Put Wikipedia on your iPod

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.

Encyclopodia, which I discovered at the Make Use Of website, is a easy to use Windows installer that adds Wikipedia to your iPod if your iPod has enough space free. You should also note that the Wikipedia file that is being used is approximately updated every six months which means that you will not have the latest information available but it should be sufficient for most research terms.

Just plugin your iPod into your computer and start the installation of Encyclopedia which will install a multi-boot configuration of Encyclopodia and the original Apple firmware. You will be asked if you want to start Encyclopodia by default, I suggest to say no to this.

The installation will only take a few moments because the 1.7 Gigabyte file will not be downloaded this way. After the installation has been finished plug off your iPod from the computer. You need to reboot your iPod by pressing the menu and play buttons together for ten seconds (on newer iPods, it's the menu and action buttons).

The Apple logo should appear. Press Down and Rewind for 10 seconds which should load the Wikipedia application on your iPod.

When you see the Apple logo, press down the re-wind button for 5 seconds and this kicks in the new Wikipedia section of your iPod. This is the process that you have to do whenever you want to load Wikipedia.

Now download the 1.7 Gigabyte Wikipedia file and place it in data\encyclopodia\library\ on your iPod.

You need to reboot the iPod once again if you want to access your music instead of Wikipedia. I wish there would be a solution to access both at the same time.

Advertisement