Hey! To anyone in the Boston area who wants to get an xkcd book signed, I’ll be doing a signing event at MIT this Thursday (the 17th). It’s in Room 26-100 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Details are here. The event is free, and there will be books for sale there. I’ve been pretty busy signing prints for the store to keep up with the massive flood of Christmas orders, but I wanted to get in a free non-charity event for people who wanted to get books signed but couldn’t afford tickets.
Speaking of which, here are pictures of the xkcd school nearing completion in Laos:
Thanks for all suggestions for the dedication plaque thing! Here’s what we ended up going with:
“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” – Plato.
This school is a gift from the readers of XKCD, an internet comic strip. The world is full of exciting things to discover. We hope you find some of them.
Thanks, everyone. ❤
I posted a while back about getting an x200s laptop. A big part of my decision was based on its durability — reviews touted the roll cage and carbon-fiber composite casing. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to hold up very well in my daily use. The case has cracked in five or six places, and some of these breaks have warped the frame. It also just feels flimsy. The related computers in the line (the x301, the x200, etc) are reportedly a lot sturdier.
Long and boring story short, I decided to repair and resell it, and use the money to get a 13-inch Macbook Pro. It’s significantly heavier than the x200s, but I have a Droid now (which I quite like) and it’s helped remove a lot of my need for an ultraportable laptop. I’ve been using an OS X desktop (a Mac Mini) as my main desktop machine for a couple years now, and I’m tired of rebooting my laptop to Windows when traveling to get to Photoshop (Wine et. al. don’t quite cut it). The things I use Linux for (programming and playing with random toys/projects) are, on the other hand, easily done in VMs. So for me, an OS X laptop seems like a logical choice, and so far I’ve been largely happy with it.
I love the multitouch trackpad (I’ve installed jitouch to expand the set of available gestures), and VMs seem to run nicely. Supposedly the battery’s lifespan is much improved from the old 250 cycles. If not, expect a post in about a year and a half about me blowing up my apartment while attempting to replace the battery with an off-brand one. I may die, but at least I’ll prove the TSA wrong. This laptop has the bonus of being more powerful than my old desktop, which I can now resell to another friend (making the laptop my primary computer), and actually come out ahead on this whole affair.
So long as I’m blabbing about recent gadget experience: Amazon’s support/replacement for broken Kindles is amazing (“We’ll rush-ship you a new one immediately! Just send the old one back to us whenever. So sorry!”). The Droid is proving excellent, though it seems like each day brings a hilarious new Android bugs. For example, it turns out having certain kinds of DNS records for the Jabber server for your Google Apps account for your domain can, starting last week, through a complicated series of events, cause Market downloads to freeze and keep you from updating any apps on the phone. That was a fun bug to try to track down, but it’s trumped in sheer weirdness by the Droid’s 24.5-day Autofocus bug, which is itself the weirdest bug story since The Case of the 500-Mile Email.
xkcd 
Congrats on the pics and dedication from the school! It’s wonderful that you could have helped such a momentous thing to happen just by drawing some great comics.
Also, a Macbook? For shame.
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Bridge the divide, man! Mac, Linux and Windows users living in harmony!
Also, the school is just an unbelievable thing. Anyone who can say they helped bring education where there was none should feel proud.
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Wow, I’m super excited about this jitouch thing. I got a first gen 15 inch macbook pro a year ago and I love the multitouch gestures. I installed MultiClutch, which allowed me to bind a few things to the unused gestures that were already in place, like rotate left and right, and 3 finger swipe up and down, but only for non-Apple programs. This looks like a sweet improvement. Thanks for posting about it!
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Yes! (on the laptop choice)
I am pretty sure that most of the Linux things you do can be done without the use of VMs, that is, right in OS X.
Also, checkout BetterTouch Tool. It is awesome for the multitouch trackpad, and the developer is adding new stuff almost on a daily basis.
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I would really, really love to hear about the jabber-DNS-records-on-Google-Apps-making-it-impossible-to-update-Droid-apps bug if you have the time to write it up (or can point to where it’s already been written).
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MacBook and Laos school ftw!
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Glad i could support and buy a few nails and a hammer for the project. The book was totally worth it and i have bought about 3 more for friends who “borrowed” my copy. The plaque will be a great lasting statement.
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I had never heard of the 500 mile email before. That just made my jaw drop.
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Great work on the school! I’ve had similar experiences a while ago moving from linux/win to OSX/macbook pros.
Great platform, nothing to stuff around with anymore, gets the job done and much more! Been big momentum in the tech industry the past yrs to the apple platform – highly informed/experienced tech people have moved over to it from *nix and windows backgrounds. Best of both worlds and pays dividends over and over negating the extra price everyone seems to be complaining of. Good job!
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Have you ever looked into BOXX Technologies laptops? Actually I take that back, there more like mobile workstations, but a good replacement for a desktop. They ship standard with i7 CPU’s factory overcloked and come with 12 GB of ram.
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For what it’s worth, the Chinese believe you about laptop batteries…they’re just doing the wrong thing about it.
I was in Shanghai last week and, when I packed to return, I put my huge, spare battery for my (work) Dell laptop in my checked luggage. When I checked my luggage, a buzzer went off and I was told that I had to report to the luggage screening room before I could get my boarding passes.
(This, by the way, is EXACTLY what you suspect will happen in a Communist country but you’re absolutely hoping it won’t. For the record, everybody was very polite and charming…nobody tried to take me into detention, even once.)
In the luggage screening room, it was explained to me that I couldn’t check my massive battery; instead, I had to put it in my carry-on luggage to take it with me!
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(Hmmm…it turns out the TSA has the same policy about batteries in checked luggage. However, they don’t appear to actually enforce it…)
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And here’s how your dedication quote will eventually be mistranslated:
“However, its accuracy, especially children, to learn the talent to entertain a direct search will not care to measure the severity of each bushel of bending strength training,” he said.
http://translationparty.com/tp/#5647966
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I was wondering how long will it take for you Randall to switch to a mac, being essentially unix with a nicer GUI. I cant live without the terminal.
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Interesting Droid Bugs?
1). Try powering it off while it is plugged in. Can’t be done. The “Power Off” command is more like a reboot when it’s plugged in, and if you take an already-turned-off droid and plug it in, it will power up.
2). Use the landscape on-screen keyboard while it is plugged in. The keys on the left side all activate and deactivate randomly, causing many key repeats. Problem only happens on some USB chargers.
3). Try sending an SMS using Google Voice. You’ll either get a Force-Close or duplicate SMSs.
4). Open up Car Home as an app instead of using a magnet. Put it in landscape and click on contacts.
5). My favorite. Set an alarm for a few minutes into the future and get ready. When the alarm starts to go off, the screen won’t show the alarm, yet. Hit the power button to try to silence the alarm. It will make you unlock the screen. Do that. Now it shows you the Home screen. Alarm is still going off! Good luck making it stop.
6). Install the Free Sudoku app and reboot. It’s in memory! Why? I have no idea. I guess the Sudoku app programmer decided that sudoku was important enough to start on boot.
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Pardon me, but on the dedication plaque shouldn’t “XKCD” really be “xkcd”? To quote the “About” page:
The preferred form is “xkcd”, all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn’t start a sentence, “XKCD” is an okay alternative. “Xkcd” is frowned upon.
It’s a small nitpicky detail, but it’s worth bringing up.
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Actually, your most recent comic about the “car on the train” exceeding the speed of light was practically an exact description of what some moron (who actually got TV coverage) thought was possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRWwI61so5Q&feature=related has this idiotic video. Try to avoid clawing your eyes out while watching.
…Then again, we’ve got quantum mechanics transmitting information faster than the speed of light, so special relativity isn’t totally perfect.
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You had an awesome processor with 6MB of L2 cache on the X200s. Why were you rebooting for Windows? VMs on that machine run very nicely.
I believe the MacBook Pro is still limited to processors with 3MB of cache. I worry about the glass in the Mac if your X200s started breaking.
Do 13-inch MBPs offer resolutions above WXGA? I am loving my WXGA+ at 12″ on my X200s, but I don’t think I’m as rough with mine. That and I just can’t bring myself to buy what Jobs commands.
Good luck with your MBP, though. I’m holding out for a real upgrade for my Android Dev Phone 1 (ION doesn’t count–still no audio jack). USB tethering is just awesome though.
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what a lovely dedication for the school!
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I’d like to mirror the above sentiments regarding the school’s dedication plaque, though I have to wonder if one day one of the kids attending the school will find the comic and ask in class about wikipedia anatomy pictures and chain restaurants…
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250 cycles?
I feel fortunate
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I believe it when you say that the android/jabber/market bug was a fun one to track down. I haven’t been able to find anything on it, even though you provided several good keywords. Can you post a link to what you’ve found? I’ve been experiencing similar issues with my G1 and would love to find a fix.
The school looks great. Awesome work!
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Yeah, the Car on the Train idea is along the lines of the first thing people think of when they’re told C isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.
But hey, that kind of thinking (“in 15 minutes of reading, I have become more knowledgeable about this subject than the experts; yar!”) pervades all areas of inquiry, not just special relativity.
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Why use a Linux VM for coding when XCode is native and phenomenally shiny?
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Congrats on the school!
I love my mac; I love my droid. I hate AT&T.
That camera bug is AWESOME! I used to work in QA and whooee, that one would have been sweet to catch (but nearly impossible to anticipate)!
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I hope the final plaque contains the actual xkcd url so that the kids don’t even have to google to find the website.
If they’re learning English at the school, they’ll probably get a lot of the jokes. When I was teaching English in Vietnam I had a class of Lao freshmen, and even though a lot of them came from rural villages, those kids knew more about techie stuff than the average American freshman I’ve met.
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Sorry, I don’t really have a comment, but the number of comments before this one was 23 and I really couldn’t stand for that.
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Well 24 is all fine and good, but 25 is far superior, being a perfect square and all.
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I was under the impression that you used Linux full-time. That’s too bad. Also, is GIMP inferior to use on your comics?
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The school looks great!
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Do another book signing after Christmas, will you? I’m going out of town.
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Enjoy the MBP 🙂 It’s a really solid machine – mine has gone through a lot and it’s still kicking. One peace of advice I would give if you are prone to damaging computers – consider putting in an SSD. Definitely a great feeling knowing that even a drop onto a concrete floor might damage the screen / touchpad, but won’t do anything to your data.
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jitouch? Check out BetterTouchTool, I’ve been using it for a month or 2 now, and I probably can’t live without anymore, it allows everything from 4-finger clicks to tip-tapping. The creator also seems obsessed with the program, as it’s updated like every 3 days.
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Reading the plaque text brought me to tears. I grew up with mentors who were generous and free with the joy they felt from getting to experience and unravel the mysteries of the world, and taught me that these can be the most awe-inspiring and spiritual of experiences. Thank you for spreading and sharing the spark of interest in this world we find ourselves in!
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The 13″ mbpros do only have 3 megs of L2, which is why I bought a 15″ 2.8, to get the 6 megs L2. Runs Snow Leopard, with a linux VM like a dream, all in 4 gigs of ram.
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I don’t mean to bitch, but “internet” is technically supposed to be capitalized as “Internet”. Just my little contribution to grammar…
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Not to be a bitch, but Internet should be capitalized in your plaque. Not that anyone but the more hardcore grammarians would notice…
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LOL. I get so distracted by the Captichas, that I forget my comment WASN’T deleted and DOESN’T need to be reposted… “Interstate smiting” is just too good to pay attention to such trivialities.
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I know this isn’t relevant to this news post, but I was wondering if you’re ever going to get around to fixing thefunniest.info and related sites. I love xkcd, and I love thefunniest.info, but the same pictures have been the “new” and “top” pictures on there for months or even years.
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Seriously… getting a mac i’m now completely done reading your commics. I thought your other commic about sshing into a mac was your roomates since they were the “hip type”. Oh well i’m for one done with xkcd as it’s no longer a comic for the intellectuals but rather the wannabe “i want to use a mac and be so cool” crowd.
j
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Laos school is INCREDIBLE. Kudos to you for doing something so charitable with our money. It would have been easy (and normal) to keep it all for yourself. So thank you for breaking the mold.
Also, congrats on your MBP! I love my Macbook so much I started working at an Apple store. OS X rocks my world.
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I had never read the 500 mile mail thing before.
Good lord, I laughed.
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Actually, the 500-mile-email-story is a bit odd, since the speed of light in cables is reduced by 30% or so …
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I wish there was something like jitouch for windows. I’m running windows on the new macbook and the touchpad is so lame (compared to how good it COULD be). When I right click on a link (two finger touch) it clicks the link AND opens the right click menu. SO FRUSTRATING.
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@xkcd: Congrats on the school.
In other news, fx3 said:
[mac is] “essentially unix with a nicer GUI.”
Starting with 10.5, Mac OS X became a certified / registered UNIX rather than just “Unix-like.” I’ve used Ubuntu and Fedora for a couple of years now, and I’m pretty happy with those, but I’m rather impressed with my wife’s Macbook.
Granted, you can’t dig around under the hood, you can’t (legally) just buy the OS and install it on your existing computer, and you’re still paying some corporation to tell you what you can and can’t do with your computer. However, I think they’ve struck a good balance between security and accessibility, between the simplicity of the Desktop and the flexibility of the Terminal.
Captcha: “nannying Internacional”. I’d totally watch that.
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Seriously, the 500mile bug thing can’t be true. – At least not as it’s presented.
The speed of a signal in either twisted pair or fibre is NOT the speed of light in vacuum, but rather the speed of light in the dielectric! Which for most cases reduces the effective transfer speed by a factor of 2/3. Either the timeout was not 3ms, or there was something else going on.
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I like the dedication; really sweet. The last few sentences had a touch of Watterson’s “There’s Magic Everywhere” I think. Good job guys.
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Out of curiosity, I did the math on how explosive a laptop battery could be, given the amount of electrical energy it’s rated for. For a 10.8v battery rated to 8800mAh (the first laptop battery I found on google), we get the equivalent of about 2.8 ounces of TNT. That’s getting dangerously close to the TSA’s 3.4 oz limit…
Math is here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%288800+milliamps+*+1+hour+*+10.8+volts%29+%2F+%284.184E3+Joules+per+gram%29+in+ounces&aq=f&oq=&aqi=h1
I also found it interesting that according to http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/11/response-to-tsa-takes-big-gulp-over.html frozen liquids are allowed (of course, isn’t every solid a frozen liquid?) The blog entry says “It is highly improbable that the explosives TSA is concerned about could be frozen by traditional means.” However, Nitroglycerin’s freezing point is 56* F, and apparently it was often shipped frozen solid in the past.
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