Author Archives: Randall

You may have noticed that the knapsack problem in today’s comic has two solutions. I thought that (spoiler alert!) the 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1 solution was the only one, but 7, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 — seven orders of mixed fruit — also works. Why did this happen? Well, I checked my […]

Here are some pictures I took by flying a camera-carrying kite over Boston: More at xkcd.com/kite. I’m getting a larger kite and hope to make some higher flights. I can’t really plan when I’ll be out there since it depends on the weather, but if you’re nearby (I’m flying them from the MIT athletic field), […]

I’ve finally left Virginia and moved to Boston (the Cambridge-Somerville area). I’m really excited. I try to avoid the teenage-ish tendency to blame everything on wherever I am (“I just need to get out of this town! This place sucks! Hey, can you put on another Simple Plan CD?”). But I really think the Virginia […]

While trying any kind of sleep-typing, you probably want to use a keyboard like this: This keyboard is missing every key that lets you delete words you’ve typed or otherwise send commands to the OS or text editor/messaging program you’re typing in (Ubuntu+ion3 and irssi here — your mileage may vary). When you drift off […]

(Note: Firefox crashed just as I was finishing this post. This is a terse recreation, as I’m about to collapse.) I gave a talk at MIT yesterday (now the day before yesterday). It was wonderful. I had never really done this kind of thing before, but it went so much better than I expected. I […]

As if Cory Doctorow getting dressed in a red cape and goggles after I drew this comic wasn’t crazy enough, in response to this comic, two xkcd fans — Rafael Roquetto and Mauro Persano — have bought Richard Stallman a katana: The had it shipped to him at the FSF offices (more pictures here). He […]

There’s some strange text on billboards around New York. I passed these four this weekend: THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY It’s clearly a viral marketing campaign and seems to be by Ask.com. I like puzzles like this, but at the […]

Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award yesterday, and I’m happy to see the presenters found him some fitting attire: (Photo courtesy quinnums, full set here)

There’s no red cape. But, then again, this was taken back in 2004: Photo courtesty Windley (via, of course, a Creative Commons license) Cory Doctorow was the guy who first convinced me to publish xkcd under a CC license, allowing people to share my comics freely. It’s easy to do and was one of the […]

MIT has a BattleCode programming competition, (which reminds me of Robowar, the reason I didn’t have a high-school social life). This year, [at least] one of the teams was a group of xkcd readers — Nicole, Bobby, and Jessica. They are fun people who I actually had the pleasure of meeting briefly while visiting Boston […]