Offline software for laptop

[Mr. Pedantic]

I just recently bought a laptop for uni, an HP Probook 4320s. The thing runs Windows 7 Home Professional (32-bit, unfortunately). The thing is that the internet access I get at uni isn't very impressive, and I would rather be able to look things up relatively instantly rather than wait for slow internet to load up journal articles or dictionary definitions or wiki articles (I do this on the internet because I don't really want to study all the time in the library - there's much better, much more welcome places on campus where we can study).

So seeing as my home internet is much better than the uni internet I can get, and seeing as my laptop's hard drive is much larger than my internet's data cap, I was wondering if there was a set of offline resources (say, wikipedia, plus a medical dictionary, and maybe even a copy of Gray's Anatomy?) that I could download, run through a front-end software, and which would alleviate my reliance on the internet for study.

 

[Fayd]

for wikipedia:

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20100130/

i'd assume you could probably find a pirated version of some medical dictionary or gray's anatomy on usenet or bittorrent... (i assume that there's copyrights on that?)

so if the question is is it possible, the answer is absolutely. regarding the wiki snapshot, you'd need a webserver with SQL support (i guess? i dont know much about webhosting) and then you should be able to access it in your browser at 127.0.0.1

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

There's an online version of Gray's Anatomy in the public domain. As for medical dictionaries, since there are so many free online ones, I would assume that there would be at least one medical one that was downloadable.

For the Wikipedia one, say I download the 5.6GB one. What would I need to do to get it to run?

 

[Fayd]

There's an online version of Gray's Anatomy in the public domain. As for medical dictionaries, since there are so many free online ones, I would assume that there would be at least one medical one that was downloadable.

i dont know much about medical stuff and public domain. but if it is public domain, then there's sure to be a free torrent of it somewhere or a downloadable.

 

[Aluvus]

For the Wikipedia one, say I download the 5.6GB one. What would I need to do to get it to run?

That would be an XML dump that needs to be parsed by specialized tools to be useful to a human.

If you are willing to play with code

If you are willing to dig through old-and-possibly-dead projects

If you are willing to buy a dedicated device (I believe another device launched recently)

If you are willing to set up a WAMP stack on your computer, then you could set up MediaWiki on your local machine, and import the entire Wikipedia contents. You will want something to snack on while you wait.

If you have an iPhoneOS device and are willing to burn lots of local storage, "there's an app for that" (possibly more than one, possibly one for Android as well).

If you are willing to live with an old version (2008, and probably never to be updated again), then you can just get the static HTML dump from Wikimedia, and figure out your own solution to search. You may notice that the download is much larger than the more "raw" XML.

i dont know much about medical stuff and public domain. but if it is public domain, then there's sure to be a free torrent of it somewhere or a downloadable.

Gray's is public domain because it is old (first published in 1858, but at least the first 20 editions are also old enough to be public domain), not because it is a medical text. In the United States and most other countries, all works eventually become public domain under various conditions.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I don't have an iPhone, but a couple of my friends have the wiki app, so that's what gave me the idea to do this.

It seems the easiest way to do this is just to use Bzreader: http://code.google.com/p/bzreader/

I'll give that a go, see how it works. The playing with code option requires a Unix/Linux, no? I'm running Windows 7, so that's not ideal; and in fact the iPhone app can be adapted for a fully-fledged OS running OS X, or any other unix-based system.

Gray's is public domain because it is old (first published in 1858, but at least the first 20 editions are also old enough to be public domain), not because it is a medical text. In the United States and most other countries, all works eventually become public domain under various conditions.

Yeah, the Grays that's normally put up on the net is the 1918 edition, it's obviously really old now, but it's still a really useful resource.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Ok, I've tried the bzreader and Wikitaxi (I don't think it was in your list?). Wikitaxi is far superior, but neither have images. So I take it the dumps don't come with wikimedia images...

It's not exactly what I want, but it's good enough for my purposes for the moment. Thanks guys!

 

[Aluvus]

Ok, I've tried the bzreader and Wikitaxi (I don't think it was in your list?). Wikitaxi is far superior, but neither have images. So I take it the dumps don't come with wikimedia images...

It's not exactly what I want, but it's good enough for my purposes for the moment. Thanks guys!

See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#Downloading_Images

If the image dumps in 2007 were 200 GB, dumps today would probably be several terabytes.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Wow. Okay, maybe it's a good thing that I don't have images. Maybe if I had unlimited internet, but with my 20GB data cap...