[PKM] decided to breathe new life into a Psion 5mx handheld. He slapped linux on it, added a wikipedia dump to a CD card, and voila: pocket wikipedia. It’s the closest thing to an actual hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I’ve ever seen. So long and thanks for all the fish!
12 thoughts on “Pocket Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy (Wikipedia Style)”
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haha that’s a kind of cute project!
“breath new life”?
The word is “breathe”.
Actually it’s not the closest thing to an actual hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…
The Amazon Kindle allow you to freely and unlimitedly browse wikipedia. Unfortunately it works only in US (except in Alaska and mybe another state, can’t remember).
Take a look at amazon dot com slash kindle :-)
I could use one of those… I like the handheld unit. Looks like a fun little project for one of my old PDAs.
That would also be “CF card.”
I considered something like this with my Apple Newton a few years back. It seems a closer match to the Guide as described in the boom. About the right size and form factor, green backlight…
The letters for Don’t Panic are not friendly enough.
You’d have to take that up with the creators of the TV show.
@ p4bl0
From a non-existant Wikipedia Article on the above project:
“The repurposed Psion 5mx handheld Guide scores over the older, more pedestrian Amazon’s Kindle in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words “Don’t Panic” inscribed in large, friendly letters on its screen.”
I did this about 4 years ago with a Zaurus C860 running Xfce on pdaXrom. I doctored up the cels from the Babelfish animation for the background. Where the orginal text was, I had torsmo display Artist and Title info from xmms so it read something like: “The Zaurus C860, while comparable in computational power to the Googleplex Starthinker, was mainly used to play bad music, such as %T by %A.” I customized some icons from the Monochrome KDE theme for the menubar/launcher, and it ended up looking pretty good. Xfce made it easy to implement a “DON’T PANIC” splashcreen.
Cool! I wrote about this some time ago, but on more modern hardware (Dell Axim X51v): http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/11/25/mobile-wikipedia.html
When I heard of Oprah’s remark that the Kindle had changed her life, it got my attention. Improving one’s life is all about discovery and then acting on it. Discovering the KINDLE II opens lots of doors such as: all the enrichment that reading normally provides, the ability to EFFICIENTLY increase one’s vocabulary, and the incredible ability to highlight
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