The Real Hitchhiker's Guide?

An anonymous reader writes "The UK's biggest selling newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, has a news story about a UK company that has developed the real version of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the galaxy. It is a kind of portable media player that allows you to travel the world's surface and receive media tailored to who you are, where you are and what you are looking at."

hhgttg

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is here [vogon.com]. I recommend the Infocom version if you want to play games.

LifeDrive + Wikipedia dump

[ThreeDayMonk]

I'm sure that you could make a real HHGG substitute with a Palm LifeDrive (or indeed anything with a few gigabytes of storage, a screen, and input) and a dump of Wikipedia. It could even have a conduit to synchronise your offline changes with the master on the internet.

Prior art

[$RANDOMLUSER]

You mean something like Alan Kay's Dynabook [wikipedia.org]?

Re:Wifi wiki?

[bhtooefr]

That's what I was thinking...

Simply a handheld device (in the formfactor of the old Sharp Wizard PDAs) with a GPRS connection (remember, the real guide took a little while to DL over the subetha), linked to Wikipedia or that version of the guide on the BBC site (although, Wikipedia makes more sense)...

Of course, even if they made such a thing, they certainly wouldn't get it here to the US.

However, any smartphone'll be able to read Wikipedia, so it's all a moot point...

Oh, bollocks.

[Mac Degger]

I've already got a h2g2: basically my palmpilot loaded with stuff coupled with my cellphone. Hell, actually my cellphone is more of a h2g2 all by itself, seeing as I do google searches on it.

Making this possible

[foo23]

I am asking myself the following: It would be really nice if this could be made possible by the following small changes in already existing technology:

1) Make wikipedia entries searcheable by proximity to global coordinates. The data is probably very quickly entered by the community and the search function does not sound difficult to me.

2) Owners of private wireless access points make them open for everyone ... but all unknown or unidentified users/MAC addresses will _only_ be able to access wikipedia. Nothing else, everything is redirected. This is naturally the more difficult point.

Has anybody experience with configurations like this? I am interested ...

Agreed...

[interactive_civilian]

Seriously, I've been waiting for something like this ever since I first picked up a PDA and then learned that wireless networking was possible.

Sure, we don't have a "Sub-etha-net" yet, but if the world ever gets to the point where some kind of wireless is possible no matter where you are, then this kind of device coupled with something like Wikipedia could easily lead to at least a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth".

It seems to me that, a good chunk of this for the part most could be done today given enough volunteers to fill in the data. If we ever get to the point where satellite recievers/transmitters will fit into a small enough device, then it will work pretty much anywhere (in the world) at any time.

Now, if I could just figure out how to pick up 15 years of back-pay for writing the words "Mostly Harmless". The first one took the most time, but the second one came to me over lunch. ;D

Circular News

[BenjyD]

Strange that this article should end up on Slashdot: it was a Slashdot inspired story in the first place. I pointed out the original Slashdot article about the device to my father (Nicholas Roe), knowing that as a travel journalist he would be interested. And here we are, a fortnight later, and it's on Slashdot itself. the strange circular world of online journalism.