
Offline-Pedia converts old televisions into Wikipedia readers (2018) - EndXA
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/07/17/offline-pedia/
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Paul_O_Meany_Jr
Interesting!

One would think, also, that there may be a similar opportunity at some point
to recycle old phones as offline devices and get similar offline Wikipedia
functionality using something like Aard.

[https://github.com/itkach/slob/wiki/Dictionaries](https://github.com/itkach/slob/wiki/Dictionaries)

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Cd00d
I would really like that page to show a static picture of the final device
instead of making me watch the video for glances of it.

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sushid
I skimmed it but it looked like they never showed the device actually turned
on. I bet the experience is worse than they hoped.

And if you think about it, with 100 USD, the cost to upcycle one of these
machines, you can just upcycle a cheap tablet and load an offline wiki
trivially. It’d be easier to use as well.

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kevingadd
Am I the only person who saw OS/browser chrome eating up 1/3 of the vertical
screen real estate on that CRT and sighed a little bit? It's amazing that
they're able to offer this to people on such a small budget but wow, modern
software sure isn't friendly to people running on small screens is it...

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_bxg1
I think we've just gotten used to higher-resolution displays where those UI
elements can be made smaller:
[https://zdnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/08/09/5d4189d0-20...](https://zdnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/08/09/5d4189d0-2005-49cd-
ba12-da50f46a0d73/resize/1200x900/4df59cceb00a93d61cc41fa3daed5e6b/mosaic.jpg)

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Udo
For the cost of a micro SD card (or a small micro SD for the OS and an
inexpensive USB hard drive for actual data storage) and an Orange Pi Zero
(about $10), this could also become a low-power headless Wifi access point
providing Wikipedia and other offline data to mobile devices, for example in a
school or a community center. Kiwix does offer a standalone HTTP server for
ZIM files. The same device could also have provisions for local messaging and
storing local user data.

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reaperducer
There's more to "cost" then price. Your scheme adds several orders of
magnitude in complexity and points of failure.

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Udo
My "scheme", in its simplest form, is to serve the same content over HTTP to
nearby phones, and has in fact one fewer point of failure - namely the old TV.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, but it's not
inherently more complex. The premise is of course that this works better
because it distributes the information among more people at the same time, _as
long as_ wifi-capable phones are common in the community.

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JoshuaMulliken
This is a really interesting project! It would be interesting to adapt it to
old laptops. They are a dime a dozen and if people could donate them then they
could serve this same purpose.

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kevingadd
Part of the problem with repurposing old laptops is they're vulnerable to
battery failure, at which point they're just awkward all-in-one PCs chained to
a power adapter. None of my old laptops are in usable condition without a
battery swap, and I suspect the cost of a raspberry pi isn't much higher than
a new battery...

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Rychard
> I suspect the cost of a raspberry pi isn't much higher than a new battery.

Don't forget that you'd have to factor in the cost of a display, input
devices, and storage if you go the Raspberry Pi route. And if you wanted the
Pi to be portable (as your alternative suggestion seemingly implies) you'd
have to buy a battery for it as well.

On the other hand, if you don't need the Pi to be portable, you might as well
just leave the laptop plugged in and use it instead, as you wouldn't have to
spend any money at all to achieve the same end-result as purchasing the Pi.

In fact, I would wager that putting together a Raspberry Pi solution
comparable to a cheap laptop would be difficult for any given price point; if
the laptop is just "old" and not "broken", I would further argue that it
provides a much better user-experience.

I don't intend for this to be a criticism of the Raspberry Pi. In the article
they're using old CRT televisions which negate the cost of a display, and
keyboards and mice are readily available from a number of places for free (or
close to it). For their use-case, it seems to be quite an effective solution.

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iandanforth
In a similar vein does anyone know a way to load all of say Simple Wikipedia
onto a Kindle? I have plenty of space and I'd love to have a simple offline
backup on a relatively energy efficient device.

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awiesenhofer
There is the Wiki Book Creator Feature, which lets you create books from
selected articles, and mediawiki2latex which can output these to epub. Though
there seems to be a page limit of 800. Link:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books)

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52-6F-62
This is excellent. I didn't grow up anywhere nearly as remote as these
communities, but being from a small town the advent of Encarta, and eventually
the internet, was a _massive_ sea change.

It can't be overstated how much of an impact efforts like this can have on
young people.

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craze3
I've been wanting to make a version of this which is more polished, has text-
to-speech, and a visual aspect. Imagine an instant documentary generator!

Would you use it ?

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jonbaer
I feel like this would probably be somewhere in the next phase of ~AI to
generate video based on a Wikipedia page or at least a copy of Wikipedia which
is highly annotated with video links.

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_bxg1
I understand why they removed it, but I really liked the analog video output
on older Pi's

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Rychard
The current Raspberry Pi 4 includes analog video out over the 3.5mm TRRS jack.

It's still there, it's just not using the RCA connector anymore.

Unless you're referring to the RCA connector itself being removed, in which
case, I apologize.

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_bxg1
I was referring to the RCA, although I didn't know you could do something
similar with the 3.5mm jack. Is there a simple (non-powered) adapter one can
use to convert that to RCA?

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agildehaus
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/2881](https://www.adafruit.com/product/2881)

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chongli
I hope this doesn’t exacerbate the shortage of CRTs. These are extremely
valuable for retro gaming. Old LCDs would be just fine for reading Wikipedia.
CRTs are irreplaceable.

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TotempaaltJ
Do you truly believe that retro gaming provides higher value than providing
unconnected communities with access to Wikipedia and associated knowledge
sources?

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goda90
The point that you and GP are missing is that these CRTs are what they have
lying around in their area already. They aren't coming to the United State and
such to buy up CRTs. The could just as easily use flat panels if they are
available.

