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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..
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.
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.
You have plenty of time to get your general license, which should permit you to use airmail using an amateur radio. But you have to hurry, and come up with the $2500 for equipment.
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.
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.
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
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 ;-)
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
Parent's joke has a good grain of truth to it. One of the best tools for non-commercial communication in this environment is Amateur Radio.
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.
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.
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
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?
Less than that, maybe $700:
$500 Yaesu FT857D used on eBay
$100 RigBlaster
$100 Power Supply
Rigging an antenna might be an issue, though.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
I'd say your biggest concern will be how you will procure enough penicillin for that voyage.
But, then again Anti Obama people also demonstrate Cult like behavior as well.
Maybe you should just narrow it down to 'all partisans show cult like behavior'?
I used to think that the easiest way to kill off Dailykos would have been for George W. Bush to come out and endorse breathing oxygen. Half of that site would have suffocated themselves out of sheer spite ;)
Partisans of all political stripes scare the hell out of me.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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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
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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
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 ?
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.
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.
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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.
ROFLMAO.
"So, hi guys, this semester at sea thing. Sounds all cool and that... but I am a net addict. So how about you shlepp out a hundred and fifty grand and help a brother out?"
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?
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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 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...
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!
pirates.
fun
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.
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
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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.
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.
Posterous works quite well for posting to a blog over email. And it can also auto-post to twitter, flickr and other places.
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.
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 /.
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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.