Matt Swann has written a Perl script that loads Wikipedia into your iPod (if you know how, you can modify this script to grab-and-save other sites too). That's really useful, and his script is very easy to use!

Wikipedia in your iPod">Wikipod v1.5 starts with a page in Wikipedia and saves that to your iPod. Then it goes to every link in the page and saves those pages. Then it goes to every link in those pages and saves those other pages. Then it goes to every link in those other pages and... you get the idea.

It will stop downloading when it can no longer find any new links or when it has reached a specific size (you set the size).

How do you use it? Here, in Matt Swann's own words:

To get started:

1. Download wikipod to your desktop and unzip it
2. Open Terminal.app and type cd ~/Desktop
3. Type chmod 755 wikipod to mark the script as executable

Then, each time you want to load Wikipedia pages onto your iPod, do the following:

1. Mount your iPod in disk mode (its icon should appear on the Desktop)
2. Open Terminal.app and type cd ~/Desktop
3. Pick a Wikipedia page to start from. WeÂ?ll choose the iPod page for this example
4. Type ./wikipod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod, then a space
5. Double-click on your iPod icon and drag the Notes folder into the Terminal window
6. Type the number of megabytes of space for wikipod to fill

The command should now look like this:

./wikipod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod /Volumes/iPod/Notes 10

When you hit enter, your iPod starts saving the Wikipedia entries. Double-click on the Notes folder in your iPod folder and you can see the entries downloading, formatting, and then saving onto your iPod.

Stop! You can unmount your iPod when it says "Done transferring ___ pages!" but you shouldn't! As Matt Swann says:

... the first time you navigate to the Notes menu after syncing with iTunes or downloading new Wikipedia articles, the iPod needs to inspect each page to see whether the links are valid. This can take a fair amount of time (and battery, since itÂ?s disk-intensive), so I recommend leaving the iPod plugged in until it finishes.

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Update: Matt Swann has made several changes:

• slashes in the URL no longer break the script
• users can remove the trailing slash in the directory path
• 50MB limit on how much can be downloaded at one time
• support for UTF-8 characters (Greek, for example)
• Apple limits the iPod to 1000 notes, so Wikipod stops after that
• sleeps for four seconds between each page request to comply with Wikipedia

Download: [Wikipod v1.5]