xkcd's 13-Gigapixel Webcomic

New submitter Nomen writes "Today's xkcd: Click and Drag (Google Maps version) is probably the world's biggest web comic at an RSI-inducing resolution of 165,888x79,872 pixels. It's made up of 225 different images that take up 5.52MB of space. Now, if only the mines were powered by nethack..."

Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Some guy made a keyboard-controllable fullscreen interface: http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/

Re:I was actually disappointed by this.

[Anonymous Coward]

My buddy wrote up a script that pulls the whole map into a big clickable image: http://hydra.drawert.net/xkcd_clickdrag/ [drawert.net]

Re:I was actually disappointed by this.

[ericloewe]

That's easy, try finding these without zooming out:

2 MD-80s
2 other airliners, possibly 767s
Apollo 13
Two X-Wings

Re:I was actually disappointed by this.

[pixelpusher220]

Find Icarus ;-)

Re:I was actually disappointed by this.

[Kal Zekdor]

Did the same thing myself the moment I saw the comment. Didn't combine them into a single image, but got every bit of detail within a 100x100 panel square. Nothing was found further than 25 panels from the center, though.

Here's the python script I threw together. It's crude, but gets the job done. (Note that it needs wget on the path or in the same directory, didn't feel like tinkering with binary writes.)

import os, urllib

baseUrl="http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/"

def convert(coords):
    st = ''
    if coords[0]>0:
        st+=str(coords[0])+'n'
    else:
        st+=str(abs(coords[0]))+'s'

    if coords[1]>0:
        st+=str(coords[1])+'e'
    else:
        st+=str(abs(coords[1]))+'w'

    st+='.png'

    return st

x=1
y=1
flipX = 1
flipY = 1
while True:
    coords = (x*flipX, y*flipY)
    print coords
    u = urllib.urlopen(baseUrl+convert(coords))

    firstLine = True
    img = False
    for line in u:
        if firstLine:
            firstLine = False
            if line == '\x89PNG\r\n':
                print 'Found Image!'
                os.spawnl(os.P_WAIT, "wget"," -nc ",baseUrl+convert(coords))
            elif line == '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>\n':
                pass
            else:
                print line
    u.close()
    if flipY==-1:
        flipY = 1
        y+=1
        if y>x:
            y=1
            if flipX==-1:
                flipX=1
                x+=1
            else:
                flipX=-1
    else:
        flipY = -1

Re:Not all that impressive

[steelfood]

It's so big. Yet so really, really small when you compare it to the real world. More size comparisons:

Based on the Burj Khalifa being 829 meters, each image (cell) is about 100 meters.

The full image is 81 cells wide, 32 cells high. The highest point where the whales are at is 13 cells high (including the initial ground level), while the lowest point is around 19 cells deep (not including the initial ground level).

Mt. Everest is slightly higher than the image is wide (88.5 cells).

The deepest mine in the world is about twice the depth of the caves from ground level (39 cells).

In fact, the deepest hole ever drilled is about six times as deep (122 cells).

If the jumbo jets' cruise altitude were drawn to scale, they would be close to ten times the height of the whale from ground level (124 cells).

If this was a map of Manhattan starting at the tip of Battery Park, it would end near the southern parts of Central Park, specifically the whereabouts of the skating rink (according to Google Maps anyway).

Also, apparently, some forum-goers have found the images at the four 11x11 corners to be blank (present but blank, whereas the rest of the empty space is not an actual image). The theory is that this one, 1110, will be either the last or the penultimate comic (with 1111 being the last comic, or just blank). The last comic theory comes from the obvious reference to Calvin and Hobbes, and a reference to the very first comic at the eastern-most cell. There are more blank images at 1n4e, 1n5e, 2n1w, 2n3w, 8n1w, but its meaning has not been cracked yet.