Wikipedia Reader?

[froggyman]

One thing that I know would be cool (and used by a lot of people) is a Wikipedia reader. There are a couple of handhelds that already do this ( like the several different wikipedia readers, along with iPodlinux and Rockbox, assuming you have the right build set up; along with many other things).

Wikipedia lets you download the dumps in XML format, no pictures in just about every language.

I think just about everyone knows how useful something like this might be, being that their are times when you dont have access to a computer/handheld with internet access.

Finally, an 8GB or more SD card would necessary, being that current dumps come in at around 5GB.

 

[aho]

The text rendering is probably the biggest issue. 90° clockwise rotated subpixel rendered (i.e. ClearType - RGB order) text looks best. It looks f-ing gorgeous to tell the truth.

http://kaioa.com/k/wizct.zip (~51kb)

That's a small demo app which just displays some image. ct2.gpe displays black on white for 60 seconds and ct3.gpe displays white on black for 60 seconds. After those 60 seconds some other text is shown via logview... press any button to go back to the menu.

 

[aho]

If anyone is interested in doing this, here is a good starting point:

http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html

 

[TitanUranus]

I'd love this. Hope someone does make this, it'd be great to access spurious information anywhere anytime, most entertaining.

 

[froggyman]

I'd love this. Hope someone does make this, it'd be great to access spurious information anywhere anytime, most entertaining.

I know exactly what you mean! I have Wikipedia on my iPod (with rockbox installed and a special patch) I can carry wikipedia in my pocket at about 6.5GB. It is very entertaining, interesting, and helps solve arguments.

When the reader was done with rockbox, they used their own way of building wikipedia, which good be done better, probably like what was mentioned earlier by aho. This is because a lot of the formatting is left as XML code, along with the tables and other mediawiki formating.


One thing for sure is that a form of zipping will have to be used, as having several million of 1-30KB text files, would take up a TON of space if its not tarred, or compressed (this one is probably better, as it would tar and reduce the overall space).

 

[aho]

The method above keeps things in their bz2 compressed form. The archive is merely split into 900kb chunks for faster access. This wastes about 100mb... if my rule of thumb math is right.