I had an idea today. What if I could download a complete Wikipedia database snapshot -- the current versions of all 500,000 English articles -- and make a script to convert it to the text note format viewable by the iPod? I could make some use of the spare disc space that I can't seem to fill, and turn my iPod into a pocket encyclopedia. Ace!
Well, I hit the ground running. I started to grab the latest wikipedia snapshots and look at the things people had already done to convert these raw SQL table dumps into static, viewable content. I figured that my iPod's drive had more than enough free space (over 10GB) to store this amount of content. I looked at the basic markup that was available for use in these notes. And I knew that there was a 4 kilobyte size limit on note files, and that many articles would have to be split into several pages, but that it was possible to hyperlink between notes and so navigation around a multi-page entry would be a problem easily solved.
And then I found out that the iPod can only use a maximum of 1000 text notes.
Arse.
But, I tell you, this is a minor setback. Nothing will get between me and my pocket Wikipedia!
I had the same idea of puttin Wikipedia on my free iPod space. As well as using Apple's software, I run Linux on my iPod (www.ipodlinux.org). I'm sure there is a (realitively) easy way to do this on Linux. My point is Linux *greatly* expands the capabilitys of the iPod and this would probably be much easier on Linux. Just my 2 cents worth.
Good luck in your search for complete knoledge at you finger tips!
Yeshe
Print it out. That's what I did.
Yeshe: Yeah, I've been looking at iPod Linux myself, and I think that's the only hope of doing this project. I have a 4th gen iPod, though, and apparently it's still very flaky and not really usable on the 4Gs. They're working on it, though!
I had this idea as well. It seems to me that everybody (and therefore apple) would really benefit from an ipod API. I wonder if they have any plans to release anything...
I just saw a page on the wiki for ipL, and went searching. Came up here.
This is an idea that has to happen.
I had this idea too independantly. It seems like the obvious thing to do. 1000 seems like a strange arbitary limit on the number of notes (usually it'd be a number that makes sense in base 2 like 1024). I wonder if there's a simple hack to expand that number...
Just had this idea as well and looked around. As well as this site, I found this: http://ipodlinux.org/Wikipedia
Unfortunatley it does not provide a means of circumventing the 1000 file limit.
I have podzilla installed (ipod linux), it works great. I downoaded the wikipedia dump, from www.ipodlinux.org/wikipedia but it will still only let me view the first....i guess 1000 files in the folder. I also noticed that scrolling through these files, to find an article will take a bazillion years. Does anyone know an easy way to put each file in folders, to alphebatize them. I tried it, but it was way too much work. I am guessing it is possible to write a script that will do this automaticly, but it is a bit beyond my programming experience.
ahem... http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/installwin.html