Internet Communications While At Sea? 504
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."
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?
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
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.
iPhone (Score:1, Interesting)
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).
money-making opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
You're welcome.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Amateur Radio? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'd check the fine print. (Score:1, Interesting)
This is not just wrong, but wildly paranoid and refuted with a minimum of effort. 10 seconds of googling would have show that Semester At Sea is a long established academic program, not a psych project. To borrow a quote from the old days: Please check your nonsense before posting to Usenet. Or in this case, Slashdot.
At sea has to be cheaper than Iraq!? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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.
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]
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.
Alumni advice (Score:2, Interesting)
Change yer ways matey! Arrrgh! (Score:2, Interesting)
Agora web client (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:He gets more than that (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do I think getting online should be a lower priority? That sounds like the trip of a lifetime, even without 300 or so females in their late teens / early 20s.