Bits and Bytes
THE ANSWER GUY
QR Codes by KEVIN MCISAAC
QR codes are more than a quarter-century old, but they’ve been used rarely except for specific cases. Recently we’ve all had occasion to carry one around with us to prove vaccination status, but do you know what you’re carrying? A QR Code is just a barcode in a different format. Normal barcodes such as those on the back of a cereal box are onedimensional.You read them from left to right. They can encode up to about 80 letters and numbers depending on which barcode format is used. QR Codes are two-dimensional and can hold up to 1500 characters.You can think of barcodes as a sentence and QR Codes as an entire page. There’s nothing magical about QR Codes despite their strange appearance. They were invented by a Japanese company to keep track of parts. High-speed part identification required a sophisticated format with very low error rates. Much of what makes QR Codes look strange has to do with the error correction data that’s encoded along with the actual data. QR Codes today are often used to encode URLs. Scanning a QR Code that contains a URL with your phone’s camera will usually result in a prompt asking if you’d like to open that URL in a web browser. You should exercise the same caution doing that that you’d normally exercise when it comes to browsing the web, but it is easier and less error-prone than expecting people to type in a URL. They can also be used to encode nonURL data. Wapiti Music Festival, for example, encodes ticket info in a QR Code that is inserted into the ticket file. When you arrive at the gate at Wapiti your QR Code, whether on your phone
Most recently QR Codes have been used to look up whether or not you’ve been vaccinated. Want to see what it does? Download the BC Vaccine Card Verifier App from the app store and scan your codes. It will show your status and your name. Seeing the name associated with the code and assure you that the vaccine status belongs to the person being checked.
“QR Codes are twodimensional and can hold up to 1500 characters. You can think of barcodes as a sentence and QR Codes as an entire page.” or printed on paper, is scanned. The information in that QR Code is looked up in a database which determines if it’s a valid ticket and whether it has been used yet or not. This has several benefits. The majority of people don’t even print the ticket. It is easy to display on their smartphone and thus reduces the amount of paper used and thrown out. Also, the lookup time is almost instantaneous thanks to the gate volunteers scanning the tickets with their phones and not needing to type anything. QR Codes are used on currency, in augmented reality systems, to link to songs and videos, to connect to wireless networks, and of course are becoming ubiquitous in advertising: keep an eye out for the giant Fernie Freestyle QR Code on the ski hill this winter as a local example.
If you want to have more fun with QR Codes you can make your own. Recently a friend mentioned that she needs to generate QR Codes for her products, but she was paying for this service online. I was a bit surprised at this as QR Code generation is fairly trivial. Putting together a simple website to host the generation is not very challenging either. So, I took a Sunday and decided to create a site to this that’s free. If you’d like to try my QR Code web page you can scan the QR Code accompanying this article. If you need a QR Code you can generate one and download it using that page. So, next time your making up a poster for an event, printing a ticket for a show, want to quickly share a website with a group of people, create and include a QR Code. They’re fun and easy. From Kevin, on The Fix
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I’m pretty sure I was in Jamochas reading the first Fix issue when Krista mentioned (may not have been to me) that she was looking for content. I offered to do a computer advice column. I intended that The Answer Guy would be my nom de plume but when the next issue came out it was the title of my column with my name below. It’s still that way 14 years and 11 months later.
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