Comment by mlrtime
6 hours ago
On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones?
For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.
Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
> For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless
Projects like this one are a step towards fixing that. Personally I choose to keep both street and topographical maps of the entire continent locally on my phone. There are plenty of uses for a computer without a WAN connection.
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
And of course you can now run local LLMs on your phone as well.
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The fact the even simple encryption with walkie-talkies is basically illegal might be problem (though I have no idea how/if that applies to at-sea ships).
The boat could do a captive portal and provide it's own LAN?
This is definitely a thing (though sometimes comes with a fee): https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles/texting-on-a-cruise-7-...
The boat could do a lot of things, but providing tech for free is not high on the list.