Browse Wikipedia on an iPod

Oct 11, '06 07:30:05AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Ever wished you could hold Wikipedia in the palm of your hand? Wanted to browse Wikipedia while you're on the bus ride home? Wikipod is the answer!

Wikipod is a short Perl script which spiders through Wikipedia, downloading pages as iPod notes. All it needs is a page to start from, and a limit as to how many pages to download.

[robg adds: I tried the script, and it worked as described, with one problem -- the notes were transferred outside of my iPod's Notes folder. Once I moved them in, everything worked. If you're going to try this, however, be aware of this note from the author's page:

There's one caveat about using notes on the iPod — the first time you navigate to the Notes menu after syncing with iTunes or downloading new Wikipedia articles, the iPod needs to inspect each page to see whether the links are valid. This can take a fair amount of time (and battery, since it's disk-intensive), so I recommend leaving the iPod plugged in until it finishes.
My test case was to download 10MB of data (2,572 pages), and after transferring the data, I then navigated to the Notes section of the iPod and waited ... and waited ... and I'm still waiting, 20 minutes later -- it seems to review about a note a second, so I've got a 40ish minute wait on my hands. So heed the warning, and leave your iPod plugged in!]

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