(Note: I do not do pranks. In any case, I encourage you to check this thing out for yourself.)
Today I learned that you can download the entirety of Wiktionary onto your smartphone. Speaking as someone without a cellular data connection who likes her apps to be as self-sufficient as possible, this is so cool.
(The downloadable Wiktionary is about a month out of date at the moment, but Wiktionary-as-it-was-one-month-ago is a lot better than nothing, and quite a bit better than an offline dictionary that only defines English and can’t be stored on the SD card.)
If I had a larger SD card, I could even get Wikipedia! (Or rather, Wikipedia as it was ~3 months ago, but still.) (~18 GB for an imageless version, 50-something GB for the full copy.) So, while I currently still don’t get to have Wikipedia at my beck and call at all times, the problem is now merely “too little storage space”, which is much easier to fix than “how the fuck do you even download Wikipedia”.
I haven’t played around with it that much yet, but initial tests are promising. (I tried using my local copy of Wiktionary just now to double-check my usage of “self-sufficient”, and it worked fine.)
(A while ago I was reading the Eclipse Phase RPG sourcebooks, and at one point they mention a device characters can get that stores a local copy of space-Wikipedia, automatically updating itself whenever you have space-Internet access and providing you with Wikipedia-as-of-the-last-time-you-had-Internet when you don’t have Internet access. And I was like “Damn, *I* want one of those”. Turns out, you can pretty much have one of those.)
Update: my uncle gave me a 64GB microSD card for Christmas. I now have an imageless copy of Wikipedia! (The card can technically fit a full copy, but then it wouldn’t have enough space left for everything else I want to put on it.)
You never know when you might want to look something up, and now I can! (as long as it’s not something where it matters that the offline version hasn’t been updated since September; I read some of their help forum, and apparently compiling a copy of a site that huge is difficult enough that they can only manage updates once or twice a year)
Tags:
#now if only I could find the time to finish my archiving #guess I’d better go tackle my to-do list if I’m ever to reach that point #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(if not clear the prank thing is because I wrote the OP on April 1st) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Brinens and Things 
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