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FREE SOFTWARE FOR CRUISERS
Kevin Ruscoe is an IT professional. He and Theresa maintain a fascinating website at www.sapphireoflondon.org. This article was originally publshed in Flying Fish 2006/1 but has been reviewed and brought up to date by Kevin in December 2008. He warns that he himself may not be fully up to date in software for long distance cruisers as he has been shorebound for a while.
INTRODUCTION
Most of the cruising sailors I have met keep to a fairly strict budget. Yet those same cruisers have embraced technology, insofar as they have a laptop on board which they wish to use productively, both for sailing-related tasks and for general admin. It grieves me to see people either doing without useful software, or making do with outdated and/or illegal copies of commercial products, due to a lack of familiarity with the free alternatives. On a number of occasions I have helped people to get started with various free applications and this has always gone down well. So it occurred to me that an article on the subject might be of interest to OCC members.
Lack of space prohibits any detailed discussion of the software that follows – my only purpose is to draw attention to the existence of the applications in the hope that at least some of them are new to you and will prove useful. Although my profession (when I am not sailing) is information technology, I will exclude jargon from this text as ruthlessly as I can...
SAILING APPLICATIONS
PropView – www.dxlabsuite.com/propview/
PropView is a small application which helps with HF reception by forecasting the minimum and maximum useable frequencies between two locations over a specified 24 hour period. Results are rendered in a colour-coded chart. You can specify locations via direct latitude/longitude entry.
WXTide32 – www.wxtide32.com/
WXTide32 by Mike Hopper provides tide and current predictions for more than 9500 stations worldwide. Data can be displayed in a variety of graphical formats and also in a textual form listing daily tides, incremental levels or a full month calendar. Predictions can be performed on any date between 1970 and 2038.
GRIB viewer. A free GRIB viewer is at http://www.grib.us/ and it should not be difficult to find others. These display WMO Gridded Binary Files (GRIBs). These files are compressed chunks of data that show weather and ocean features as of now as well as computer-modelled forecasts.
NON-SAILING APPLICATIONS
Firefox – www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Most often, access to the internet for cruisers is via internet cafés. In remote places these are often slow and expensive. Firefox is an excellent web browser in lots of ways, but its particular benefits when using slow connections are that it prevents pop-ups from appearing without the user’s consent, and can filter out advertising (via an extension such as AdBlock Plus –
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1865&application=firefox , which avoids the waste of limited bandwidth. Of its other features, tabbed browsing is my favourite. This lets you open tabs, each displaying a web page, within a single Firefox window. You can open links in new tabs, where they will load while you read the current page.
Firefox is one of the applications I keep on my USB memory stick. The first thing I do when I sit down in an internet café is install Firefox. This only takes 30 seconds or so and significantly improves my browsing experience.
FlashGet – http://www.flashget.com/.
Once you start using lots of free software, you will find yourself downloading updates to the various applications quite frequently. You may also need to download other large files. In our case, we sometimes treat ourselves, when in port, to a download of BBC Radio 4’s current affairs programme The World Tonight, which we can then listen to on board to remind ourselves of home! When downloading large files over slow connections, you will find that the download managers included with web browsers do not cut the mustard.
FlashGet is a standalone download manager which offers two particular advantages. First, FlashGet can automatically split files into sections or splits, and download each split simultaneously. Multiple connections are opened to each file, and the result is the most efficient exploitation of the bandwidth available. Secondly, FlashGet will continue to download a partially completed file from where it left off. If you need to download a huge file and only want to spend ten minutes a day in the internet café, you can leave the partially downloaded file on your USB memory stick and complete the download over a number of visits.
FlashGot – http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=220
This small extension to Firefox links it with FlashGet, so that when you click on a download, you are given the option to use FlashGet to retrieve the file.
The GIMP – www.gimp.org/
Many cruisers use digital cameras to record their experiences, and the resultant photos nearly always benefit from some enhancement. The GIMP is a photo manipulation tool, similar to Adobe Photoshop. (GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program.) You will need to download and install three packages from its website: GTK+ (stands for GIMP ToolKit – a graphics package on which GIMP depends), GIMP itself, and GIMP Help (the user manual). Chapter 3 of the latter, Using Gimp, contains a section entitled Working with Digital Camera Photos, which is well worth reading. For an example of what GIMP can do, load a photograph with less than perfect colours (which is most of them) then activate the Levels tool (ToolsgColor ToolsgLevels in the image menu) and press the Auto button in the dialog.
For photo sharing, there are a large number of choices. http://www.flickr.com/ is another one worth mentioning.
Digikam (http://www.digikam.org/) is an excellent photo management tool. I did not mention it in the original article because it does not run on Windows and is therefore of interest only to a minority. However, the forthcoming 0.10.0 release (which is due out imminently) will be the first to run on Windows and will definitely be worth trying. Theresa and I manage all 6000 photos from our trip using this software (although we perform the actual photo editing in Gimp).
(But please note that, if intending to submit photographs to Flying Fish in .jpeg format, the Editor would still rather have the original just-off-the-camera version – see Digital Photographs, Flying Fish 2005/1.)
OpenOffice – www.openoffice.org/
OpenOffice is a suite of office applications, including a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation creation application (Impress) and database (Base). Although OpenOffice can read and write the proprietary file formats used by Microsoft Office, it stores your data in the OpenDocument standard by default.
Skype – www.skype.com/
Most people are probably familiar with this. Skype allows you to make telephone calls over the internet to other computers for free. You can also ring telephones using a service called SkypeOut, which is not free but is certainly much cheaper than equivalent telephone charges.
SmartFTP – www.smartftp.com/
Many cruisers like to maintain their own website, documenting their voyage for their family and friends (ours is at http://sapphireoflondon.org/ ). We use SmartFTP to upload changes to the site. Like FlashGet, it can open multiple remote connections and resume broken transfers. It can download files as well as upload, so competes with FlashGet, but we prefer to use FlashGet for this.
Thunderbird – www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
Cruisers, including ourselves, often use a web-based e-mail client (such as www.mail.yahoo.com/). When arriving at a new port and faced with dozens of e-mails to read through, people often copy them manually to read when back on the boat, or prepare outgoing mails on the boat, then copy them manually into the web-based e-mail client for sending.
There is a better solution. Thunderbird is a stand-alone e-mail client which can also be used to read RSS news, blogs and newsgroups. Keep it on your memory stick and install it when you arrive at an internet café. Configure it with your e-mail account details, then let it retrieve your mail onto your memory stick automatically. Similarly, prepare your outgoing mails within Thunderbird on board, then have it send them all for you from the internet café.
However there are a couple of points to watch. First, you need to change the location where Thunderbird stores your mail from the default to your memory stick. From the menu, click on Tools–Account Settings, then select Local Folders and change the local directory to a suitable location on your memory stick. Secondly, by default, Thunderbird deletes your mail from the server when it has finished downloading. We prefer to leave copies on the server. To change this, go into ToolsgAccount Settings as before, select Server Settings, then tick the ‘Leave messages on server’ option.
VideoLAN – www.videolan.org/
VideoLAN is a multimedia player for various audio and video formats, including DVDs. It allows you to play DVDs encoded with any region, irrespective of the region setting of your computer.
LINUX
The more technically-minded can gain access to a vastly increased selection of free software by using a free operating system, Linux being the obvious choice. It is not much more difficult to install or use Linux than it is Windows – the problem is that most people are familiar with Windows and not Linux, and that Windows generally comes pre-installed, so people do not worry about installation. The hardest part of installing Linux is partitioning the hard disk to make space for it, assuming that Windows is already in use. For technical reasons I use a commercial application for this, called Acronis Disk Director Suite – www.acronis.com/ . Next, you need to choose a Linux distributor from the hundreds available. DistroWatch – www.distrowatch.com/ – has lots of information, but if you cannot be bothered with that, try my recommendation – OpenSUSE – http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org. (Update in 2008) http://www.opensuse.org/ remains an excellent Linux distribution. However, many would argue that Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) is the ideal starting point for those interested in Linux.
Just a few examples of the thousands of free packages which are only available to you if you use a free operating system are Digikam – www.digikam.org/ – which helps you to catalogue your photos, KStars – http://edu.kde.org/kstars/ – a sophisticated astronomy application, and GnuCash – www.gnucash.org/ – which helps with personal finances.
FINANCE MANAGEMENT
Another application which I did not emphasise because it did not run on Windows (whereas now it does) is Gnucash (http://www.gnucash.org/). This is a finance application more than capable of dealing with on-board finances for those who are keen about tracking where their money goes in detail.
FREE WEBSITES
In addition to free software, there are many websites which offer free services of relevance to cruisers. For example:
· It can be a waste of time to keep visiting your favourite websites just to see if something has changed – it would be more efficient to be kept informed of changes to the site. This is the purpose of RSS, which is supported by many websites (including our own – www.sapphireoflondon.org/rss/rss.xml ). Bloglines – www.bloglines.com/ – allows you to record the RSS feeds in which you are interested. So, instead of visiting (say) your ten favourite sites to see what has changed, you can just visit Bloglines and check the feeds.
· Ikeepbookmarks – www.ikeepbookmarks.com / – is somewhat similar to Bloglines, but is used to record your favourite URLs. Normally, you would do this by storing bookmarks in your web browser, but this is not of much use when visiting different internet cafés.
· Fotopic – www.fotopic.net/ – allows you to store your photos on a server (which provides a useful backup) and make them available for viewing by family and friends. Think of this as an online photo album.
· Finally, I could not close without mentioning Wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org/ – a good source of information about just about anything.
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