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Internet Communications While At Sea?
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:04 PM
from the use-carrier-whales dept.
from the use-carrier-whales dept.
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."
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how do they calculate the time? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Message queuing (Score:5, Informative)
That's a ridiculously good point. Applications like Gallery 2 [menalto.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] Queuing [wikipedia.org]. 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
Parent
Re:Message queuing (Score:4, Funny)
Oh come on, people have been using bottles in situations like this for ages and it worked out fine. If he's really starved for bandwidth he can just pop a thumbdrive in each one. I hear they come in 64MB flavour now.
OTOH if he *really* can't stand being offline while out at sea, what he needs isn't a tech solution. What he needs is professional help. That comes in a lab coat.
Or maybe he's just not ready to come out of the basement yet.
Parent
Re:Message queuing (Score:5, Interesting)
It's supposed to be for ed-you-ma-cay-shun. Being online is pretty much a requirement for education these days. I'm sure he'll have a whale of a time, but unless this boat has a huge library, I don't reckon there's much benefit in being at sea while studying.
Parent
Re:Message queuing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's supposed to be for ed-you-ma-cay-shun. Being online is pretty much a requirement for education these days. I'm sure he'll have a whale of a time, but unless this boat has a huge library, I don't reckon there's much benefit in being at sea while studying.
Please tell me you're not serious. Handy? Yes. Useful? Yes. Required? No. It's only my opinion, but the more I work with students the less critical thinking I run into. Perhaps being unplugged for more than two minutes might be useful.
Flame away.
Parent
He gets more than that (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Sounds like fun (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ece.ntua.gr].
Use the opportunity properly (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sounds like fun (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention IP over DNS. They may block him on wifi after his 100 minutes, but he can get a slow connection this way.
http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html [thomer.com]
Parent
Re:Sounds like fun (Score:5, Funny)
My wife and I love cruising
Wrong forum, buddy
Parent
RMS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:RMS (Score:5, Funny)
My advice is to trade internet access for sex. These horny college-age girls will do anything for another hit off Facebook.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For those who aren't familiar with how to encode to base64:
# cat /bin/echo | openssl enc -base64 > encoded_echo ./decoded_echo Test
# tail -n 1 encoded_echo
AAAAAJhHAAAZAQAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAAAAAA==
# cat encoded_echo | openssl enc -base64 -d > decoded_echo
# chmod +x decoded_echo
#
Test
That would be an interesting concept, though -- "email tunnel" -- where you set up a local proxy and it communicates with your backend via email. Http tunnel software could be a good starting point for implementation.
Re:RMS (Score:5, Funny)
Also, you have some of your slashes wrong. They should be "/", not "|".
Parent
Missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Used to be... (Score:3, Funny)
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...
Slow connections! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Slow connections! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Cut the cord (Score:5, Insightful)
Temporarily cutting off contact will be the best thing you ever do for yourself.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Research every place you'll be beforehand and print out anything you think you might need.
When I'm travelling the only thing I ever want from the 'net is info on the locales. When I'm well prepared I don't even want that.
Re:Cut the cord (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that is the point of the 100 minutes of internet. Enough for some emergency communication, not for blogging and letting people know what you are doing every second.
Drop the blog, no one cares anyway about the blog. And save it for a cram research of data, that emergency patch that you need on your laptop. Getting those baby pictures that come while you are out.
There is life outside the internet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"There is life outside the internet."
Unfortunately for most of us on Slashdot, that's simply not true ;)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The guy's username is "ubergamer1337". I don't rate his chances very highly.
Supposedly... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 :)
Limitations are in place for a reason (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Limitations are in place for a reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Limitations are in place for a reason (Score:5, Interesting)
My buddy's daughter was on a Semester at Sea around a year ago. Sounds like a really fantastic experience overall.
Her classmates' solution to this problem was not at all surprising, and remarkably effective. They got a hold of one of the professors' password. Within a few days the whole ship had unlimited access. There was ship-wide wifi, and normally you'd sign on to a web page that appeared before it granted you access. I guess the sign-on page wasn't encrypted, and it was trivial for students to pick up a new professor password whenever it was changed.
Hopefully they've closed that gap since then, but you never know.
Parent
Unplug, get away (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw your email.
Sounds like heaven.
Re:Unplug, get away (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Why not everyone share the internet connection? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you limit the internet conection to evenings, lets say to 12 hours, then you can double that to 83 days.
Does nobody know about RFC1149? (Score:5, Funny)
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 [rfc-editor.org]
"1 April 1990: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers"
Thomas Dzubin
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
These kids have no idea what an RFC is...
+1 Informative from my imaginary mod point collection.
Re:Does nobody know about RFC1149? (Score:5, Funny)
Wasn't this discarded years ago because of the dropped packets problem?
Or was that packet droppings?
-Matt
Parent
Mail2Web and Wordpress (Score:5, Informative)
That is all.
Sadly you have next to no options (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [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.
RFC 1149 (Score:3, Funny)
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.
money-making opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
You're welcome.
sailmail over HF (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:sailmail over HF (Score:5, Informative)
And by law you must get the ship master's permission to use ham radio on a ship. Close reading of Part 97 will show that this is ever true for ferry boats in Puget Sound and your 2m HT.
Parent
Re:sailmail over HF (Score:4, Informative)
Whose law? The ship may be under a flag of convenience - Panama, say.
Parent
You're Missing the Point (Score:4, Insightful)
The Greatest Lesson You'll Learn (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
HAM Radio / Blogging (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
HAM Radio is the way to go. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
postcards (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:In port... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:In port... (Score:5, Informative)
jiwire.com
Parent
Re:In port... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Still the way. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Well, the easy answer would be (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Parent