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.

There’s probably a number of reasons why PC shipments stalled overall at the end of 2011. One of them could be the emergence of mobile devices like the iPad and several hundred different Android tablets. Another reason could be that there hasn’t been anything really exciting going on in the desktop space for some time.

Research firm Gartner shared numbers that showed a Q4 decline after two strong quarters before it. The drop was 1.4% among all vendors, and ended the year selling a total of 92.2 million units.

HP stayed on top of PC sellers at number one, but had a global dip of almost 16% compared to its shipments in 2010.

Here’s a similar study from IDC, broken into a global list and US only list:

Apple fared rather well in the US with an astounding 18% year over year growth, according to these numbers from IDC, even though they’re stuck at number three behind HP and Dell in the US.

Where will the PC market go from here? The introduction of Windows 8 should boost sales at some point this year, with new machines shipping with it pre-installed, but the first two quarters of this year should be fairly quiet thanks to the whisper-end to an otherwise strong 2011.

If you’ve been using Picasa on your desktop, you’ve noticed that there haven’t been any updates that involve Google+. That all changes today with Picasa 3.9.

The desktop app boasts a few new features, with Google+ sharing front and center. Here’s what the Google Photos team had to say about the features in its latest client:

Share with people in your Google+ circles: Picasa 3.9 makes it easy to share the right photos with the right people with just a few clicks. To share an album, just click on the green “Share on Google+” button and add the specific circles you want to share your photos with. Find out more here.

Tag people in your circles: When you click a photo to tag a friend, the dropdown menu now includes people in your Google+ circles in addition to your Gmail contacts. If you tag friends from Google+, Picasa will automatically suggest that you share your pictures with them when you upload your album. Learn more about tagging.

Tagging people and sharing to circles on Google+ is drop-dead simple with the latest version of Picasa, which you can download here.

Along with the new social features, the team has also included 24 new photo editing effects as well as side-by-side mode for comparing two images. This is super helpful when you’re editing your pictures and want to match colors and effects perfectly.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that Google is integrating social into all of its products one by one. The only downside of this new update, is that they’re still calling the product “Picasa”. Dearest Google, can’t we just rename it to Google Photos and call it a day already?

➤ Picasa for Mac and PC

Despite rumours to the contrary, HP will not be selling its PC business anytime soon, after HP’s SVP and Chief Communications Officer Bill Wohl addressed reports by stating it remains at the “core [of] HP’s strategy for the connected world”.

DigiTimes had reported that HP was looking to sell its PC business, sourcing an article in the Chinese-language publication Commercial Times. It was suggested that Samsung was lining up an acquisition, a rumour that has been circulating from late in 2010.

Wohl issued a statement on HP’s behalf, stating:

“Irresponsible reporting by Taiwan’s Commercial Times, suggesting that HP might sell its PC business, should be dismissed as market rumor and speculation. HP runs the world’s largest PC business and it is core to HP’s strategy for the connected world.”

With the smartphone and tablet market booming, HP recently declared it would push its WebOS mobile platform, releasing a number of new handsets and tablet devices in 2011/12 but also on its PC products, expanding HP’s offerings in the software market.

The commitment by HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker suggested that the company would gradually adopt its WebOS platform over Windows-powered PC’s, fuelling speculation that it would move away from its PC business altogether.