xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Also some webcomics about IT may frequently appear on it. For example, the following one-- People who know Unix will understand it easily.
In fact, xkcd is a Geek culture, many comics inside this site can only understood by some specified group of people.
The comic began in September 2005 when Munroe decided to scan doodles from his school notebooks and put them on his webpage. Eventually the comic was changed into a stand-alone website, where Munroe started selling T-shirts based on the comic. He currently works on the comic full time. According to Munroe, the comic's name has no particular significance and is simply a four-letter word without a phonetic pronunciation, something he describes as "a treasured and carefully guarded point in the space of four-character strings."
In May 2007, the comic garnered widespread attention by depicting online communities in geographic form.
In October 2008, The New Yorker magazine online published an interview and "Cartoon Off" between Randall Munroe and Farley Katz. For the "Cartoon-Off," Katz and Munroe each drew: "the Internet, as envisioned by the elderly", "String Theory", "1999", and "your favorite animal eating your favorite food"
For April Fools Day 2012, Comic no. 1037 ("Umwelt") displayed different comics depending on browser, location, and IP range
On September 19, 2012, Comic no. 1110 ("Click and Drag"), featured a panel which can be explored via clicking and dragging its insides. It immediately triggered positive response on social websites and forums. The large image measures 165,888 pixels wide by 79,822 pixels high
XKCD Comic No. 1110 "Click and Drag"
How big is the image?
- This image can be divided into 2592 2048x2048 pixel images
- There are only 225 2048x2048 PNG image files, the rest 2337 images are just white and black blocks.
- The whole image has 81 2048x2048 images(Left :33, Right :48) in horizontal, 32 2048x2048 images(13 in the Sky, 19 on the ground) in vertical.
- If 32 pixels in the image is equal to 5 inches in real world, then the whole image is 25920 inches in width and 10240 inches in height.
- If print each 2048x2048 pixel image as an 300dpi post, then the post will be 14.05 meters in width and 5.55 meters in height.
Some people may say that it's time consuming to create this big image, but this is not a problem to a geek, because this can be achieved with vector picture concatenation.
What have geeks done?
These are what geeks have done about this image.
- If you are uncomfortable with using mouse to drag the image, you can read this article, press Ctrl+Shift+I, then go to JavaScript console, paste the codes, then you can use keyboard to view the whole world.
- This is the full screen version : http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/
- If you want to download all images, you can use this Python script.
- Some people create a Google map like product, you can visit http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/ and http://xkcdmap.webege.com/
- You can also visit the post on Hacker News.
The following site illustrates all information about this image, including meaning of all images and texts on this big image.
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1110:_Click_and_Drag
Why does the author create this image? It's just for fun? This may be one kind of geek spirit, just to prove that I can.
Author : 陈皓 Source : http://coolshell.cn/articles/8398.html
