xkcd #3186: Truly Universal Outlet
Title text:
Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3186/
You must log in or register to comment.
There really is an xkcd for everything.
The only truly universal solution
It might be a final solution too if you’re not careful…
From schuko to shocko
I’m not sure I fully get the joke, considering the literal existence of outlets like this. Did Randall not know they exist?
Typical wall outlet in china. Any plug will hang loosely in there and work. Dangerously
Only if the socket is worn out and you are using a plug without inherent safety mechanisms.
I’m guessing seeing one of these was the starting point for this cartoon.
Also wouldn’t surprise me if he threw in 1-2 types that don’t exist.Randall isn’t suggesting a universal wall plug, he’s suggesting you cut holes in your existing plates to make them “compatible”. (At least that’s how it reads to me)
Plenty don’t fit that. Type i for instance.
Can’t speak for all of them, but type I does fit
These were all over Vietnam when I travelled there. Didn’t even need an adapter.
silly Caspase8 Vietnam doesn’t exist you were in Finland
I think Randal would enjoy my plug adapter
Ugh, what a shameless plug
You try spending your whole life getting penetrated by various foreign objects and not feeling shame
The penetrated usually penetrates too.
This also makes me wonder why the xkcd one was laid out like that. Is the xkcd one better/safer, or was it done that way to look more insane.
On yours, the Canada/US and UK layouts overlap, while in the xkcd one they’re opposite to each other.
or was it done that way to look more insane.
Yeah I think that’s it lol
I think it’s because mine doesn’t have Schuko (type f) support … probably because it’s real? And maybe because his adaptation uses “Euro”/A combination, wheras mine uses vertical axes for the “euro” plug.
Seems to be incompatible with some plugs, after all:
For some reason the image doesn’t seem to work for me, so here’s the link to it, too
There’s no preview, not even a hint of the image being there… But clicking on the text show the image in Boost
On thunder there was no picture in post preview, but there is a picture in the post. Maybe it’s because of png format, or maybe Wikimedia does something weird when you embed links to it, dunno
The embed looks fine for me using Voyager through sh.itjust.works with a ‘muricuh IP.
Thunder user here, works fine
What about the voltages and the hz?
Yes.
Put the plug in upside down to get 220V.
You can switch from 60hz to 50hz by rotating the plug fast enough
As an engineer, thinking of designing the metal connectors needed for this, this gives me nightmares.
Simple, just use a metal mesh in each hole. Make sure it’s a really thin mesh too, like practically steel wool. Pushing 1500 watts through steel wool has never caused anyone any problems ever.
thisisfine.gif
Good news, you can just buy them from China at pennies :D
I actually have a really annoying problem in that I cannot find any universal adapter that has a real ground pin.
All of them only have prongs for the hot and neutral wires, and sometimes a dummy plastic ground to grip the socket better.
I understand that 99% of the time, modern electronics don’t need a ground cable and its only there for safety, but it would still be a lot more comforting knowing the ground is actually connected.
I even considered modifying an adapter with a ground cable I can manually insert into the socket.
Ground is always there just for safety. It is supposed to be connected to any metal bits on the outside of any device, so that if a live wire touches the outside it just shorts and some fuse blows or circuit breaker trips, rather than providing an unpleasant surprise to anyone who touches it.
Most modern electronics is “double-insulated”, meaning there are at least two layers of reinforced insulating material between any mains-carrying conductors and the user. This is deemed to be safe enough so that those devices don’t need to be grounded, and if the case is plastic then they will almost never be. So if you’re only connecting plastic-cased electronics to the socket, a ground would be superfluous in almost all cases. There might be some exceptions, like power supplies connecting one of the low-voltage pins to ground, but it is quite rare to see.
Im not an electrician in any way shape or form, so I dont know if my slightly panicky sweaty-behind-the-knees reaction to this is appropriate, but it scares me
They might also enjoy your electrical adapter.
Now I want to see the plug.
Ok bro. You had already posted this.
I posted it after the person I am replying to posted, therefore if I wanted to show them, I had to show them like this. that’s why there’s a link to my original post.
/stares in unibrow
https://media.tenor.com/re5TT3M0cAkAAAAC/electro-boom-eyebrows.gif
Psh tp-p-p Psh tp-p Psh-Psh
Psh tp-p-p Psh tp-p Psh-Psh
Psh tp-p-p Psh tp-p-p Psh tp-p
biblicaly accurate outlet
That lowkey looks like christmas tree
I have faith that we will eventually standardize plugs internationally. Assuming we avert the apocalypse, that is.
We can’t agree which one is best. When Tom Scott proclaimed his home plug to be the best I scoffed. I thought my own home plug is better. But in reality I think they all suck in their own way, every single one of them.
I think a new more research driven approach like the USB-C design would be better, something that protects your fingers, is easier to locate when behind furniture or in the dark, works in more than a single position, is not going to stab you if you leave it on the floor, does not get stuck in the socket, I think it might even be possible to add a fuse without making it larger than a typical phone charger, but to be honest, the smaller the better. One can only dream.
Randall himself already solved this problem
For up to 480W of fun!
Now there are fifteen standards…
There’s always an XKCD for discussing other XKCD’s, isn’t there?
Perhaps the most successful attempt at convergence so far has been the Europlug, but only because it’s a weird compromise. Did you know the europlug prongs aren’t actually parallel? They angle inwards slightly and have a little flex, so they can be accepted in multiple European countries’ sockets that actually have slightly different dimensions! It’s a cool design, but you wouldn’t intentionally design it that way if you had the opportunity to standardise the world from scratch.
The Schuko plug/socket are the ones that are both grounded and reversible. And are used in most of Europe.
Oddly Poland, Czechia and Slovakia went with the French standard, which isn’t reversible. But helpfully the CEE 7/7 plug is compatible with both that one and Schuko.
That’s generally the thing with decisions that don’t matter much. If one option is much better, there is no discussion.
But if the benefits of either option are marginal at best, you get tons of discussion and no decision.
For example, the EU decided almost a decade ago that they would get rid of daylight saving time, and everyone quickly agreed that DST sucks, mostly because changing the clocks sucks.
Since then, the whole EU has been arguing about whether to keep summer time or winter time, even though that matters so little that we have been using both of them for decades. A week after switching DST, nobody even notices the time shift.
That’s why at work if a discussion goes on for too long I usually point out that that’s the case because all options are almost equally as good and thus we should just pick a random one instead of continuing to waste time discussing in circles.
We can’t agree which one is best. When Tom Scott proclaimed his home plug to be the best I scoffed. I thought my own home plug is better.
The UK G type is the only one which is insulated, fused, grounded and polarized by default:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#Comparison_of_standard_types
This is great for electrical safety, though it’s a very bulky plug.
Why the hell would I want the plugs to be polarized? Brits really stockholmed themselves into thinking that being unable to turn the plug around is a good feature. This is fine and dandy by Brits’ standards.
Quite a lot of plugs are polarized, as you would see if you followed the link in my post. This includes plugs in the USA, Canada, Japan, China, Argentina, Switzerland, Denmark.
What’s that to me? It’s still dumb and inconvenient.
Same country that convinced itself that you should have one hot and one cold tap, and if you want to get proper temperatured water just fill the basin… instead of just combining them like the rest of the civilized world.
Mixer taps exist in the UK and are widely used.
Exactly. It’s best technically but worst for the end user. I am an end user and I would hate to be stuck with that monster of a uniderectional plug. I don’t care that it washes my dishes for me if it doesn’t fit in my bag and kills me in the night when I step on it.
Don’t know where all that research driven approach led us… USB-A worked perfectly, nobody ever had a problem with it; except having to turn it around a couple times to figure out how to plug it (which could be solved with a coloured dot on plug and cable). USB-C had the advantage of being a little bit smaller, but it sucks in any other aspect. While I might have broken a couple USB-A cables and plugs in my life, I do not expect an USB-C cable to last much longer than one year.
Usb-c has already proven itself to be reliable, it was designed to be reversible, it is easy to insert and remove with good tactile feedback and is compact while having lots of versatility. All traits I would love to see in an universal power plug.
To me USB-A was what schuko is today. It works and is mostly fine but I’m sure we could do better if we put our minds to it. The problem with todays plugs and sockets is they all work just about, enough that no one with any authority is going to bother with the topic. Any improvement needs to be by an unrealistically huge margin to be worth the investment required.
The problem with USB-A is that well, it has to have no problems.
Ramblings
What I mean by that is, for USB to be a ‘universal’ serial bus it has to keep legacy support while still allowing the standard as a whole to keep up with new tech, and there’s just no sane way to do that on one plug type.
As for why type C is the way it is:
The USB Implementers Forum decided that adding more pins to the original format (type A) was a dead end (no way to keep backwards compatibility after a point), and the only way foward was to make type A a ‘legacy’ port while a new connector would take over as the main/modern one.
The forum decided that to make that happen type C has to be more decoupled from type A then previous connectors.
Since the most profitable market for electronics is the mobile one, that’s what they aim for with type C. (And because all the previous mobile USB types sucked, especially the micro).
Also probably atleast some if not most of the forum members wanted planned obsolescence, it’s goverened by tech companies after all.
Still, type C and the 4.0 standard in general is pretty good at doing what it was meant to do.
USB A doesn’t support at the fancy high-power PD/PPS features.
Pretty sure I can solder something together using a USB-PD decoy 😄 Made a bunch of barrel jack adapters the same way.
Electricians hate this one weird trick
Wooo! IEC type I! Shoutout to the greatest!
