Looked neat until the track started.

You could totally integrate the SD card into something like this, and deploy it to 3rd world countries. Have our planes not drop leaflets, but cheap-as-dirt devices with a good chunk of all human knowledge in them.

Note: that code doesn’t support pictures. I haven’t released that yet because of some serious instabilities (having to do with the darned tv drivers and yet to be sorted out hardware difficulties).

song

2003 database fits on 2GB SD card stated on project page,

150GB for XML now (presumably no graphics, etc & wikipedia only) according to previous comment.

Presuming SD cards are the way to go is somewhat presumptious. I believe there was at least a 128GB “flash disk” or something to that effect at least 1/2 year ago.

The biggest problem would be, more or less as Ford Prefect alludes to, is trying to keep the thing updated (“harmless” vs. “mostly harmless”).

So – are you going to subscribe to a service that syncs your local wikipedia store with “the real one”? Are you simply (if SD cards or the like -were- the way to go) buying the database, say, for a given year? Anyhow, torrents are wonderful things but I kind of think the wikipedia is expanding at a rate that your “handheld interface” would not be able to deal with & eventually you wouldn’t even be able to afford the bandwidth. and then, once synced, presuming that you wished for it to _be_able_to_ run stand-alone (i.e. no wi-fi, i.e. COMPLETELY disconnected from the Internet [of which the Web is merely a portion, even still]) makes life very difficult.

I don’t know – as it is, wikipedia has a moderately gruesome front end: jamming a google clone on the front would be better than having it mindlessly returning “No article title matches ‘gigi taco’” just because it is looking for the full-text string. Even then, google isn’t the smartest front end I can think of…

Random thoughts from a random, uh, whatever it is that I am today. Please fold, spindle, mutilate, and/or burn at will (quick quiz that will tell you how old you are – or how much you’ve read of “ancient history”: what document had the first three words of that sequence on it?).

I want to clear up some confusion, so here are some answers to your comments:

@frank: I did use some work from other people, like the drivers for the SD card and video, but that is what programmers do all the time, it’s what you have to do and it would be stupid not to do it, because you would be recreating something that has already been figured out. I wrote the code that makes this what it is.

@bertoelcon + dev-null: The wikipedia dump from 2003 that i used is just under 2 gigs, it is in html, with links, and not plain text. If anyone noticed, in the vid i only looked at articles that started with A, because that is all i loaded on the sd card. Unless someone out there can come up with a batch program to do it for me, i have to copy and paste the articles from their dump folders by hand, which is really slow and menial work.

@aonomus: This is not a beta release of the hgttg, but I think i might google that now that you mentioned it.