Pointless Fun With Technology

Don't bother going cross-eyed!

7 Responses to “Pointless Fun With Technology”

  1. ThePresentOccupier says:

    An obvious application would have to be an encryption algorithm.

    Or “If you can read this you’ve too much time on your hands”.

    I am not a number?

    I dunno, is anyone actually going to decode the thing on a t shirt?

    libdmxt doesn’t seem to extract anything from the image, which surprised me.

  2. Rob Fisher says:

    Ooh, on a related note, have you scanned the Google barcode?

  3. ThePresentOccupier says:

    Code_128, text.
    Guess what it says…?
    “Google”

    Are you going to put Patrick out of his misery? I would have been more forthcoming, but I wasn’t certain whether to spoil your fun or not.

  4. Rob Fisher says:

    I did email him. :-)

  5. Yes, you emailed me.

    And I am still none the wiser.

  6. Rob Fisher says:

    Perhaps I was still talking Geek instead of English.

    The picture is a 2D barcode, so it’s like a regular barcode but can store more information — up to 250 characters of text in this case. The one pictured encodes a message from me about printing such a barcode on a T-shirt, and if I did, what slogan should it be?

    The barcode can be de-coded by a anyone with a mobile phone, using the camera and barcode scanning software. Sometimes they are used to get URLs or contact details into phones — you could print one on a business card, for example.

    The Wikipedia page about this particular type of barcode is informative.

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