r/xkcd

I'll wait

I dont mean to drag powerscalling into xkcd, but I need to know

I was inspired by https://xkcd.com/3239/ Simple Machines so I made my own. Did I come close enough?

Print your own here: https://www.printables.com/model/1709643-xkcd-simple-machine-six-in-one-multitool

Was asked to reheat something for a minute and a half, so I just pressed Nine and Zero. Friends seemed surprised, but it's more efficient than One - Three - Zero.

I use Nine pretty regularly on my microwave. Then I see and xkcd about it and wonder if I'm alone.

Speaking of which this comic is older than me.

https://xkcd.com/198/

This is almost 20 years old. And this is one of those xkcd that now might need a lot of explanation to anyone under 30.
At one point, Microsoft had a monopoly and was pretty much the Big Bad of tech circles. Apple was a struggling company who had just recently developed some niche products. Google was a search engine. Facebook was a niche site for college students. Amazon was an online bookstore (not sure just when Amazon started to expand outwards, but I don't remember it being big, it was less important than eBay)

Anyway, as this strip says, browser choice was a political issue, and providing an alternative to the buggy Internet Explorer browser made by villain Microsoft was the heart of open source. It was about more than a browser---it was about freedom of information online. Somehow the logic went, that if people could choose their own browser, we would have an open internet! Like, the success of the Mozilla Browser really was tied up in many people's opinions with freedom of speech. There was actually a thing called "Download Day", where the Mozilla foundation tried to set a record for software downloads in a day! All of this was seriously imporant in the 2000s.

Anyway, 20 years later, we did learn that having a free choice of browser did not totally revolutionize society.