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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.
Temporarily cutting off contact will be the best thing you ever do for yourself.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Screw your email.
Sounds like heaven.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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?
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.
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.
It may be their intent, but this is Slashdot. He poses to us an intriguing and difficult problem and we solve it through various obtuse and technical solutions.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
My advice is to trade internet access for sex. These horny college-age girls will do anything for another hit off Facebook.
An alternate suggestion would be to do everything yourself onboard, then release it all at once when you hit shore.
Ah, yes. The traditional way of sailors dealing with . . . things, since man first started traversing the waters.
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;
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.