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Wikipedia In Your Pocket, $99
An anonymous reader notes the announcement by Sean Moss-Pultz (Openmoko, Inc.) of a new geek device: The $99 WikiReader. All of Wikipedia in your pocket with no Internet connection required. Works in bright sunlight. 3-button interface. You can update the information in the WikiReader either by mail (they ship a microSD card) or by downloading a 4+ GB file.
The form factor is a bit wonky. Adding just a little more functionality would have made it worth twice as much. Right now it looks like you have to depend on the community to provide delta-updates, they want you to dump 4GB. There are numerous tools for gathering your own wiki subset.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We don't all want to pay for data plans.
Wikipedia online plus Google, the interwebs, and books too.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
According to the rules of open source... all derivative works must also be open source.
This is hardware. Does that mean that the design, specifications and technology used are also open source?
That's an easy question! Answer: No.
First, the hardware is not derived from Wikipedia. That's just silly. Second, even if it were "derivative" in some sense of the word, hardware itself is not copyrightable, and thus not subject to the GPL in any meaningful sense.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
Not exactly what you asked for but it's good stuff and it predates Wikipedia.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
A compressed image of Wikipedia is about 4 gigs (last time I downloaded one anyway). That's just the text of the articles though. From what I hear, the pictures add about 600-700 gigs. Now, if you include revision history, discussion, etc. then you'll get into the terabytes, but if you're just building a local mirror you can fit the whole thing on one drive.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Somebody please hack it to contain the complete works of Project Gutenberg, or at least a worthwhile subset.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Any instructions on how to build a local mirror?
Here's enough to get you started. They also link to a program (Wikix) that builds scripts to download images should you desire them.
I've found that in most cases just the text is good enough, but if I had the hard drive space and bandwidth I'd download the images too.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/
http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
Three points to consider:
- It's openmoko based, so it's extremely hackable.
[citation needed]
It's produced by some of the Openmoko people but it's a very different software stack that shares little (if any) code with their phones. It doesn't run Linux.
Source code is available (seems to be at http://code.google.com/p/wikipediardware/) so there is some potential for hacking and community development, but so far I haven't thought of any interesting applications except for an e-book reader. It doesn't have any of the interesting peripherals that come with the Freerunner (WiFi, GPS, accelerometer, USB, etc).
I do appreciate the AAA batteries and the sunlight-readable screen. Those are the reason that I'm still using my Palm III to read science-fiction magazines.
I'll buy it when it includes images. The text is wonderful, but there are definitely some things that require a picture, or at least a diagram.
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