Ben Saunders - Polar Explorer, Motivational Speaker

Arctic Geeks

The process of getting text and photos from our little tent on the Greenland icecap to your computer screen involves a fair amount of technological jiggery-pokery and a healthy dose of crossed fingers, but the basic routine looks something like this:

1) Write blog post - I do this on an HP iPAQ (a PDA, or palm-top computer - the kind of thing you write on with a stylus). I write it in the 'pocket' version of Word, and then paste it into…

2) WordPress! - WordPress is a free CMS, or Content Management System. It's hugely popular, and like many people, I use it to power my blog. Damien du Toit hacked together a static html page for us last year, so we can compose entries offline before dialing up. But before we do that, we need to…

3) Pick a photo - We're using a Pentax *ist digital SLR camera (and no, I've no idea how *ist is pronounced) which takes SD cards (removable memory cards, the size of a postage stamp). Once we've chosen a pic du jour, we take the card out of the camera, plug it into the iPAQ and shrink it down to a smaller size using a piece of software called Photogenics. Once we've saved the photo (they're numbered from 01 upwards) we can…

4) Dial up - to get online, you need an Iridium satellite phone, a lead to connect it to the iPAQ, and an old-fashioned dial-up internet access number. I forgot this bit when we left the UK, so I called uber-geek Pete Barr-Watson from Reykjavik airport to see if he had one. Thankfully, Pete came up trumps and we're using his number to get online. (Online is perhaps a slightly misleading term - the bandwidth of the Iridium phone is too small to let us check email, or surf the net.) Once we've clicked the 'Pete's dial-up' link and the phone has flashed up 'Data Call in Progress', it's time to…

5) Send the photo back - we do this via FTP (and a nifty program called CedeFTP) - a 10kb photo typically takes around 50 seconds to upload. Once that's done, we're ready to…

6) Blog! - click 'post' on Damien's WordPress page, and Bob's your uncle. Unplug the phone. Eat chicken curry.

There are a couple of commercially-available software packages aimed at expeditions, but they're not cheap. The beauty of our system is that the total outlay for software was about $50 and we're not limited to sending back just photos and text - we've transmitted Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and text files so far on this expedition, and we'll be sending back video and podcasts (audio updates) from Antarctica.

Techno-jargon aside, it's a beautiful evening here - perfectly still and a few degrees below freezing, with a low, orangey sun casting long shadows over the pale blue snow. Normal blogging will resume tomorrow…

{ Filed under Greenland on Monday, May 22nd, 2006. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. }