The Hydrophilic Nomad's Cybercafe List

 Deutsche Uebersetzung/German version

Connectivity for the sailing nomads of the internet age.

Sailing is no pastime, it's a lifestyle. Classically the life as a sailor meant being cut off one's communication links for long times. Poste restante was the all-time standard of getting information from other people, telephony was and is too expensive for many low budget sailors to afford.

The internet age with the availability of access to information in most areas with urban structures worldwide has the power to change this information deprivation. All kinds of information can be digitized and shared today - text, pictures, videos, music. An end is not in sight. Personalized mailboxes store the information while the sailors are en route. The better mailboxes can be accessed from all places with access to the net. Most mailboxes charge nothing or ridiculous amounts. Even earlier of soft switchovers from working citizen's state to life as a sailor can be achieved - you can do some of your work on your boat and mail it back to your clients or employer. You can still share the valuable information you collected in a lifetime of work with your employer and in return collect a fee to finance your lifestyle.

But the sailor has to find access to the net in his port of call.

The idea behind this project is to provide sailors with a list of cybercafes serving yacht harbours woldwide. Every cybercafe in a reasonable distance from any harbour usable for yachts is a potential candidate for this list.

The list is currently published on two different sites on the net: The german Trans-Ocean Club e.V., is preparing to provide the list here with a couple of sophisticated selection tools, including a clickable world map. Thanks to TO's webmaster, Helmut van Straelen <HvS@rhein-land.com> for the effort he puts into the project.

This list will be provided free of charge to all individuals for non-commercial use. It will be placed under the  GNU General Public License  to discourage distribution of derivatives of this list with reduced usage rights to the public.

In order to establish and maintain this list the international community of sailors is kindly requested to gather information on all cybercafes they run into and mail it in the format described in this text  to  cyberman@ipar.de

Download area

Here you'll find the different downloadable versions of the list and some tools for the various oparating systems

The cybercafe list

So, here comes the list. Please help me to make it grow fast.

 Text format    PalmDoc format
 

Utilities for various OSes

To use the list on the Palm simply upload the Palm version to your pilot and install the excellent free EText Reader utility   CSpotRun  to view the list. For a start the Palm version is just an enacapsulated version of the text list, so use your seach function of CSpotRun

Future development

One of the future goals is to encourage cybercafe owners to provide Ethernet ports for Laptop computer use so people can easily share bigger documents with other individuals on the net. First activities to encourage network appliance industry members to develope packages which ease this step to cybercafe operators are ongoing.

Volunteers are encouraged to develop filters and browser applications to ease the use of the list to the user community. I could imagine
 


Applications contributed to this project will be published here, either as links or as files for download. The donated applications must be placed under the GNU General Public License to be published here. All donations should be sent to cyberman@ipar.de , possibly with a subject containing "DONATION" in capitals, as mail to cyberman will in future be read by a robot. I hope to receive enough feedback with the list to make the labour put into the robot worthwile.
 
 

Copyright (C) 2000 Peter Rutten

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: 06 JUL 2000 prutten