WikiReader

[tech234a]

Although not a dedicated hardware device, Kiwix makes it very easy to browse Wikipedia offline on both desktop and mobile devices: https://kiwix.org/en/applications/

[Scoundreller]

I feel cool having a "doomsday" phone with offline maps, wikipedia and a few other references in kiwix, music, a few weeks worth of podcasts... and curious to know what else one should have.

Now if apple could just shoot me a few kb of news/weather updates by pointing it at one of their satellites, we'd be really cooking.

(Other than a solar panel and I got a cigarette lighter adapter with clips at the end so I can charge off a car battery without turning on all the accessories)

[peterburkimsher]

Kiwix is good, but the file size of offline Wikipedia is bloated compared to Wiki2Touch.

Kiwix is over 100 GB for the English Wikipedia. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/kiwix/zim/wikipedia/

wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2023-10.zim 31-Oct-2023 07:37 103214717026

http://www.haukap.com/wiki2touch/

Wiki2Touch is about 9 GB for en-wiki as of 2012, and about 14 GB now.

I've been working on a Wiki2Touch reader for more modern iPhones. I've got the BZ2 decompression working, now I'm just cleaning up the markup to HTML parser in JavaScript.

If you're interested, please email me and I'll send you the code! You can install it for a week on a non-jailbroken device using XCode self-signing, and if you're jailbroken you can install the Immortal tweak to make it work forever.

If you have a developer subscription and want to put it on the App Store, I'm be very happy to let you do that. I just don't want to pay $100 for the privilege of running my own code.

[kohbo]

Sad to see the Android app hasn't been updated in 5 years

[tunnuz]

Thanks for the pointer.

[dkwr]

> "The last official WikiReader image was released by Pandigital in 2011. However, there exists an active fork [...]" > "The latest update was released by this community in June 2021."

Nice to see that a community-backed project can outlive the official one for such a long time and keep it alive. Shows how good open source can be.

[RodgerTheGreat]

I've written a few applications for WikiReaders using the built-in Forth interpreter: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Wikireader-Adventures

[Lammy]

https://old.reddit.com/r/wikireader/

I remember getting one of these from woot-dot-com (iirc?) back in The Day. My dad really liked it.

[omneity]

I feel like a modern version of this with a small LLM and a vectorized wikipedia, maybe even TTS, would make for a very interesting offline device.

Humanity’s knowledge in a box, or as the Internet Box as the IT Crowd called it.

[eternityforest]

The hardware is there, with stuff like: https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-deck

i think there might be room for another class of less-powerful, offline-first but still connectable, app-capable, long battery life devices.

[rabbits_2002]

>The WikiReader does not display article text which appears inside a table on Wikipedia.

Kind of a dealbreaker isnt it?

[ashton314]

You misspelled “Hitchhiker’s Guide”: https://xkcd.com/548/

[64operator]

I own one of these, its excellent. I leave it in my car.