Miscellaneous

Posted byRandall 206 Comments on Miscellaneous

Color Survey

People have made some fun things with the color survey data already.  Howard Yeend did a 3D visualization, Gissehel made some maps out of the raw data, and Rune Grimstad made a color picker tool.  Also, Jacob Rus nerd sniped me with this, which is not related to the color survey but I’m sharing it anyway.

School-Building

Breadpig, the publisher of the xkcd book, is holding a survey to see where people want Room to Read to invest their remaining profits from the book.  If you want to vote, it closes at noon EST on Monday.

xkcd: Mobile Version

If you read xkcd on your phone, or you just prefer simple pages without a lot of clutter, check out m.xkcd.com.  It has a nice, clean design and should be capable of showing the alt-text in any browser (even Lynx, which can’t even show the comic). Report any problems with the site to mobile@xkcd.com.  Thanks!

206 replies on “Miscellaneous”

  2. Speaking of the mobile site, perhaps have user-agent checking on the main site so that mobile users can easily access the alt-text?

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  3. I really like the mobile xkcd site for my regular viewing pleasures (click to see the alternate text is great, no time-out). I tried subscribing to it via RSS, to replace the original feed, but it shows up as the non-mobile site when I click a link to the comic from Google Reader. I could be doing it wrong. But, in case I’m not, feature request: RSS feed for the minimal site. Please and thank you.

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  4. @chris pick what person honestly who reads xkcd has an iphail?

    i’m glad for the mobile site tho, loving it on my g1

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  6. Breadpig, the publisher of the xkcd book, is holding a survey to see were people want Room to Read to invest their remaining profits from the book.

    where*

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  7. Mobile version still doesn’t help Opera Mini or the default mobile browser on my sony ericsson w300i. Just because my phone is tiny and 4 years old, doesn’t mean I don’t want to read your comic on it…it’s blocked at work. 😥

    Of course it’s probably opera mini’s fault they don’t let you zoom in on pictures…

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  8. iPhone/iPod touch users might also want to try this bookmarklet that lets you read any alt-text: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20100404045906105

    The mobile site pretty much renders this superfluous for xkcd.com, though. Any chance to make the mobile site default for mobile browsers?

    Also, unixkcd seems like it would work on the iPhone safari, except I can’t get the keyboard to activate.

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  11. Any chance that the “display:none” for the alt text in the mobile version can go directly into the page instead of being triggered by JS after the page loads? That way you probably could avoid the flicker of the alt text while the page still loads – in many cases the alt text only makes sense *after* reading the comic, displaying it before the comic even displays isn’t too great 🙂

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  12. Just like everyone, I’d love to see automatic redirection. I view xkcd updates from Google Reader, and that means it links to the full site, requiring more work, time and bandwidth to see the alt-text.

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  13. Thank you for the mobile site. I couldn’t find a good xkcd app for Android (the better-rated one in the market completely crashed on me), and the mobile browser doesn’t show the alt-text.

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  15. Thanks for mentioning my color picker tool. I already got a I-hate-you-and-anything-that-is-made-on-microsofts-platforms comment, and I’m loving it.

    Thanks for publishing some really interesting results! 🙂

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  23. Not only did Jacob Rus just nerd snipe me, mothertrucker scored a head-shot. It gave me the idea that perhaps one could create a network of magnetic circuits that could function in a manner analogous to a neural network.

    I have questions. If the answers to a few of them are “Yes” I think I have a basic design in my head. This isn’t really the place to ask them.

    And anyway even though I have a degree in neurobiology I dropped that career about a year ago to start an outdoor travel company. Which I should get back to working on.

    So nerd sniped.

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  25. No longer must I delve into the rss or atom feeds to see the alt text on my droid! I am free! Ahahaha!

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  26. I could you use a “wire” made of linked rings of copper and iron to carry a current from a roof mounted solar array down into my house? It would eliminate the risk of electric shock or fire hazard. Firemen will let a house burn instead of going up on a roof with solar panels.

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  27. Huh, voting seems like a horrible way to determine where money or a construction project will do the most good. I really appreciate the spirit of the donation, but may I suggest reading Dani Rodrik on growth diagnostics as a way to organize thoughts about charitable giving in developing countries. Anyone spending this kind of cash has a responsibility to try and get it right.

    Best,

    Brad

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  29. I’m seeing title text on the RSS feed, and code inspection shows that it has both alt and title. Now I wonder if it was already that way or if it changed after the comments here. (The RSS browser I used: Firefox)

    About redirection, I don’t know if it is a good idea to change the meaning of http://xkcd.com from “normal site” to “normal or mobile based on your UA”, as there’s already http://m.xkcd.com for that.

    What about mobile versions of the RSS and Atom feeds? (They would link to the mobile site instead)

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  32. @dckx

    In my view, the author is big on the idea that platforms are ultimately not as important as content, and is clearly a user of many computing platforms by many manufacturers as indicated in his comics. In other words, the opposite of what your comment suggests.

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  33. I love the mobile version, especially the alt-text. It is awesome. Thank you ❤

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  34. Love those kinds of thought experiments. E&M is fascinating. Now let’s get our learn on.

    The reasons for Fig. 8’s questions on the page: The primary relationship between magnetic flux and electrons, is that magnetism *accelerates moving* electrons, and *moving* electrons induce magnetic fields at a right angle to their motion. The reason for the coil around the ring in the first place is that moving electrons in a coil shape produces magnetix flux on a singular axis, feeding the flux through the magnetic “circuit”. The conductor transfers the electric field by moving the electrons, or should I say, rapidly accelerating and decelerating the electrons (to be scientifically correct). Yes, constant random motions of electrons (for ex, due to heat) will always produce current and some form of magnetic activity, but not significantly (this is part of what creates electrical “noise” in resistors etc). Basically, think of that entire page in terms of kinetic and potential energies. Yes, fields are induced, but that does always not mean energy is transferred… in a same sense that if current has nowhere to go, the E-field doesn’t mean nearly as much. Just like if you stand on your chair, gravity has no path to move you towards the floor.

    Secondly, the idea of transferring electrical energy without a conductor should be familiar. Cut the right length of wire, coil it up, drop a capacitor off it into the dirt (give the circuit an “RC” constant), and place a cheap speaker across the capacitor. If you bought a capacitor of the right material and capacitance, you will hear a radio station. We live in a world where unspeakable amounts of electromagnetic information pass right through us / around us constantly, without conductors. And similar principals are used. Changing current (all wireless tech. is encoded on an AC carrier frequency) produces EM waves. EM waves induce current. The relationship is the same, magnetic fields are related to current by a cross product (electric fields to current by a dot product).

    And yes, you could make a magnetic “transistor”, if by transistor you mean any device which controls the flow of energy between two points, by changing the potential energy of a third point, which is the definition you would be using if you took the whole E-field thing out of the equation. You could make a mechanical one, in that sense too. Your sink. Mechanical flux increases as you add energy to the faucet. In theory, you could build a calculator out of plumbing equipment. But none of these applications are terribly useful due to the fact that none of them are nanometers wide and insanely cheap to produce (microchips cost pennies). Except, there is the idea of making a transistor out of transparent insulators, which is entirely useful and being worked on for fiber-optics.

    Ah, I guess taking the time to type that out makes me “nerd-sniped” nonetheless?

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  38. I made Randall’s rgb.txt into a color list for the Mac OS X systemwide color picker. Right-click/control-click this link and download it into the ~/Library/Colors/ folder (to install it for just yourself) or the /Library/Colors/ folder (to install it for all users on the machine). You might have to create the folder if it doesn’t already exist.

    Once you have it installed, launch an app and go to the third tab of the color picker (the icon that looks like three squares of four colors each). In the pop-up menu of palettes at the top, you should see an item for “xkcd Colors”.

    Note that I’ve sorted the colors with the most popular one first (opposite of how they are in rgb.txt), but I could change that. Also note that you can search for colors by name using the search box at the bottom of the color picker.

    (Randall: how come rgb.txt promises 954 colors but only has 949 lines?)

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  39. Durr, reading comprehension fail…as Randall said on the page with the table, the extra colors are “darker”s and an “again”.

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  40. Talking of the colour name survey I knocked up this code. http://pastebin.com/LKirMe9i . Its a bit system specific (*nix with SDL and the “espeak” speech synth program installed, but could be changed for other command line speech synth programs)
    Basically it displays a table of the colour survey results, and when clicked stated the name of that colour using the speech synth.

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  43. I tried to put this off as long as I could, but I felt the internet should know.

    I pooped my pants today.

    I apologize to my family and everyone I hurt by my actions. I am deeply sorry.

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  44. My only request would be to make the alt-text switch a button or image beneath the comic title, instead of just a random blortch of text that doesn’t appear to be clickable/tappable. Without knowing any better I’d probably assume it was some kind of error in the template.

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  48. Correction for the comic on June 2: Lake Pontchartrain does not connect to the ocean.

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  49. “FIG 6: Perhaps this figure is more familiar to you.”
    I see what they did there. >_> Except maybe they didn’t. I was sure by Fig. 11 that they were referencing… something. 😛
    But maybe I’m just being immature.

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  50. It’s a good thing I didn’t participate in the color survey. My terrible colorblindness would have thrown off the results. Green is brown is red. Blue is purple.

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