Android and Linux

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

QR Codes

I'm going to start adding QR codes to scripts I post here. QR codes are neat, but I've never found much use for them until I realized Barcode Scanner has an option to copy text from QR codes to the clipboard. Cool.

Here is an example using my locate.sh script, and the preview from Barcode Scanner.





Note, there is no button in Barcode Scanner to save as a file, but if you hit the menu, there is an option to automatically save text to the clipboard. If that's turned on, you just scan the code then open a text editor and paste.

I'm not sure anyone will find any use for the codes, but getting the script to the phone is the number one problem users have with my iphone language deletion script. I get 100 hits a day to that page and it seems like 50% have trouble getting it on the phone. Too bad QR codes can only handle 4000 characters and that puppy is over 9700.

None of the online qr code generators work very well. I couldn't find any that encoded newlines so the whole script would end up being copied on one line. I finally decided to see what was available for Linux and ran across the qrencode command line utility which seems to work perfectly.

I'll be going back and adding them soon. EDIT: Done!

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