Erik’s Blog

After reporting on how to obtain your offline installation of a great online dictionary, I want to point out how you can create an offline installation of a great online encyclopedia. I stumbled upon an article that describes just that. You have to download a Wikipedia dump. The rest is done by the package provided in the article. Be aware though that you will need around 9GB of storage during the preparation. Moreover, it took 24 hours to complete on my computer (1.7GHz Pentium-M Laptop). After that you you will just need the split dump files and the index. I put the index into a SquashFS container to save considerable space on in. I ended up with a compressed local Wikipedia installation (without images) that is relatively quick and inhabits around 4.1GB of HD real estate.

Although I cannot answer that question, I have a suggestion for alleviating your concerns: Use a meta search engine, if you can spend the additional waiting time (for me usually 2-3 times the search time of a single search engine). In search for the former I have stumpled accross Jux2 that combines searches from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Unfortunately it does not (yet?) include Ask which I think is also quite a nice search engine. Moreover, it has a slick interface (although I hate their selection of colors).

Partly because it has again been a long time without a post and partly because there really might be something interesting for all of you (anyone?), you can follow a digest of newsfeeds I read with the information I deem interesting at my google reader shared items. By the way Google Reader might be worth a look as your feed reader too, as it allow you to browse your feeds from everywhere.