One of the things that I really wanted to have with me while traveling around the world was Wikipedia. Although internet cafes are plentiful, sometimes you're just sitting in the middle of a jungle somewhere and discussing something like "Malaria", "Snake bites", or simply "Python"... I mean the other "Python". And some random question comes up, like "Was the snake that just bit me poisonous?" Ok... so maybe we should have taken an experienced guide with us, but that's all besides the point. Now you don't have to fret anymore... you can always have your Wikipedia with you.
If you have an Irex Iliad and a 4GB Flash Card, you can carry Wikipedia wherever you go.
Yesterday I released a (hacked together) version of an Offline Wikipedia reader. Most of the work was either cross-compiling Python for the Iliad, finding parsers for Wikipedia's markup, or figuring out how to do fseek() in a huge (3.5GB) bzip2 compressed file. I also had to learn how to program in Python, and write some indexing/browsing code (based on CDB), but that's just details.
I guess some people thought it was useful, since I was already on the front page of MobileRead.com (archived here), but now I wonder if this will make a dent in amazon's kindle sales? (jk)
I'll be covering more about this project on this blog, and over on the pyoffwiki project page on google code. If you have an Iliad and want to use it, head over to the mobileread forum, which also contains an installer for the Iliad (thank you Adam B), or directly to the getting started page.
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2 comments:
Isn't it great when you don't have a job? :-)
Looks really cool (maybe you can post some pictures of how it looks on your Iliad, cause I don't have one).
BTW: did you manage to put the entire English wikipedia there (3.7GB), or only the smaller Simple-English wikipedia?
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