As we reported today, Wikipedia will be shutting down its English version on Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA. It hopes to educate its users on the two proposed acts and ask them to contact their local congress members to stop them from passing.

Wikipedia is a huge resource of information and many rely on it for homework or just for personal browsing purposes. It’s such an important resource that most of its pages surface as a top Google search result for a prominent figure or event. Having said that, there are ways that you can keep a copy of Wikipedia for yourself. Yes, the entire thing.

There are extremely geeky ways to do this, such as mirroring the entire site, but this will take a lot of technical knowledge, know-how, setup. Instead of downloading the entire Wikipedia database, here are a few ways that will cost you a few bucks, but are infinitely simpler.

The apps below don’t require you to be online to view the pages, and you’ll be able to reference Wikipedia no matter where you are, even when it goes dark on Wednesday.

All of Wikipedia

All of Wikipedia is a brilliant and feature-rich app for your iOS device. It will even prompt you to download a dump of the latest Wikipedia pages in a way that requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. All you have to do is give it some time. And by “some time”, I mean generally between 3 and 4 hours depending on the speed of your connection.

➤ All of Wikipedia / $8.99

WikiPock

WikiPock also brings Wikipedia to your mobile device no matter where you are. It’s available for Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. In a nifty spin, if you don’t have the space on your device for Wikipedia, they will ship you a pre-loaded memory card with Wikipedia on it. Of course that won’t help you when it goes dark on Wednesday, but it’s definitely good to know. While not as pretty as All of Wikipedia, WikiPock gets the job done.

➤ WikiPock / $9.99

Offline Wiki

Offline Wiki is an extension for the Chrome browser that lets you grab a copy of Wikipedia for your computer. The extension does all of the downloading and decompressing of the massively huge files so you don’t have to. The other great thing is that you can read Wikipedia in your browser as you’d normally do.

➤ Offline Wiki / Free

Kiwix

Kiwix is an offline reader that you can download for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It’s a project supported by Wikipedia itself, so it definitely has a thriving community behind it. This software requires you to download a copy of Wikipedia yourself, which you can do here. Once you’ve downloaded the gigantic file and decompress it, Kiwix will take it from there.

➤ Kiwix / Free

Wiki Offline

Wiki Offline is a Mac app that works extremely well on your desktop. It includes features like full-screen reading and image galleries. Like most of the apps listed above, it prompts you to download Wikipedia and takes care of all of the heavy lifting for you. Since it’s for the desktop, you can customize things like the fonts and theme of the application.

➤ Wiki Offline / $9.99

So there you have it, five ways to get your own copy of Wikipedia in English before it shuts down on Wednesday in protest of SOPA. So far, the foundation is getting quite a bit of support in its efforts to raise awareness about acts that could endanger free enterprise on the Internet, as well as call politicians out on their failures at communicating why an act like SOPA is necessary. Even though it will be down, Wikipedia is a resource a lot of us rely on, so it’s best to be prepared.

In what sounds like a lost episode of The Sopranos or CSI, reports are surfacing that clues to the murder of a Canadian mob boss were found hidden in encrypted BlackBerry messages.

According to The Vancouver Sun, mobsters tend to communicate using BlackBerry Messenger since its messages are encrypted and unable to intercept. Apparently, the encryption doesn’t mean that police can’t ask RIM to get involved to bring messages to a trial as evidence.

While the Quebec police aren’t commenting on their methods, it seems like there is some history for getting RIM’s assistance as part of a court case.

After a case in Pakistan, RIM gave a statement suggesting that it would follow the law and hand over any information that is required on a case by case basis:

Like others in our industry, from time to time, we may receive requests from legal authorities for lawful access assistance. We are guided by appropriate legal processes and publicly disclosed lawful access principles in this regard, as we balance any such requests against our priority of maintaining the privacy rights of our users.

Of course RIM isn’t handing your messages over to just anyone, but in the case of Salvatore Montagna’s murder, the case against suspect Raynald Desjardins appears to revolve around BlackBerry messages between the two. One lawyer, Marcel Danis, called it a first for him:

In my experience, this is the first time police intercepted blackberry conversations.

Did RIM hand the data over, or is the BlackBerry thing a smoking gun? Since all of the requests for information are sealed, I guess we’ll never know.

Glympse, a unique location sharing app announced today that the Android version of its app has been downloaded over one million times. This is a huge milestone for the service, that also offers iOS, Windows Phone, and Blackberry version.

Regarding the milestone, Glympse Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Trussel had this to say:

We’re thrilled that our Android install base has grown over 400 percent in less than a year. It’s a testament to the value users see in our simple and safe approach to location sharing.

The Glympse app allows you to share your real-time location to friends and family for short periods of time. For example, you could send a Glympse alert to your wife to let her know that you’re on your way home. She could then track your movement on a map in real-time from an app or on the web.

It’s not as creepy as it first sounds, it’s actually quite useful if someone wants to ask you to pick up something from a nearby store and sees you’re nowhere near it.

The app doesn’t care about “what” you’re doing, but focuses on the “where”. There aren’t any check-ins or badges with the app, just simple sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

The Android Market has taken a long time to even compare to Apple’s App Store, but numbers like this show developers that if they haven’t ported their iOS app for Android yet, it might be time now. On any platform, 750,000 downloads in less than a year is huge.

In June, the company announced that it raised a $7.5 million series B round, and that it had crossed the one million user barrier.

➤ Glympse

There are quite a few restaurant and food recommendation apps such as Dinevore, TV Foodmaps, Alfred, and Yelp. And that’s only a few of them.

Chefs Feed aims to change the food recommendation game by bringing you suggestions from actual well-known and respected chefs in your particular city. Right now, Chefs Feed has information and chef recommendations for Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. The company promises that Seattle, New Orleans, DC, Boston, and Philadelphia are on the way. The app is available for iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The company isn’t alone with the app, as Virgin America is an official launch partner and is airing a documentary about the Chefs Feed app on its airlines.

Here’s a video from the company, which explains Chefs Feed:

Let the chefs show you the way

Once you sign up and choose your location, the Chefs Feed app grabs your location and gives you the option to look for restaurants and food by Chef or by dish. Since these aren’t your friends and are trained professionals, their recommendations might actually help you make a better decision quicker.

The app for iOS is gorgeous, and everything is tied together beautifully. The food items, restaurants, and chefs are all objects in the system and flowing between them is simple and fast. Once you tap through to a chef, you can read about what restaurant they work at, what foods they recommend and where, and what accolades they’ve received during their career. Chefs Feed has launched with very well-known professionals, some of which have been on the popular TV show “Iron Chef”.

Rating and reviewing

While the chefs are driving the experience on the Chefs Feed app, you can review an item yourself if you’ve already tried it, or add it to try later. Your account stores your list of reviews and plans to try things, so while you’re out and about, the app can lead you to your next restaurant destination.

It’s actually a great experience to let your friends suggest where you go to eat and what you eat once you’re there. I’ve personally experienced some reviews on Yelp though that weren’t helpful, because the person may have been at the restaurant at the wrong time, or was having a bad day. Having trained professional chefs tell you what they think is well cooked, in season, and something that has impressed them, has a very different and important value.

I’d like to see Chefs Feed expand to the cities we mentioned above quickly, and provide an easy way for chefs and restaurants get themselves onto the platform. It doesn’t seem like its site provides an application to do so at this time.

If you’d like a professional to tell you what they suggest for your next meal, then give Chefs Feed a try.

Having announced official support for Android applications before it released its PlayBook tablet, RIM has started to detail the features that will be available when its compatibility layer goes live. If you were hoping for full-featured Android apps and services, think again.

Speaking at DroidCon, as part of the Eastern European Mobile Monday Developer Summit in Romania, RIM engineers explained that whilst the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps will support a number of Android apps on the BlackBerry OS and future QNX platform, many key features will be missing.

Thinq reports the following features won’t be supported:

Android’s famed battery-sucking Live Wallpaper, SIP and SIP VoIP, anything built using the Native Development Kit, apps containing only App Widgets, and apps containing more than one activity tied to the Launcher.

In addition, any packages which rely on Google Maps, in-app billing services, Android’s text-to-speech engine, or the cloud-to-device messaging system will all be rendered unusable under the company’s runtime system.

Whilst it can’t be expected that RIM would be able to fully support Android’s suite of features and development kits, the announcement that so many of them won’t make the jump across to the PlayBook will surely frustrate new and existing PlayBook owners who waited on the introduction Android apps to breathe new life into their tablet devices.