How to store the entire Wikipedia (well almost) inside your Smartphone or Tablet

How would you like to have the entire Wikipedia text inside your android smartphone? What do you say to that? I'd say "Information is POWER!".

Never mind that it's fully text-only with not a single image in sight. Imagine reading two million articles on famous persons, history, technology, etc. on Wikipedia, but totally, get this, OFFLINE. Access the articles, anytime, anywhere, without WiFi.

Welcome to BitMagic Technologies LLP's Wiki Encyclopedia Offline-Free app!

We're talking here about a whopping 3.58 Gigabytes of download data for your cherished smartphone or tablet. Zounds! A long wait indeed, depending on your Internet speed, but it's well worth the wait.

In fact, I can't wait for the day when a smartphone or tablet has the storage capacity exceeding 250 Gigabytes - which is how much storage space a full version of an offline Wikipedia, containing text and images, will take up.

Einstein would have been proud of you!

2 million articles at your fingertips.

My one gripe is that the app doesn't allow text-to-speech capability. So my Ivona Amy or Nicole TTS Engine can't read the text while I'm driving or ironing my shirt. Maybe in the next update then.

A smartphone is too smart and expensive a device to use it just to play games. Life is too precious to while the time away with all kinds of distractions on your smartphone. Want to be a winner at Jeopardy? Why not enlargen your world and knowledge by browsing 20 Wikipedia offline articles a day? It'll only take you 273 years to finish the two million articles of 2013 Wikipedia! So why not Wikipedia-fy your smartphone and tablet today? You won't regret it.

Happy Wikipedia-ing
Frankie Kam

P.S.,
Incidentally, my first blog post on Moodurian.blogspot.com was entitled "How to fit the entire Wikipedia inside your laptop" was in May 2010. How times have changed. Amazing.

Moodle 1.9 Custom Corners Theme for mobile devices by Yedidia Klein

Here's a quick question. How many Moodle 1.9.x themes do you know of that are specially designed for mobile devices? Forgive my ignorance, but I only know of one - Isreali Yedidia Klein's theme named "custom_corners_mobile". You can read about it here.

It is a modified JQuery version of the "custom_corners" theme for Moodle 1.9. You can download Yedidia's theme from here. After you have downloaded, extracted and ftp'ed the theme to your Moodle site, you can then add these lines to your config.php:

//Mobile Detection and theming
include("theme/custom_corners_mobile/mobile_functions.php");
if (ismobile())
  $CFG->theme="custom_corners_mobile";

After this, you can then browse your Moodle site via your mobile device.

Do you know of any other themes for Moodle 1.9 that cater for mobile devices? Please share in the comments section below.

Happy Moodling
Frankie Kam