Any ipad apps as good as Calibre's Fetching News?

[tanteoma]

First off, I love this function. From back when I was using kindle to now I'm using iPad for work, it has become my morning ritual. My only problem is that I travel to China quite often and their evil firewall blocks many news sources and individual pages on news sites based on keywords. I don't use VPN so I need a cloud based news fetcher to get the news for me in a package to circumvent the firewall.

Any recommendation or workaround is much appreciated.

[Steven630]

I live in China. But there are some free VPN services out there. I use them when I want to fetch news outside the wall.

[tanteoma]

Any recommendations? I'm an eternal newbie to all things digital. I roam around in China quite a bit, too. The previous vpn services I tried had various holes where they couldn't work with the one or the other internet provider in different cities. Then they got banned, too. It was a mess.

[tanteoma]

Solved the problem myself. I'm on windows xp and don't use IE. So I found a free http proxy specialised in fighting the annoying GFW http://briteming.blogspot.de/2012/07/fookproxy.html, downloaded it, run it, set IE proxy to the right address and calibre is already fetching BBC news like a full featured diligent great software it is. Now I can use internet as usual for my other stuff instead of suffering through shaky vpn connection in provincial hotels.

Here is to the speedy end of that nasty regime!

[Steven630]

Great. Actually the page you provided is not accessible in China as well.

[tanteoma]

The file is reachable https://merandd.googlecode.com/files/fook10b86.rar

That blog explains a little how-to, though not really important. I ran the file and it already had a brief how-to inside, plus there was not much fiddling around anyway. You just run it and set the IE proxy as 127.0.0.1:8000. That's it. I left it that way overnight when my calibre was set to fetch news, then changed the IE setting back to "no proxy" in the morning. I didn't notice any difference when I surfed the net using firefox and chrome. But as an IT newbie, I don't really know how many things the IE proxy setting affects so I turn it off when I'm using the computer.

The blog post reads

使用说明
Fookproxy很容易使用，只需三个步骤：
第一步：下载解压代理客户端：点此下载
第二步：配置浏览器：设置浏览器HTTP代理服务器地址：127.0.0.1 端口： 8000 。点击这里查看各浏览器详细设置教程。
第三步：打开Fookproxy文件夹内的 Fook.exe，点击主界面的启动按钮，代理开始工作。
使用过程中遇到问题可先参考常见问题 ，如自行无法解决，请通过下面的联系方式获取技术支持！
局部地区访问网页如提示10053、10054错误，请点界面设置，在23行处修改https=False 为https=True即可解决问题。
备注说明
1、共享帐号内置在代理客户端，密码会不定期更新。
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其实就是wallproxy的gae版。 用以前一个类似的东西-ezproxy更省事，永久有效。

CAUTION: The one collateral problem GFW caused is that I'm forced to trust these little programs that come from unknown sources. So I only use them on a non-essential netbook with not much personal data, no credit card information, business stuff or online trading information on it, just to be on the safe side. The netbook is my entertainment center loaded with movies, music and ebooks, nothing more.

[Steven630]

I think it should work. But since you are not in China right now，it might just be an illusion. The setting may not have been successful at all. So try it out again within the wall.

[tanteoma]

I'm in the wall. :P

[Steven630]

Cheers then. It may come in handy for me sometime.

[tanteoma]

Cheers! Remember to find an http proxy. My old one was a socket 5 and couldn't get Calibre to function. I don't know why and but I'm happy with this solution.