co.za/radionet.asp
Amateur(HAM) Radio is a very very valuable addition to worldwide boating activities.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Someone mentioned GlobalStar, but their satellites are failing... Iridium is the only "decent" sat-phone right now for this hemisphere, although there are other options in the Eastern hemisphere.
Slow, about 9600baud, and expensive (spend $2000 or so for phone and a year's of service), but works everywhere...
I know you probably don't have $2K to blow, so if you can really send emails of 1MB (no attachments), learn how to make "embedded attachments" the ol' fashion way... (uuencode)...
and learn to appreciate WAP/text HTML... if you get close to the shore, you should be able to roam onto GSM networks with GPRS data. Try www.riiing.com or www.prepaidgsm.net for GSM data worldwide (you'll need a quadband GSM phone unlocked).
As someone who provides satellite internet access to all manner of land- and sea-faring vessels I can offer special insight into how easy it is to rectify your problem.
All you have to do is quickly finish off that degree. But be quick because the US Navy's Officer Candidate School takes 12 weeks and you need to get in and out of that before that new semester starts. While that's going on you need to win over as many people on Congress as you can. Your best bet is to start an internet campaign before joining. Then when you get out you can have Congress rush through your appointment to admiral. Two-star at least.
It's that simple.
Once you've gotten through all that you're pretty much guaranteed a decent internet connection throughout your travels. Unless someone like me accidentally pulls a patch cable or something (which was an unfortunate accident and given the involved general's reaction not one I'm likely to repeat).
Direct away from face when opening.
Your sig is pretty interesting. Did you really mean it to be ironic? The kool - aid meme is in reference to Jonestown, where kool aid laced with poison was distributed to the cult members to kill them. If you drank the kool - aid and want some more, then the first batch must not have been laced with poison and you're probably not in a cult.
Don't get me wrong, Some Obama supporters often demonstrate a cult like adherence to Obama, but he is not a Cult Leader. He won't give them Kool Aid laced with Poison. Maybe Tax cuts, but not Poison.
But, then again Anti Obama people also demonstrate Cult like behavior as well. Anythign he does is evil. Anything he doesn't do is Evil. And he hasn't even done anything at all yet. So as long as he doesn't tell people not to drink Kool Aid laced with Poison, they'll be okay.
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/
If you think you'll need it, get a recent static copy. Most things you will look up won't change much over a few months.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I think you'll find that even if you do get an email to web gateway working, you'll get caught due to higher than average data usage. Bare this in mind, and try to make friends with what ever passes for a sys admin at sea. As I'm sure you'll have to sign some crazy internet usage form. On another note if they've opened a port for email, there's probably a way to get around the firewall. I doubt it'd be very advanced. But as every one else says, it probably better to concern yourself with getting laid.
This won't get you more internet access, but here is a site that lets you embed files in ASCII art. You could send the ASCII art as text in the e-mails and your family could "decrypt" them on the other end. You might be able to grab their code somehow and use it offline so you don't burn your internet minutes uploading files to it.
Depending on exactly how the net connection and sign in system work, you might be able to tunnel net access through DNS. It worked for me on a cruise I took this summer, but I can't guarantee it will work for you.
For more info, go to http://dnstunnel.de/
If you're really a geek you could try finding a wifi hotspot when you close to a port with a cantenna. The biggest issues with wifi over long distances are obstructions. Your boat should always be pointed in the general direction of a port, so sit at the front with a Pringles can and hope for an open router.
FYI: Back in the day we could get webpages via email. I think all of those services are down right now, but I'm sure anyone could rebuild a web app to do just that.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I went on Semester at Sea in 1997 before the internet was available on the ship. I have to underscore what so many people have been posting -- focus on the experience while you are having it and share it when you return. Snail mail addresses of the ports of call are available ahead of time and it makes it enriches the experience to receive and send a physical letter. I would recommend keeping a journal (or local blog) and then creating a website upon your return. Friends and family will still be interested!
As an alumni I had to opportunity to voyage from the Bahamas to New York on the new ship this past summer. Let me tell you that internet access is slow and spotty. I do credit the administrators that they allow the wifi only to be in a few public spaces so that students will not be holed up in their cabins.
Have a great trip -- it was one of the best experiences of my life!
How about you get everyone on board to band together and build a giant http proxy so everyone get to benefit. You could load your local wikipedia copy there as well.
hey its worth a shot.
You're going to be so busy scamming squirrel that you're not going to care about internet. Take advantage of the time away, disconnect man, simplify.
You're going to be on a ship with ~300 girls. Get your priorities straight!
Send select pictures embedded in email. Save rest to snail mail or email from Internet cafe.
Test your website thoroughly before you leave.
100 minutes disappear if you are not organized. Use these minutes sparingly.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Use the opportunity wisely. Soak up the new experiences. DOn't be one of those fools that travel halfway around the world to sit in a McDonalds or an internet cafe.
Forget about the internet, email, wikipedia etc.They'll all still be there when you're done.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Check out this link here: Airtime pricing and this link: Equipment Rental. That's not the exact unit I've worked with (I have a Hughes 9250 tracking BGAN antenna sitting right to my left at the moment) but it should do ya.
Let me break the cost down for you approximately:
Total:$2820 for four months of basic internet anywhere in the world.
In conclusion: what you want is not cheap at all. I suggest you man up and keep a journal - you know, paper?
http://angryee.blogspot.com
There's still lots of ways to access stuff online via email.
FTP by mail, web browsing by mail, so on, so forth. It will take some experimentation to find out which (if any) of these services are able to avoid using MIME attachments and just uuencode files into the body of the message. And then, it's still a quick Perl hack away for you or a geekier friend to produce a filter turns MIME attachments into inlined uuencode...
I used to do this a long time ago, with (of all things) dial-up WWIVnet. Send a carefully-prepared email, wait a few days, get the data you've asked for. I imagine it's probably a great deal quicker than that these days.
Kid-proof tablet..
You have the option of using a phone/internet prepaid calling card available through a number of vendors. The vendors work with INMARSAT so that all of the charges go to your card and not to the vessel. Look for companies like GlobeWireless, Vizada, Singtel and others to see what they offer. However, for getting online⦠the type of satcom equipment onboard will strongly impact your abilities. If they are offering internet you can bet that it's going to be slow (less than 128k but probably 64). And that's usually SHARED with all the ships in your footprint so your speeds are usually in the 20's. While there are dedicated ISDN channels and newer broadband packages using the FB500 or VSAT terminals these are usually more expensive to install and maintain and have higher per-minute charges so you may not find these fat pipes onboard your ship. I'm not sure about wi-fi that people mention... you're not going down the Mississippi are you? You won't get wifi except right near shore anyway. HF? You don't have a license and the ship is not going to allow you to install equipment. ABS regulations aren't going to allow your to run cables or penetrate Class A bulkheads either so the folks mentioning that are clueless. My recommendation (as an 18 year career sailor and IT professional) is to stick with phone calls. You'll get more 'content' via a phone call than spending your money trying to upload data. When you get to port you can usually find some sort of café to do any internet surfing you may need. And like some people have said... you are on a ship. Get off the damn internet, quick blogging about every fart you make and enjoy the ride.
I thought it was a TV show in the late 90's....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_High
Also it sucked. This was the budding (or spawning) location of a Mr. Ryan Gosling.
In 1998 my friend Bernie and I took a cruise on Holland America's MS Statendam to view the solar eclipse off the coast of Curacao. We planned to broadcast a live webcam over the internet. The ship radio charges would have been charged by the time that we kept the radio busy, not bandwidth or "connect" time. The Statendam radio man agreed to let us use the radio for free because it would have been very expensive. Twice we spent hours rehearsing, trying to call my dialup Netcom account, but I failed. We had radio problems, modem problems and ISP problems.
I understand that ham radio operators can probably lend you a lot of help. I guess you should get a license and get up to speed.
Be wary of your location when making a ship-to-shore internet connection. Some countries consider it a serious crime.
There's no content on the page you linked to. There's only a reference to some binary object; no text, no links.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/05/diy_portable_wikipedia.html
Four months? Bah. I went for about 20 years without internet access, and I survived just fine.
JJ
You might want to check out twitter.com. It has low bandwidth and works using mail and sms messages. You'll have to pare down on photos but it would be good to send snapshots and links to where you currently are. Chances are the 100 minutes are for usig their PCs. (You might not get WLAN or laptop access for your machine. There's probably a business center where you'll have to do everything. That being said do take a vacation from the net. If this is a good cruise you'll be too busy for sending hourly updates to the blog. :0
Government officials have noticed that wildness permits and park attendance has been dropping the past couple decades. Travel costs and fees haven't increased on an income-adjustment basis. Plus with the increased interest in green and ecology you'd thing people would go there more. The most believable reason offered is that young people are so wired into phones, the network, games, etc. that they dont want to be off the grid for the time it takes to visit the backcountry.
Get hamradio operator with multimode HF trx and Pactor modem. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACTOR and http://www.winlink.org/ Working email at any place.
Just include the uuencoded text in the body then.
Do not underestimate the value of snail mail in a situation like this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I've heard tales of an ancient form of communication that used small slabs of tree fiber carried by occasionally tempermental human beings. You can use an antiquated stylus-like device, which instead of selecting icons or doing script recognition on touchscreens of today, they leave behind a quasi-permanent colored marking on the tree fiber substrate, and these glyphical markings can serve to contain the message you would like to send. These tree fiber substrates are capable of including graphic attachments on one side, and hte mesage on the opposite side of the slab. They are often pre-encoded with a selection of graphics to choose from, and sometimes you can create a substrate encoded with a graphic of your own creation using a device able to translate your digital imagery files into the pigmentious container format which is compatible with the wood fiber slab. You will likely need to include a second attachment to these messages, in the form of a second, but smaller slab of wood fiber, a kind of wood-fiber-slab tax which the occasionally tempermental human transporters require, without this second attachment file then you risk your message and other attachments being lost in a sort of delivery black hole. You may have to search for an acceptable terminal which is compatible with sending messages in this format, and these terminals may not always be available to you. But the ancients once used such laughable methods with great success, so it may be somewhat usable for you as well.
I do consultant for alot of DoD, oil and gas and other government agencies. I would recommend you take alook at INMARSAT BGAN terminal as a vaild option, they have pay as you go plans and the Sat unit is about the size of a 15" MACBOOK Pro. With that size you can get unfiltered access to the internet at a little less then 512kb. You should make sure you will be inside of the covrage area.......
Being a former sailor I have personal experience with this issue. Bottom line, it sucks. There are very few options available to you, aside from setting up your own system. The idea of wget might work the best, but you would always be waiting for that reply email. The idea of some kind of HAM system is another good idea. I've heard there are HAM systems set up that are used for internet for wide areas and are used during hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Opening web pages with internet that comes in and out(as the waves rock the ship back and forth) is almost impossible. There's ALOT of packet loss and basic timeouts. I'm talking sometimes as high as 50% packet loss, and latency over 2500ms. Honestly, if you can design a system to interact via email, that's your best option because your emails will always get to you... eventually. Downloading a webpage that times out means reloading the page, where the same problem will probably haunt you again and again. Find as many web pages as you can that have as few pictures as possible(that's what will kill your surfing abilities). You want webpages that utilize as few data connections as possible.
Even downloading a 10MB file on the ship while underway was completely out of the question. You were lucky if you could actually view the whole page. If you want files emailed to you and you can't accept attachments, look into something similar to what newsgroups uses. The yEnc(or whatever the common ones are) would come in handy here.
I just accepted that I wasn't going to get my slashdot addiction satisfied while underway. I had my g/f email me the slashdot articles sometimes, or whatever stuff she found on cnn.com that she thought I'd like.
Good luck and enjoy your cruise!
You can find ways to encode most anything over text only "no attachments" email.
Even if you're using a central terminal to send from, you might be able to plug in a USB
stick flash drive or something to be able to copy/paste the message contents from/to.
In that case you could just prepare pre-encoded (e.g. UUENCODEd RAR archives) messages
which are split into sub 1MB size encoded pieces on a convenient PDA/netbook/laptop/server and then copy the ASCII text of the messages as the "body" text of your email.
There are email proxied methods to do things like post to blogs (as others have mentioned), and even email mode access to FTP files and such (though you might need to modify the setup a bit to get them to send the files as non-attachments).
Finding a good deal on cellular data e.g. the blackberry / t-mobile / international roaming options mentioned above is a good idea. Maybe some places offer prepaid calling cards that can also be used to get a good deal on the data charges. Check on howardforums.com forums I'd imagine that people there would know of about every possible deal that would be applicable to your locales. I have heard of the t-mobile international roaming option mentioned above, though, previously from that site, so it probably isn't a bad option. I'm a bit surprised it's listed in conjunction with blackberries, though. maybe it is a BB specific plan, I forget. The point is, though, that you'd probably find more flexibility of programs and I/O options on an Android phone these days than many blackberries, assuming attractive rate plans are offered equally for both.
Anyway the option that I can add that I haven't seen mentioned is using radio modems with the amateur radio service. Depending on your location and equipment / usage choices you could transmit data over short distances (dozens of miles) over VHF/UHF directly to local (coastal?) repeater stations which may exist in range when you're close to land. With the appropriate antenna and gear you could use free satellites for packet mode radio connections over UHF/VHF or HF which would work almost anywhere at sea of course. You could also with the appropriate choice of gear / frequencies use HF to directly communicate over hundreds or thousands of miles and use digital packet transmissions and/or voice. You'd need an amateur radio license from your country of citizenship, which generally are trivially easy to get. For the USA it's just a multiple choice question test with a few dozen questions and the question pools (questions AND correct answers) being public information you can study in advance of taking the test.
You'd also have to do it in a way that is permitted by the ship's captain, but that's just as true as any other activity you might undertake aboard ship -- don't get in the way / be a nuisance and I'm sure it'd be fine. You'd have to constrain yourself to sending information that isn't indecent/obscene (no porn surfing) and not conduct business over it (don't be running ebay auctions), and realize that the contents of your messages might be heard/seen by others (probably not much worse privacy than using a cell phone or university email these days).
In the USA a 'Technician' license will get you any UHF/VHF privileges, useful for point to point transmissions to a repeater within dozens of miles, or useful for satellite access in some cases.
If you get a 'General' license (just a dozen or so slightly more complex test questions than for the Technician one) you can use most HF frequencies as well to allow you more world-wide direct communications.
http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/pools.html
http://www.eham.net/exams/
http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/license-requirements.html
http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/examsearch.phtml
For $14 (IIRC the current test fee) and about 3 hou
Provided you have a right software (proxy at home and custom network device driver on the other end), you can translate virtually any communication to pure text e-mails. However, it would be quite slow and it would take a while to create.
I'd say your biggest concern will be how you will procure enough penicillin for that voyage.
Blogger allows you to email your blogs in and it will publish them as if you had posted them via the web interface. Simply add an allowed email address (your school email addy in this case) and blog away. As for internet, you'll survive.
You have unlimited access to e-mail?
Design or reuse protocols that push X over e-mail. Back in the day, services would essentially perform FTP or HTTP over e-mail. You don't need attachments -- uuencode data and use or create your own in-email attachment description. (This was done before attachment handling was standardized in mail clients.) E-mail size is not a problem, simply chop data up into less-than-1-MB pieces and rejoin them at the other end. (This is still done with newsgroups.) Set up your own server that is not limited to respond to your by-mail queries.
All of your problems have been solved in the past. :-)
include standard legal_disclaimer 'Informational Only'
I would get a good quality directional wireless antenna and point it at the coast at all times. An 18dB-24dB antenna will find wireless for miles away. Use Netstumbler to find unprotected networks and connect up. You could even do double nat and have a router connect to the wireless network, then you can use the local router for other people's PC's, if they are allowed on board. Sell them internet access for when it is available. /disclaimer
Make friends with one of the RA people. They get unlimited internet. If I remember correctly, the source of the internet was wifi through their personal computers, not public ones, but I could be wrong.
We used to use it back in the free Juno dialup email days in the early '90s. We figured out how big to make each block and then just pasted it into the email client. It may take several emails messages to send it all but it worked really well back then!
These guys seem reasonably cheap, but still a bit on the pricey side.
http://www.outfittersatellite.com/bgan_overview.htm
Keyhole and compuserv jokes aside, there's a long tradition of methods to access the Internet via email, with (at least, 10+ years ago) some good systems set up. You might browse http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/ and see what's still available.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Google search URL Wash. I have this as an AJAX control on my iGoogle. It lets you view a page with just the text and links. No graphics.
This could save you a lot on bandwidth usage on pages where you are really only after the text content.
IIRC, you will be at sea for 1 day and in port for 7. There are plenty of internet cafe's in Europe and you could adjust to having to study for 1 entire day without an internet connection.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Not in every culture. Look up the origin of the phrase "son of a gun." A couple of hundred years ago,some (especially British) warships used to bring pro-hos along for the ride. The gun deck, outside of battle, was usually deserted. You should be able to put the rest together for yourself.
Have not tried it myself, but it gets "hyped" right now, it might be good: http://posterous.com/
Mobile Satellite Internet might be an option depending on the coverage and finding a place on-board with a view of the sky. Heck, they even have suitcase models.
You didn't specify if money was an issue. If not, what about a satellite phone?
http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350
Not fast, but works anywhere. The Globalstar network would also have data modems, but their coverage isn't as extensive as Iridium (lacks in southern areas and some ocean areas.
No one yet has suggested that you bring your own PC and wireless hub!
Think of the all the crap you could sell!
1) E-mail addresses
2) Nethack
3) IRC
4) Blogs
If you wanna go high tech get a pico cell and sell everyone SMS access so they can text each
other or twit (via your twitter) clone.
Just because you aren't addicted to the net is no reason to not sell access to your simulacrum.
Since when is messages-under-a-megabyte a serious constraint in "staying in contact"?
You've got to realize that you're on a ship. It's not going to have a fiber (or even a 10baseT copper cable) to anywhere, so the limitations are real. It's not like The Man is fucking with you by imposing ridiculous constraints. The only technical solution that truly fixes all your problems and gives you the multimedia contact that you apparently (and strangely) "need", involves launching more satellites and/or building more antennas.
You could try to make a 1 meg attachment, and that could be the zip file containing all the text to all your friends in sms format, that could be sent to a central server, that ends up sending your text messages all at once.
This of course would have to be done, although I think the software already exists on sourceforge
Tumblr blogs are great for updating without using an actual web interface. We used them for a 24-hour play festival. We had a photographer emailing pictures in, we used twitter to add blog updates. We were going to roll our own, but tumblr had pretty much everything we needed.
If the cruise ship has a sprint network on board, a kindle would give you access to wikipedia and e-mail. It even has a primitive web browser. since it's a kindle all the wireless charges were included in the price of the device.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
Pool your minutes with other students, minimize redundant messages. Where you are, big shipboard events, etc only have to be posted once.
Put everything on a thumb drive ready for upload to your favourite social network and borrow online time when you hit port.
Focus on the purpose of the cruise and use your minutes for emergencies.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
How about you forget about obsessively blogging every minute of the day and just, you know, enjoy the cruise. Maybe even socialize a bit.
You never know, you might even end up talking to members of the opposite sex.
No sig today...
You're going to be away at sea for four months with a bunch of college-aged people of the opposite sex, visiting exotic locations and all you can think about is internet access?
I know it's cliche, I know it's oh-so-70's, but does the term "Love Boat" mean anything to you?
Perhaps. The OED first has the phrase used in 1708, but not "explained" as due to being conceived or born on a gun-deck until 1867.
Do you understand the concept of spending a semester at sea? It doesn't sound like it. You don't NEED to update an hourly blog of your experience. You don't NEED to post 50 pics a day to your facebook/myspace/bebo/whatever account. You're not going to die if you don't hear about Freddie's new car 15 seconds after he gets it. It sounds like you still get all the email you want once you've used up your "internet" access. And up to a meg each? WTF are you freaked out about? You can still keep in touch with friends and family. You can still send the occasional snapshot.
If being away from the computer/phone/sms for a few months will send you into convulsive fits, take a smaller first step.
I'm serious. 99% of all blog traffic is just other bloggers looking to see who linked to what.
They are not reading what you write. they don't find you intresting. they find you useful as another link they can post to their own blog to continue the endless circle jerk.
You will be at sea. across the world. with women your own age... and YOU WANT TO BLOG?!?!?!?
dude. what the fuck is wrong with you? no, i'm serious.... it's a question you really need to get answered.
and NOT this one you posted. this question, while intresting in itself. is entirely stupid for your situation.
go, enjoy, have fun. stop wasting your time producing endless useless text.
cap:unheeded
hey. its right once again. you won't listen.
Internet cafes are useful, but beware: many European internet cafes use completely gimped terminals that srsly affect your ability to do anything useful at all, except browse. I went to some place in Hamburg once that denied me access to gmail, I mean, wtf. If you happen to be calling anyplace in China, then you can pick up extremely cheap USB dongles with SIM cards that apparently allows pretty good access--some even work in other places. I've never bought one, but I have used one to talk on Skype for over five hours before.
Last time I was on a RCI cruise (who I think runs Semester at Sea) "someone" just got an IP on wi-fi through DHCP when connecting, and did a quick scan of the subnet. The scan yielded a few PC's that looked like they would need unlimited access (named things like "karaoke machine" or "registerdeck10") and the person set his IP to one close to those machines that had unlimited access. Worked like a charm about 1.5 years ago and should still work if IT at RCI hasn't figured out setting a block of IP's with free unlimited access isn't the most secure method to get more of your $.
That same someone I was with managed to tell his favorite bartender about it (who then used it to call his family whenever he was on ships working 6 months at a time) and scored free drinks for the rest of the cruise.
Bring a high-gain directional wifi antenna and card that can use it. Many ports will have a local entrepreneur running some kind of pay-for wireless isp near the cruise ship dock. It might cost you $5-10 per day but you will be able to move a lot of data. I've done this even without an external antenna, simply placing the computer near a window on the ship but the antenna will help ensure that if a service is out there, you can connect to it.
Regardless, thanks for the lesson! Hanging out with native Chinese has really opened my eyes as to the vagaries of languages, and how ensconced they are in shared experiences, and how clueless outsiders may be to the meanings of non-literal phrases.
Then get yourself a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. A small watercolour box, and some good brushes.
KIll the idea of the Blog and instead do a proper log. Create a little work of art that you will be able to look back on in 20 years time. It'll be much cooler. Really.
There are plenty of Internet and Email at sea options that don't require the cost of INMARSAT nor an amateur radio (ham) license. AFAIK, they do require the vessel to have a marine HF license, but your boat may already have one. They all use HF radio to move data around and should be enough to update a blog or get emails, but don't expect real-time interaction. Check these out: - SailMail (sailmail.com) - XNet (xnetmail.com) - Global Link (gln-network.com) - Globe Wireless (globewireless.com) - CruiseEmail (cruiseemail.com) --mco
How much does a SATphone cost? Could you set up a private enterprise cafe on board? Would students pay for extra time?
Actually, have fun and meet people in person.
Welcome to the club! I'm a Spring 07 alum, and probably the biggest geek onboard during my voyage. Although all the ideas presented here are interesting, you want to be realistic: Satellite internet coverage is expensive, and using your phone as a internet device can rack up global charges very quickly. (I work for a cell phone company and you have no idea how many times I run into bills with thousands of global charges) If you're a true addict like me, you can purchase more internet time through the purser's desk on the ship. It is EXTREMELY expensive ($250 for 400 minutes I believe) and slow as hell. The only time you get a decent speed is when everyone is sleeping (and not hogging the bandwidth), making even VOIP possible. I accrued $2500 in internet charges on my AmEx that took me a few months to pay back. (I have an excellent job that pays my tuition, so it wasn't a huge deal for me) The other real option, that everyone will be doing, is to visit internet cafes in port during your downtime. There isn't a whole lot of downtime when you're exploring a foreign country on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but when there is (ex. immediately after a field excursion, waiting to depart from an hotel/airport, recovering from a big lunch, etc), internet cafes around the world are very inexpensive. Just be careful of all the malware/keyloggers that could be on there - bring along a USB drive with a secure brower or a bootable OS CD if you'll be doing anything important (like checking your bank statement). Check out my voyage blog http://www.alexsong.com/sasblog/
You're going to have to adapt to what sounds like a connectionless environment -- or at least one that's more like having a 1200K dial up modem atmosphere. I'd suggest exploring older technologies not even excluding print and snail mail. My first thought was uuencode which I used successfully to ship megabyte files to and from a site that was literally half-way around the globe and had nothing but dial up access with a 20K limit on each email (no attachments). We would begin with a zip archive then uuencode the archive and send the emails. On receipt the first email was the input to uudecode which could follow the chain to the end and reconstruct the original zip. It sometimes took a few days but that was far faster than sneaker net via floppy diskette and air mail.
DOn't be one of those fools that travel halfway around the world to sit in a McDonalds or an internet cafe.
I'll agree w/ your statement on McD's but not necessarily on internet cafes. Many internet cafes have a lot of character. The seediest ones are the most interesting. You get to see what people in other countries are doing with their computers.
That said, queue up the stuff that you want to send on your flash drive before you arrive, and download the stuff you want to read for the long boat ride later. Don't spend too much time there.
Ok, take this from a former voyager (Spring 2007 Voyage)
the internet minutes that you start with go by fast. you can buy more minutes, expensive though, it used to be 40 cents a minute.
Wikipedia was free along with several other educational sites.
trick to checking e-mail is to use somthing along the lines of a POP3 account and syncing then signing off and writing the responses offline then signing in briefly to send it.
if you have any questions regarding SAS or things of the such, search for the group on facebook, they are more than happy to answer questions.
Back in 1994/1995 I used to browse the web via email. There was a service called "Agora" which worked like this, more or less: You'd send email to agora@xxx.yyy.edu (can't remember the address) with lines like "GET http://xxx.yyy.com". You'd get the html or text in an email reply. Perhaps you can dig out the agora software (or rewrite it) and set it up in a server somewhere.
Perhaps you should be a bit less concerned about the internets for a while. It's just one semester. Your friends and family will be there when you return. Well, most of them.
I advise (since you asked) that you spend a lot less time thinking about the technological challenges of life at sea, and a lot more time thinking about the social challenge of getting into the pants of your schoolmates (or instructors, if the mood strikes). You're only going to be young once. There will be lots of time for techie fussing later.
Live, damn you... LIVE!!! That's the true educational value of a semester at sea.
But I have sailed from San Fran to Hawaii, Annapolis to Bermuda, Rhode Island, and Florida, and delivered a 19 foot sail boat from Nort Carolina to New Jersey. Plus I spent a few weeks on a Navy destroyer at sea as a contractor supporting missile defense tests.
Now, that is not dodging crab pots and hooks on 35 foot swells while freezing my ass off, but it is enough to say that yes, indeed, SaS sounds like heaven.... esp the unplugged part.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Like the tradition on usenet, You can use uuencode to send any binary file as plain text.
Rsync can be a quick way to copy data, and supports compression and deltas. Run a local mysql db to support your blog, and rsync the db to your server. You may wish to do just a text version to avoid images.
Seriously. You don't need an Inet uplink. Or a computer. You *might* want to take one if it makes the books you need easyer to carry (read: in digital form).
Use the space you'd need for an outdoor computer for other usefull stuff. Like a camera, something to read or survival stuff.
The time on this trip will be over in no time. If you absolutely must, take a portable with solar panels along and do some coding.
Otherwise just write a diary. With a pen and paper.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Two options: (1.) wifi directional antenna (2.) sat-phone sub.
Option 1:
My advice is to get a nice directional wifi antenna. That way when you are in a port you can easily snoop the port for open wifi networks and get free internet. I will list three antennas of interest. They are ordered from best to worst gain ( dBi i.e. how much the antenna amplifies a weak signal )... or in terms of least to most practical ( i.e. how large the antenna is... do you have to mount it ).
(a.) 9 dBi gain, 6x3x3 inches, needs mounting, http://www.l-com.com/item.aspx?id=21852
(b.) 8 dBi, 4.5x4.5x1 inches, needs flat wall, http://www.l-com.com/productfamily.aspx?id=6300
(c.) 5 dBi, 6.5x1.0x0.2 inches, attaches to the back of a laptop, http://www.l-com.com/item.aspx?id=21330
I kind of like the smallest one the most because the datasheet shows it being attached to the back of laptop
---
Option 2:
Sign up for a sat-phone service that serves your part of the globe. Try: Inmarsat/ISat, Thuraya. You might be able to get a DECENT rate on a data plan. Expect a high price for any satellite access.
---
I am really interested in how it works out! At some point I plan on sailing around the world! So I would like to know what happens.
Sincerely,
Trevor
---
p.s. if you REALLY want to be cool go with one of the parabolic wifi antennas! Like this small 14 dBi, 10x10 inch http://www.l-com.com/productfamily.aspx?id=6150 parabolic
As I see it you have unlimited in/out emails.
So for example you could open an image with a plain text editor, send whatever is in there via email in 1mb chunks and whoever receives the emails can make a new file, paste the text you send him and see the image.
I'm not a programmer but I think that it wouldn't be impossible to automate the process in both sides, ie a server that upon receiving a link loads the page and then sends back the text/images/whatever in 1mb chunks and another on your pc that opens all these emails, merges them together and fianlly display them to you.
In the same context you could make a program that upon receiving a link updates your blog or whatever else you like.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
Use the Inmarsat Broadband-global-area-network - they just launched their 3rd satellite and is in the process of adjusting their orbit. By the end of feb. 2009 they will cover most of the earth. The largest solutions offers 462 Kbps
Only problem is that in order to access the network, you need a quite expensive terminal - thrane.com delivers nice ones - and even more expensive airtime.
In a similar situation as the original poster, I'm also looking for a blogging software (preferably Php) that can be updated by email. I should set up a specific email account, then the blog software connects to it via POP3 regularly and publishes what is received, in particular image attachments. Anyway that's the idea. Anybody has recommendations ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I've had my share of sailing, thanks god I wasn`t that deep in the net then ;-)
First - the cruise: this is a one in a lifetime experience and get the most out of it. in the case of internet communication, that means get to know the bridge guys, the navigating officers. They have the communications at their disposal, wherever and whatever the pay plan. if you want free time, look to befriend them in the "dead man's watch" - after 01AM local time in the darkness till ~05 in the morning. believe me, they would be happy to have some company and would gladly treat in some time in favor.
next: free WiFi in the ports - most definitely get a good Pringles-like pointed antenna. you might consider limiting yourself to a phone and sms messages, now that cruise ships usually have a roaming cell for GSM networks (even pricey, yet) - it is good for emergency calls and such, but not for blogging.
bring a lot of offline stuff to read and beat the boredom in the long passages and I mean a lot!
for the true junkie- get the BGAN or as the experienced fellas say - OFFLINE POP3 mail client.(thunderbird portable?)
when you are put in a non-real-time environment, you are forced to think and distill your answers and writings, thus making them better and also helps time pass faster (believe me, you'll have PLENTY).
Enjoy the different experience. Plan what to see in the ports you call.
If you are persistent and disciplined, keep a diary on daily basis, helps keep the head clear.
meet and interact with as many people as possible. after the 3rd month you'll be pissed off each other pretty much, but if you're aware of that symptom, you'll get over it quickly and it'll be a good lesson in HR.
explore yourself and the wonderful places you get to visit!
This is a true eyes-opener, don't spoil it just to keep being hooked to the net, beach-rats' way ;-)
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
yeah like he's got any chance, remember this guy posts on /.
Probably won't have much access at sea but when you get into port you can shove off a few emails and browse the web. I'd personally recommend a Blackberry.
What you're wanting to do is like ordering escargot in a French restaurant and smothering them in ketchup.
Of course escargot aren't that mush of a delicacy, the garlic sauce is there to cover up the taste of the snails (it does the same job as the ketchup) so I'd say a better analogy would be it's like ordering steak tartare "bien cuit".
The chances of it all still being active isn't high, but: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/
Iridium is the obvious answer. It's an LEO satellite system. That means the satellites fly low in the sky, at an altitude of around 500 miles. So, you don't need a directional antenna to reach it. It's also visible from everywhere on earth. Downside: expensive per minute and oh so painfully slow (2400 baud. Call it 10% of a modern modem).
http://iridiumclassic.com/service/iri_service-detail.asp?serviceid=18&method=direct2
While in port, you may be able to use a set of normal satellite Internet services like Dish. Faster. Cheaper. But it communicates with geostationary orbit at an altitude of 26,000 miles. This means you're hauling a great big dish onto the deck and spending 10 or 20 minutes aiming it before you can use it, and then you only have a prayer of success while actually in port where the ship's movement is, if you're lucky, within the fraction of a degree tolerance for the dish's aim. Also, each geostationary satellite system has a earthside footprint that it can see. You'd have evaluate which satellite systems reach which footprints where you're going to be.
http://www.mybluedish.com/
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Awww,.
Do the little kiddies need thier mommys?
F^@$ that, If I was on this trip, I'd say pissoff to the family, and mabee I'll contact them when I get back when I'm 45.
As to sending pictures something like this might be a solution
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
I checked out the SAS website, and they say "Email Service and Internet Access - Participants can access web-based email accounts, such as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. The technology fee charged to all students and lifelong learners provides 125 minutes of Internet access. Internet usage beyond 125 minutes will incur a charge on a per minute basis." So, he doesn't get cut off after 100 minutes. He gets 125 minutes, but he can pay for more. It's not as bad as he makes out.
I've seen several suggestions for avoiding the "no attachments" rule by sending base64-encoded data in plain text. This is essentially the same thing as a normal email attachment apart from some content-type headers.
Note that if your network admin really means "no email attachments" to indirectly limit your size, then saying "oh I know, I'll just send the whole thing as text/plain instead of multipart/related" is a technicality, and you should not be surprised if someone gets annoyed once they catch on. If they actively monitor your quota instead of blindly filtering out by header and size, they well might.
---
Over all, I'd suggest you get used to not being able to surf, and instead sign up for a news aggregator that sends you digest emails. Google Reader unfortunately doesn't support this, but there is surely some service that does.
If you can afford it, and I stress that, use a GPRS/UMTS enabled phone when close to port. It would be rather expensive, since you'll probably use a lot of carriers.
The phone bill may come as a shock.
blogger.com or blogspot.com allows you the setup and blog, and submit to it via a secret email address. yes those emails can include pictures, and you can set it to automatically post to your blog.
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41452
Brother Kurti
(1) pay an isp at home
(2) write a program which check via POP3 mail every
X minutes, and brokers your traffic
(3) Install a client end SMTP program which can send out information (optional if you type the email)...
(4) The posibilities are endless, your client could bind to 127.0.0.1 and all HTTP traffic could pass through there, write a simple parser which also CGI data to be stripped from URI for the hostname (for 1.1 server of course), and then a simple save HTML, sed to your server, and over the wire it goes, simple enough
strip some CGI on the out, and parse HTML on the in
your url would be like http://127.0.0.1:8080/?site=google.com
If your a C programmer I got all you need at
3dstoneage.com/dvd/src/
winner winner chicken dinner
Well, as a lot of people pointed out, you could just do research, party and enjoy the trip. If, on the other hand, you're starving for the internet, and are technically inclined then here's what you do:
1. Get every student to sign up to your "program" (via Facebook or something similar) - get their log ins.
2. Bring a 'server' box to cycle through user log ins.
3. Power the server to connect to the internet through the login page. Each connection lasts 100 minutes, then you cycle to another login.
4. Do that for about 8 hours a day
5. That gives everyone on the ship (via wifi) an uninterrupted (but shared!) browsing for about 125 days (4 months).
As others have recommended, don't waste your trip on the internet, use it wisely, love the trip sans technology.. you will be surprised.
Having said that, uuencode will let you send your pictures through email in plain text.
I'm in the Navy, and have spent many months at sea with internet access that is probably very comperable to what you are going to have (except that we were probably better off than you in terms of access). First of all, recognize ahead of time that your connection will perform about the same as really slow, unreliable dial-up, so your 100 hours won't be nearly as useful as you might expect at first. We used several important coping stategies:
1: Bring your own laptop. Use it to prep everything (emails, blog entries, photos, etc) offline, then use sneaker-net (USB flash drive, CD-RW, 3.5 floppy, whatever) to transfer it over to the internet-connected computer and upload it all at once. Transfer emails back to your own laptop in similar fashion before reading. This does more than save you time online: it is a courtesy to others. I would imagine that there are a very limited number of terminals available for use, and this allows you to get in, do your thing quickly, and get out of the way so that the next peson can get online.
2: Send your pictures home from an inernet cafe in port. If you have a lot of photos, they will just take waaaay to long to send over the ship's internet connection, and they probably enforce limits on how much total data you can upload/download (uploads are especially limited), which will also make sending photos harder. Most of your worthwhile photos will be taken in port, anyway, so just be sure to save a block of time on your last afternoon to upload your pictures. Do NOT bring your laptop off the ship, and do NOT use flash media in strange internet cafes: burn a CD.
3: This one isn't really about data, but I think you'll find it handy, anyway: buy a quad-band phone and unlock it before leaving, then buy a Lichtenstein-based SIM chip to put in it:
Global Riiing
or
sim4travel
etc.
These chips typically allow you to receive calls for free, and make outgoing calls at various rates on a pre-paid plan. Just call home tell them to call you right back, hang up and wait for your phone to ring. Or you can do what I did: each time you pull into port, buy a pre-paid SIM chip from one of the local phone companies. U.S. carriers typically charge $0.50 to $2 per minute to call back to the States on their iternational plans, depending on where you are. In Europe, I averaged about $0.35 a minute calling home on pre-paid cards, and that was when one Euro was worth ca. $1.78. The best thing about pre-paid is that you can't accidentally rack up a huge bill by talking for too long (one guy ran up a $1000+ bill over the course of a single port call in Dubai because he had no idea that his U.S. carrier was charging him $2.50/minute). Unfortunately, some countries have laws preventing you from buying a SIM chip unless you have proof of local employment. If you're really smart, you might even be able to find a way to get data plans working, but the internet cafes are probably a cheaper easier option.
well. I just think it is sad that people know so little about the history of their prime medium.
uuencode, base64. wget.
Thee have all been mentioned, but the ability to hack together means to send messages under any circumstances is our history. It is the way the internet was built.
Is this really the state of geek culture? "How the hell do I do this?" rather than going out, looking things up and making it happen?
---
Back in the day we used to use a program that would break down the data we wanted to send into several messages in order to send programs pictures and other things over the net. But that was back when blogging meant connecting to someone's telnet server and posting a comments it was was almost an internet chat room that didn't really automatically update, and highspeed data was 56k modem. But then again I was 10 back in that day.
Ditch the cake-eaters at Semester at Sea. Then apply to the Sea Education Association's Woods Hole Sea Semester. The former program is aboard a modified cruise ship. The latter, a fraking brigantine. Sailing, science, and some sex to boot.
Also, SEA's not dumb enough to sail their ships in the Gulf of Alaska in February, a mistake SAS will fortunately never make again after their ship got bitch-slapped by a 50' rogue wave.
(Why yes, I am an SEA alumnus, how did you guess?)
I went on a cruise last summer with my cousins for a week in the Caribbean. I bought the 5 hour of useage package for $100. The first and second day I used about 45 minutes each day, then me and my couins met a group of girls. Only time there after was when one of them wanted to check her MySpace, and when I traded my cousins so many minutes in tern for boo's since I was a month shy of 21 at the time and my Sail and Sign card for the ship had my birthday on it and their policy was 21+. That didn't stop me when we were in port though. Cheers!
Once you have a group of friends you do stuff with on the ship is established, you will care less about the internet. If you feel the need to document it, write stuff out in a text file and compile your blog entries for later entry once you return home.
I see a lot of people posting, but very few people actually trying to address your problem.
The fact is when you're at sea you'll be away from any kind of reasonably priced internet service. It's just a fact. No land lines on the open ocean, and bi-directional sat service is expensive.
Cruising sailors / powerboaters are usually stuck with either paying insane amounts for some kind of real time bi-directional satlink (which is what the ship has) or spending a lot less for some sort of Store and Forward satellite system.
Another option open to cruisers is using HF radio and RTTY to send email around. Slow, but surprisingly reliable. That'd require either a marine HF, or a Ham Radio license, and the appropriate hardware.
None of those may be an option for you.
There is a product called Sailmail that might suit your needs. Essentially a little hand held device that has an accoustic coupler in it. Call into the server to send and receive your mail over any phone.
Ultimately, I'll give you one piece of advice. Namely: For waht you need, forget Slashdot. You'll get more people talking about how many seconds a day 100 minutes works out to. Try something like the user forums over on Cruising World or any of the other cruising / sailing forums.
Talk to people who actually know the subject matter at hand.
Cheers,
and enjoy the semester.
Bagheera
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Dude... The girl to guy ratio is usually 3 to 1 on semester at sea. If you're wasting your time dinking around on the internet, then you don't deserve to go on the trip in the first place.
You'd be too naive to think you'll be participating in anything other that sex orgies and soaking in alcohol... Just think about it - ship... students... sea....oh yeah, this is Slashdot.
Think "Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll". Well, drugs are probably not available and you're too young for Rock'n'Roll. So, that leaves just one thing...
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Well, how about it?
I understand the use of being connected, but really - is it absolutely needed?
Will your family and friends feel cheated if they knew your photos were "really" taken a week ago?
If you want to do a blog, you can get a friend stateside to post your letters/photos.
-Frank
ps: Good luck - sounds like the opertunity of a lifetime!
I have my own website and being a PERL programmer, I wrote my own photo gallery script for my website. I then setup an email address just for my gallery.. Then I wrote another script that is run every 10 minutes from a cron job that logs into the email account, downloads any messages, deletes them and then posts them into the gallery. I used my cell phone to take pictures and from it, I would send my pics to that email address and within 10 minutes, it would be posted in the gallery, with the text of the message being its description.
Now I set this up to be able to post any pics quickly and easily, however, it also works with standard email. You could just work offline and create a message for each picture and store them in your outbox. Then, when you do have access, you can send an entire batch at once. The coding is actually quite simple, and I would be willing provide you with my photo gallery script, I even wrote an auto installer for it. Just upload one file, set permissions and run it in your browser.
Hope you find your solution.
You can set up a *NIX box as your mail server with procmail handling the mail to a dedicated user account. Set up a procmail rule to act on the messages with the subject, say, "Simon says *insert_your_verification_token_here*" and sender's e-mail address matching that of yours. The body can be fed to anything, including bash, and results e-mailed back to you. But keep in mind that this solution isn't the most secure thing in the world :)
Cruising sailors have dealt with this problem for years. If you don't know, "cruising" is where you quit your job and live on a sailboat in the Caribean, spending your days mostly looking for food and booze. I am so jealous of these folks. Anyway, "Cruising World" magazine might have some ads. I've heard of Sailmail, but don't know how their services rate. Might be a place to start anyway.
http://www.sailmail.com/
Push the button, Max!
Thunderbird actually has quite decent offline support. If you have an IMAP server somewhere (uh, gmail?) you could do major updates in ports at cafes. Download all of your IMAP folders at the internet cafe. Do just incremental updates at sea. It also allows you to control which folders you sync offline so if you have some online filters you could prioritize emails that way. The advantage of this approach is you can compose emails and get them ready off line and then when you have some access, send them all and download the new ones. I'm sure there are RSS aggregators that will do the same thing. RSSOwl almost does it. You can search around and find one that does. It would let you pull down a batch of news and then you could read at your leisure. The basic idea is you want to do your business quick when you have access and then do your reading and composing at your leisure. You also probably want to distill the "news" you need from the web down to the basics, forget about your regular roll of 500+ RSS feeds. I'd pick a couple of good news services for real news that you like and then the 3-5 geekier sort of things that let you feel connected. It will all still be there when you get back and amazingly, within a couple weeks of getting back you won't have even realized you missed anything in the geek world.
pirates.
fun
Ive been to sea quite a few times and all I can offer for advice for internet access is become as friendly as you can with the guys in charge of the connection, a few bottles of single malt might not hurt ;)
You could probably send pictures as .eps files in the text of your email message. Of course, it would be a loooong message.
Get a life and enjoy nature and the trip. Technology is not everything...go learn something. And if you really, really need to contact someone, there's something called a postage stamp. Maybe your semester at sea will have a class on how to mail a postcard.
1. Before you lose access to high-speed, log into your email service and disable the "advanced" services and use HTML-based as your default. This is critical, especially for Gmail.
2. While at sea, write all of your emails in notepad. At the top of each file, include the block of email addresses, separated by commas. Save them until you're ready to connect.
3. Use FireFox with NoScript and AdBlock. Carry it with you on a USB key if you have to. Make sure you disable images, but check off "show image place holders"!!!
4. When you sit down to connect, open all of your emails in an individual notepad window so you can copy pasta quickly.
5. Connect, log in, start copying and pasting. You can send a LOT of emails in 2 minutes that way.
Or you can enable POP3/SMTP access on your webmail, then use your own client. Just make sure to configure you webmail account before you leave. Using this sort of solution is best set up with a USB key using PortableApps.
[End Of Line]
You can also encode images into base64, don't know how big an image it would take before you hit the 1MB limit, but it's possible.
No attachments. An attachment is just a UUE or base64 text block inside an e-mail; if attachments aren't allowed, those won't get through the mail server. Some other encoding method, as non-standard as possible, must be devised so that you can fly under the radar and TX/RX binaries as text.
I have not-so-fond memories of being on the 'Net back in the late 1980s, and having to MANUALLY encode/decode UUE or base64 files. It was an absolute joy when the first e-mail clients with automatic UUE/base64 ("attachment") handling appeared.
ROT13 a base64 and create a header which calls it "random text good luck charm 72" or something else? I dunno. Get creative. Hell, probably any filters on the mail server aren't all that sophisticated - they can't really look for anything more than fixed string lengths or UUE/base64 headers, as the actual data is pseudorandom. It might be as simple as deleting the header on send and recreating it on receive.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
No attachments? Before there were MIME attachments binaries were sent via email using UUENCODING and putting the data in the body of the text. One can also just base64 encode it and tell the recipient to use a base64 decoder on the included paragraph. ...).
If one avoids the current "standard" (MIME attachments) and reverts to old style methods, one may be able to move binaries (and then there are programmes which will split a file and uuencode the parts in separate messages and
As someone who has spent time at sea on research ships and works with satellite communications on research ships for a living, I can say that it's really expensive once you get away from coastal waters. The US academic research fleet (UNOLS) didn't get full internet access until 2005 because of this, and even now it's very limited in terms of bandwidth compared to what you are used to in your mom's basement/dorm room.
Near coast, you can use your cell phone, but once you get more than 50 miles offshore, your options quickly become limited and really expensive. You are at the mercy of various satellite operators, all of which charge you a pretty penny for the privilege of using their birds. The fact that most satellites are positioned to concentrate on populated areas (read: land) makes satellite connectivity in the middle of the ocean a very pricey commodity. This is why they charge you on a per-byte basis - C-band internet connectivity is typically a couple of thousand dollars US a month for a whopping 256 kilobits per second of bandwidth.
With all of the nerdy stuff out of the way, the MV explorer looks like a really cush cruise ship rather than a research vessel so you probably won't get much of an "at sea" experience other than not being able to leave the ship between ports. Enjoy your active stabilization, swimming pool, and piano bar.
For others considering time at sea, the Sea Education Association is the real deal. I've been aboard the SSV Robert C Seamans, their Pacific-based ship, and was kinda jealous that I never got to do something like that while I was in college. The students get a chance to climb the rigging and really sail the ship, rather than just being chauffeured around on a giant floating school bus. Additionally, you get to do some real science on their ships. Port stops in Tahiti and the Marquesas are tough to beat as well.
Why not bring aboard couple of terabyte NAS drives, fill them with data, update/sync them at each port.
Then create your own Adhoc network aboard the ship. (optional: charge other students to access the drives)
You would take the term "Pirate" to a new level
Don't any of you have a 3G iPhone??
Even the Somali pirates have them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like the comments I've seen to the effect that a little time away from the Internet might actually be a good thing. There's a well-known blogger (don't recall his name though) out there that specifically takes "unplugged vacations" to get away and gain a little perspective. That said, you might like looking into getting your amateur radio license before leaving. If conditions allow, you could use this to supplement your on-board access. There are of course caveats, not the least of which is the fact that data over HF is pretty damn slow. While not exactly web-browsing speed, you could manage to do a better job of keeping in contact via e-mail at least. From a practical standpoint, you would be surprised at the station you could run from your cabin. HF antennas are known for being really big, but there are plenty of compact designs out there and nothing beats good old saltwater as a ground plane. Amateur radio can of course be fun just as a hobby too, especially on a ship. You could have the opportunity to talk to some really neat people all around the world. It would be a great way to occupy your time should you find yourself bored between classes and getting laid -- just be sure not to show the girls your license or that'll never happen. It's worse than being tagged as a computer nerd :)
Having your license may also allow you to build some comraderie with the ship's radio operators, with at least some possibility of fanagling some additional time :)
That FAQ you referred seems to be quite old (2002). But many of my friends in China following service. http://www.webinmail.com/webinmail/index.html Just send email to browse@webinmail.com and put url in subject field... In seconds you'll get email back with the web page of file which you requested. Very very handy in case direct browsing is limited for some reasons. Btw. It's easy way to get to pages from work which are otherwise blocked by corporate firewall.
I've been working on the offshore for a year and a half now, and have been on 4 different ships. All ships have had internet onboard, and all have had wireless on board. The connection isn't the fastest, but it's still quicker than say dialup. It'd be no problem for you to keep in contact with your friends and family, or send emails, if they have a similar satellite system to what I'm used to out here.
I've faced a similar problem in remote Antarctic field camps.
An Iridium phone, a data kit and a uuplus.com account is the cheap and bulletproof solution.
The answer obviously depends on how you interpret 'no attachments'. From a purely technical point of view many mail clients send messages bearing very little similarity to RFC attachments. From a more pragmatic point of view, if you are sending an encoded image then it is an attachment even if it is transmitted as text in the main mail body.
I would try an comply with the spirit of the rule and forget about images. However blog posting and web page retrieval seem to comply with the spirit of the rule, whilst being very useful and none too hard to implement.
My solution would be to configure a mail server (even Win Pro has one built in) to handle this. Write a script that takes all mail send to a specific address, checks its cryptographic signature and, if valid, saves the mail as a script and executes it, then emails you the stdout back. (If you even need to ask why checking the cryptographic signature is needed please don't do this).
Web posting and reading ASCII rendered web pages can be handled with something like surfraw, or links.
I did something smiler when my mobile phone provider gave me free IM.
I would kill for a good excuse to be offline.
don't waste your chance.
Posterous works quite well for posting to a blog over email. And it can also auto-post to twitter, flickr and other places.
I was on a SAS voyage last year. A couple of hints:
1. Some sites are "free" I think Wikipedia was one. Get one of your professors to ask for that as a free site, and going to it will not count against your time on line. I think CNN was also a free site; the ship's internal website has a list of free sites.
2. SAS's own website is also "free." There was a link on that (free) site for sending a "postcard" to friends and family; a lot of students caught on that this was a free way to communicate with people.
3. The main problem is not the limited time, it's the slowness of the connection. The ship's access was sometimes EXTREMELY slow, by satellite hook-up, and the restrictions on usage are to let everyone have some of the bandwidth. The expensive "extra" time is a way to discourage non-essential use.
Most students got used to not being so "hooked in" all the time. Relax! You're going around the world! Tell your friends and family you are OK by the SAS site's postcard, tell them you won't be in such close contact as they might expect, and then enjoy all the places you'll be without having to be hooked up to an electronic life-line.
Semester at sea.org. Hope you know what you're getting yourself into...
If you are going to spend most of the time over the Mediterranean sea, you could ask your ship's captain to drop his anchor far down enough to make contact with those broken undersea Internet cables which were in the news recently.
Once he does that (which must be easy, since ship captains seem to be doing it all the time these days), just connect a wire from the anchor cable to your laptop and voila! free Internet...
If he is not able to connect to any existing broken cables, just ask him to break one for you. Bribe him with enough rum to last your entire browsing time...
If you don't succeed at first, try again. If you still don't succeed, try harder. If nothing works, try reality shows.
Real men don't float around on a 600 foot cruise ship looking for internet access. They go to SEA|mester instead. (Yes, I'm biased.)
Take a couple of those old thumb drives or flash memory cards you never use anymore, fill them with as many pictures as they can hold and then drop them in the mail when you come into port.
Well, as far as emailing pictures, as long as they are small.. how about encoding them in ASCII art? I believe this was recently posted on /.
This space for rent, inquire within.
I would apply for a SATCOM feed while you're out there...
Live offline. It's possible, you know. Humans achieved that remarkable feat every day of their lives for 130,000 years. Surely, you can manage it for six months?
See the world. Meet a bunch of freaks. Get stories for the rest of your life. That's what it's about, not Wikipedia entries. It'll be there when you get back. Well, should be there.
Come on -- forget the Internet. You're going to be on a ship with probably 300 hot co-eds in bathing suits, all of you with only each other for entertainment for long stretches. If you spend the time in front of a computer instead of squished between several rotating co-eds, you're an idiot.
Don't just take my word for it that "interpersonal interactions" should be your focus when presented with such a situation -- clearly the scientists stuck in Antarctica agree:
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN0943167020080609
Of course this will get modded down and is unlikely to be read, but this is a sincere statement. The opportunity for learning something valuable in life during this cruise doesn't come from your internet connection, and it doesn't even come from all the places you'll see -- it comes from getting to be part of this huge, temporary community of folks with similar backgrounds and purpose. Be someone you aren't today -- if your new personna works out, great -- if not, you can be someone new again after you leave. Step outside your comfort zone and get away from the computer.
If you're "doin' it right"(tm), you should not even notice that there is no Internet, because the only tubes that you are going to see, will be on/in some of those 300 girls (or boys, it you like them instead)! :D
Worry about the tube to put around that tube down there, and worry about the booze. That's all you need to worry about. At least if you still live. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Since the folks paid anyway, why not try VSAT or BGAT?