2 posts with tag “Wikipedia”

Preserving the discontinued, offline, E Ink WikiReader

From Input: “A ragtag community is keeping this aughts Wikipedia gadget alive”:

The aesthetically unremarkable aughts gizmo measures 4 inches by 4 inches, with a resolution of 240 by 208 pixels. It has an e-ink display with a rather janky touchscreen that’s better fit for a stylus than a finger.

Jack sells SD cards with updated content for $34, or $29 for a digital download. [He] believes he is the only person in the world who “makes the update and makes one that works and has all the articles (at least the articles that can be viewed on the WikiReader).”

Something about this device, and the person working to keep it relevant, makes me happy. As much as I love/hate the internet, I’m always interested in ways we can do things without needing an internet connection.

Over the last couple decades we’ve begun putting everything on the web. Taking something off the web — something that couldn’t have existed without the web — and putting it on a handheld device feels warmly reassuring.

It’s a nice reminder, too, that Wikipedia is “freely licensed, allowing anyone to copy, modify, and re-use it for any purpose, including commercial uses.” It’s incredible that such a thing exists.

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Count Chocula

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Count_Chocula&oldid=64163729

Ernst Choukula was born the third child to Estonian landowers in the late autumn of 1873. His parents, Ivan and Brushken Choukula, were well-established traders of Baltic grain who– by the early twentieth century – had established a monopolistic hold on the export markets of Lithuania, Latvia and southern Finland. A clever child, Ernst advanced quickly through secondary schooling and, at the age of nineteen, was managing one of six Talinn-area farms, along with his father, and older brother, Grinsh. By twenty-four, he appeared in his first “barrelled cereal” endorsement, as the Choukula family debuted “Ernst Choukula’s Golden Wheat Muesli”, a packaged mix that was intended for horses, mules, and the hospital ridden.

[via Design Observer]

And Boo Berry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boo_Berry&oldid=64820541

On February 2, 1969, Robert Barry’s four-plane group, now known a “The Green-Blue Angels” took to the skies in a routine “horizon sweep;” this was a standard mid-morning exercise where the planes would spin low to the ground in hexagonal patterns. At approximately 10:16 a.m., Robert’s altimeter malfunctioned, his plane dropped suddenly and severely, and he crashed unceremoniously into the hard earth of central Illinois. When word reached the west coast, Francis Christopher was nearly incapacitated with grief. The ever-increasing success of “Frank Barry’s Cereal” was absolutely no salvation from the melancholy he felt. Susannah Mills struggled to lift her fiancè’s spirits. After a difficult month, the engaged two, along with General Peter Mills, traveled to North Carolina for Robert’s funeral. In a surprising and touching move, Peter spoke at length after the ceremony, passionately and animatedly describing his plans to immortalize his soon-to-be son-in-law’s brother the only way he new how: on a cereal box. With tremendous emotion and very little public fanfare, “Robert ‘Booh’ Barry’s Airplane Cereal” first saw mainstream distribution in December of 1969.

Note that the editor’s name in both cases is Philelvrum. Further reading:

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