Today was such an evil day full of trying to solve a riddle with only a few clues that I had to find something interesting funny to post at the end of it. I loved to watch MacGyver when I was a kid, it was always cool to see how he was able to build [...]

Categories: Entertainment, Funny

Way back in February I found a cool tool to browse Wikipedia from the desktop called IndyWiki, so let’s get our hats and whips ready and a take a look at the application. My first impression was that this is too simple, it doesn’t have any fancy buttons, it looks like it’s lacking some features [...]

Categories: Browsing, Search Engines, Tools

Wikia Search is the new project by Jimmy Wales who created Wikipedia. Instead of using an algorithmic approach it combines that approach with user feedback to provide everyone with better search results. The theory sounds nice, let users week out the spam and fake websites like Made for Adsense sites and websites with no content.

Categories: Search Engines, The Web

I theoretically mentioned the fact that it was possible, and in fact quite easy, to install Wikipedia locally which has several advantages but also one disadvantage. Advantages should be clear; You do not need a net connection to access the Wikipedia contents, you can distribute the solution to as many computers as you want and you can make it available in a local area network.

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Windows

I was recently looking for a way to put Wikipedia on my notebook to be able to access it when I have no Internet connection. A research on Wikipedia revealed that there was an up to date German DVD version but no English version which I think is somewhat strange considering that the English section of Wikipedia has more users than the German section.

Categories: Online Services

If you have one of the newer iPods with 8GB+ you might want to consider putting all the information of Wikipedia on it for fast reference. I personally think that this is an excellent idea if you regularly visit Wikipedia to research information but do not have Internet connection all the time. This could also be useful on your holiday trip if you want to quickly lookup information about a place, location or historical fact.

Categories: iPod, Software

Pediaphon is a text to speech script that generates a mp3 from any Wikipedia article that you point it to. The article is then processed and a mp3 is created where a robotic voice will read the article for you. The voice is understandable but you recognize that it is not a human reading the article. If that does not bother you Pediaphon is a great application.

Categories: Online Services

Oh Sony, when will you learn that manipulating the public will not be taken lightly when it becomes public. This time, someone from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s studios in Liverpool was caught adding a sentence to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia. The person in question added the sentence ‘Although it won’t look any better than Halo 2′ to the game description which has been removed after discovery.

Categories: Entertainment, Games, The Web

A website like Wikipedia that offers every user the ability to edit most of the articles is definitely being manipulated by organizations, companies and individuals that try to push their agenda on this new battlefield. It is however not that easy to determine if an article has been altered by someone on behalf of an organization.

Categories: The Web