What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase.
WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also came with a snazzy new landing page, and set of logos for Wikibase etc.
Infact, in the last few weeks I finally saw all of the old wbstack Github issues finally migrate onto Phabricator for the team to more easily view and work with.
I look forward to creating an overview of the things that have changed with Wikibase.Cloud year on year at some point, as an overview of the progression of the platform that I still believe is very important to the continued growth of Wikibase.
In the less digital world, I turned our many boaty blog posts and pictures into a book! No you can’t buy one (maybe if we made a 2nd edition. But can we consider ourselves published authors now? It has an ISBN on the back, after all?
I planned on blogging being one of my relaxing hobbies while sailing around the Atlantic Ocean ⛵, and though we managed to keep a sailing blog up to date I found it extremely hard to write tech-related blogs while crossing oceans without a speedy or any internet connection.
The setting (of writing these blog posts) is rather beautiful, but to date, I have only written a single blog post when without a connection at all on this blog, now doubling that list to 2 with this post 🎉.
This was not because I didn’t have things that I wanted to write about, but rather that unless you are prepared well, there always seemed to be some element of my blog post writing process that would require access to something that is online and not on one of my local devices, or that only using local devices just ended up being a giant pain 🤦.
It’s been around 6 months since I set off on a digital nomad-style experience on a sailboat with the Digital Yacht 4GConnect and WL510, and I’m ready to give them some kind of initial review.
If you want to read some high-level details of this adventure, and other technical details of the boat, batteries, antennas and work, read the digital nomad boat experience post first.
Overall, they are 2 nice bits of kit, well-engineered and thought-through, but probably a bit expensive given the amount of use that I have managed to get out of them (less than I would have liked for a variety of reasons).
TLDR; If I were to start this trip again, I probably wouldn’t buy them again. However, for a different trip or situation, they might make more sense (cruising around the UK for example)
Installation
A collection of antennas on the Mizen (back) mast
Both of the devices were easily wall mountable, and they come with all required cables and connectors, but I do wish that they both had switches included to turn them on and off, just in case you want to.
Due to the length of the antenna cables and the desire to put the antennas up our mizzen mast the positioning of the devices was not ideal, but at least we got the antennas up with a bit of height.
The Wifi antenna cable is also pretty thick, making usage of a rubber deck cable Gromit harder than we would have liked, as the cables also already have their ends attached and these are even thicker than the cables. (Of course, we could have made our own cables…)
Usage of the 4G Connect
The UI within the 4G connect is fine, fully featured and pretty easy to use. There isn’t much you need to do here if you are using the 4G Connect alone, but you’ll probably end up regularly changing things when using in conjunction with the WL510.
It’s nice having a large and high 4G antenna (part of the 4G Connect) to increase the chances of getting a 4G connection from your sim cards.
This has mostly been most useful for me while heading away from land or toward land at 5-20 nautical miles. I always get a connection on the 4G Connect before getting one on my phone and other devices. But in the grand scheme of things, this is not when most of my internet usage happens. It was a novelty being able to make a video call while in the middle of the sea, with the land only in distant sight, but not amazingly useful.
It’s been a while since my first personal sailing post, life is busy as ever, just now on a boat. Lots of sailing, exploring, relaxing, resting, working and boat jobs.
We have written lots of adventure content at sailinghannahpenn.co.uk, but now for my own summarised take on the past few months and general thinking of this boat life.
Exploration time
Looking back over the past 3 months I can now say for certain that you should spend more than 3 months adventuring down the western coast of Europe. In fact, just schedule 4x the amount of time you initially think for a sailing adventure. There are many gaps in our explorations and places I will need to try and see again.
I’m writing a lot of content over on sailinghannahpenn.co.uk, and I want to share some of that here, linking to most of the posts and adding a little more.
We actually wrote most of the initial blog posts in Month 1, as we had already set off before creating the blog. I’m looking forward to being able to look back on the blog in the future.
I tried writing a diary while driving my old van through Europe, but I stopped halfway through. These blogs feel like something I can continue.
I have always been somewhat of a digital nomad in my working life, an opportunity that mainly exists due to my very flexible job as a software engineer at Wikimedia Germany.
Working in Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico 2019
Over the years I have been primarily based in the UK but have travelled with work to California, South Africa, Israel and many places in Europe, among others.
As well as these work trips, I managed an extended vacation in 2019 through Central America where I worked around 10 hours per week, as well as other hops to Portugal etc.
This is the part that I find myself attempting now again in 2022. But rather than Central America, it will be “the world” on a boat, with slightly less regular mobile data connection.
On previous trips, I didn’t really blog much, at least not about the travel. The one post I have from around 6 months in Central America was a post detailing travel between 2 places. And for work trips, if I blog I focus on the work aspects, such as this post on the Lyon Wikimedia Hackathon. I want that to change with this sailing adventure.
In fact, as I write this I am in the middle of the bay of Biscay, and I just listened to Between the Brackets episode 117 where Yaron and Brian mentioned my little adventure. (Partly the reason I decided to write this post). So here are some more details about the plan.
For more sailing details and to follow along, you might also want to check out sailinghannahpenn.co.uk where there will be more sailing content this year. There are already posts covering the first 50+ days of sailing!
