Putting Wikipedia on an iPod?

December 27, 2006 12:04 PM

My brother would like nothing more for Christmas than to be able to put some or all of Wikipedia onto his 5th-Generation Video iPod. Is this do-able?

I had thought it would be easy, but so far as I can tell encyclopodia won't run on a 5G iPod, and wikipod won't run on a Windows machine (all he, or I, has). Is there another hack that will do this, or am I missing something here?

posted by willbaude to computers & internet (4 comments total)

wikipod is a perl script, and should work (perhaps with trivial modifications, or at least trivial modifications for someone who knows perl) on a windows machine, if you install perl. All it does is strip out the html and turn wikipedia pages into text files that can be put into the notes directory of the ipod. I don't see anything in it that obviously would need to be modified for windows, though I'm not one for perl myself. You will probably need to run it from the windows command line (you can look at the wikipod script to see what arguments to give it). I don't know exactly how to access the "notes" directory on a windows machine, but some googling suggests that if you check "Enable disk use" in the preferences your ipod will show up in "My Computer". Hope this helps some...
posted by advil at 1:05 PM on December 27, 2006

Uh...all of Wikipedia? Just a side note, but I doubt all of Wikipedia will fit...
posted by markcholden at 4:35 PM on December 27, 2006

Won't work for your 5th gen ipod, but Encyclopodia is pretty cool for those of you with older versions.
posted by kaefer at 6:00 PM on December 27, 2006

Well, he can install iPodLinux and dual-boot it with the Apple firmware, then go on to install this: http://ipodlinux.org/Wikipedia

Good luck.
posted by limon at 6:22 PM on December 27, 2006