Russ Cox puts images into QR codes. Here's how | Hacker News Reader

Russ Cox puts images into QR codes. Here's how

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88 pointsgghh12 comments

This is a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833850, except this points to a useless G+ page rather than to the guy's actual article.

Link to the guy's actual page: http://research.swtch.com/qart

Really cool stuff!

duckduckgo's Gabriel Weinberg isn't missing the beat: https://twitter.com/#!/duckduckgo/status/191926962120425473

If you're going to do this, I would suggest configuring your webserver to redirect the hashed URL to the canonical one. That will make it less likely for people to bookmark and pass around the URL with the big hash, which is there just to generate the picture.

I'm fairly sure that the hash never actually makes it to the server side [1]. Of course, you could just use a querystring param instead.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396#section-4

Oops, you're right, the server never sees that.

Nice work reusing the ECC data in QR codes to hold the image, unfortunately it is still a bit noisy due to the limits of Reed-Solomon.

I use a similar technique (just the center part, though) on http://www.qrpixel.com .

Sounds like I just found what I'm putting on my next business card!

Unfortunately this only works if you put very little data into the QR code, e.g. only an URL

Then the question is: Does it actually make sense to use an QR code for that alone?

(for a visualization of that see: http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2012/01/which-one-of-these-billbo... )

If you want to try it out yourself the best QR code online tool I know is QRHacker.com

Does it actually make sense to use an QR code for that alone?

for me a QR code is a bookmarking tool. I am at a restaurant with friends, I like the place and want to keep a note. What's cooler / more practical: (a) take out a blocknotes, a pencil, and write stuff (b) put the 10434th business card in my wallet, which by now looks like a watermelon and I can barely put it in my pocket (c) take my smartphone and "delicious" the URL encoded in the QR code.

I believe they have a reason to be.

What I meant was that if its only a short URL then it might be quicker to type it in vs scanning the QR code - have a look at the example link then I guess you know why.

If you put more info into the code then certainly scanning is the better way but then you're limited with what graphics you can apply to the code.

I hear you, but if there is an industry trend of showing QR codes instead of urls, then so be it. No reason to do things two ways. Or at least, you might as well put the QR code in addition to the text URL if that is what consumers expect.

However, I do feel that the QR code really is overkill for encoding a URL. At some point, couldn't we just standardize on some easily OCR'd font in a some sort of graphical frame and have software recognize/parse that?

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