Friday, February 20, 2009

Reading Web Content Offline On Your T-Mobile G1

I've got some travels coming up, where it would be handy to have web content on my G1 that didn't require me to be connected to a network. That way, I could be doing some reading while in flight.

There may be a better way of doing this, but here's a solution that came together easily enough:

  1. Decide which web content you want to read. In this case, I wanted to grab Starting Forth by Leo Brodie (yes, I know, more Forth). You'll want to confirm that the site is readable on your G1 before you start this process.
  2. Pull down the content to your local computer. For this, I used wget, and ran the command:
    wget -r http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html 
    
    The -r stands for recursive and grabs not only the page you point it to, but all subsequent pages on the site.
  3. Plug your G1 into your computer via USB and mount the SD card. Copy the files you've downloaded to the SD card. I placed them in:
      /Content/Books/Starting_Forth
    
  4. Using the G1 Market, install a File Manager app on your device. There are a bunch to choose from, but I randomly picked Astro File Manager, and so far I've been happy with it.

Now, when you want to read the content, you open up Astro File Manager navigate to Content >> Books >> Start_Forth and double tap on the HTML file to read. From there, the web browser should start up and you can navigate the site just like it were online - except it's all sell contained.

Happy reading! And good luck cloning the entire Internet to your cell phone's SD card.

Disclaimer: I'm new to the G1, so if there's a better way to do the above, please share! Thanks.

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