How to Read Wikipedia on an iPod

Please Sign In or Register | Set as Homepage

How to Read Wikipedia on an iPod Rating: -13 from 73 votes Views: 1,604

Submitted By: Phip on 1/30/2007. (

Add to Favorites

| Share | Clikk It! )

Link: http://homepage.mac.com/swannman/wikipod.zip
Wikipedia on an iPod

Wikipod starts from a Wikipedia page and traverses all the links it finds, downloading each page to the iPod. It will then traverse each link on the new pages, continuing this process until it finds no new links or has reached the size limit you specify.

To get started, download the script and mark it as executable:

1: Download wikipod to your desktop and unzip it (link above)

2: Open Terminal.app and type cd ~/Desktop

3: Type chmod 755 wikipod to mark the script as executable

Then, each time you want to load Wikipedia pages onto your iPod, do the following:

1: Mount your iPod in disk mode (its icon should appear on the Desktop)

2: Open Terminal.app and type cd ~/Desktop

3: Pick a Wikipedia page to start from. We’ll choose the iPod page for this example

4: Type ./wikipod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod, then a space

5: Double-click on your iPod icon and drag the Notes folder into the Terminal window

6: Type the number of megabytes of space for wikipod to fill

The command should now look like this:
./wikipod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod /Volumes/iPod/Notes 10

Hit enter — and your iPod will start filling up with Wikipedia entries! Go back to your iPod folder, double-click on the Notes folder, and watch the entries as they’re downloaded, formatted for your iPod, and transferred over. When the script exits and prints “Done transferring n pages!”, you can unmount your iPod.

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. (This is a real bummer — I’m looking into ways to work around it, but I’m not optimistic.)

Modifying this script to be a general-purpose web-page-to-iPod-note translator is left as an exercise for the reader…

More info on this topic can be found here:

http://www.instructables.com/id/E6NUUTEWNUET9K4FCH/

http://swannman.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/howto-read-wikipedia-on-an-ipod/

Tags: howto ipod wikipedia

Stumble It

Share on Facebook

Twitter

Fark It

Link to this:

* copy and paste the above text into your site to link to this post.

If this post contains copyrighted or otherwise illegal material please let us know by clicking here.
If this post contains adult material please click here so we can place it in the appropriate section.