QR Codes: great, but then what?

I keep a long and ever-growing out­line of blog top­ics I may some­day write about. Most aren’t ful­ly formed, but each at least once struck me as inter­est­ing at some point or anoth­er, so I fig­ured they’re worth keep­ing around.1 (See one real exam­ple to right.)

  • <3 qr-codes
    • bridges the phys­i­cal and the cyber
    • low-tech, lowest-common denominator
    • cam­er­a­phones in every pocket
    • makes a lot more sense than com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies, like that microsoft one with the dif­fer­ent col­ors that requires col­or print­ing, etc. this one I could, if so inclined, draw with a pencil
    • sad­ly, most of what I use this tech­nol­ogy for is curi­ous­ly decod­ing bar­codes I come across on the web

I add top­ics to my list pret­ty reg­u­lar­ly, but what does­n’t hap­pen very reg­u­lar­ly is some­one read­ing my mind and writ­ing my post for me. Okay, it’s only hap­pened once: about a week ago, and it was geek­ing out on QR Codes.

I’m a bit behind on my RSS read­ing, but when I just came across this boing­bo­ing post, I was quite pleased. In it, guest blog­ger Glenn Fleish­man pret­ty much lays out the case for 2D bar­codes — QR being the most pop­u­lar, good/open-enough for­mat — as a use­ful sort of link between the phys­i­cal world and the dig­i­tal one. It’s an idea I hap­pen to have loved for a few years now, and with Internet-enabled cam­er­a­phones all over the place, one that has the poten­tial2 to cre­ate some ben­e­fit to soci­ety on a large scale.

It should come as lit­tle sur­prise, then, that for as long as I’ve been aware of these codes, I’ve longed to find a use for the tech­nol­o­gy aside from the mun­dane let peo­ple scan your ad to go to your web­site, or send a URL from your com­put­er to your phone. A hand­ful of boing­bo­ing com­menters point­ed out a few real-world exam­ples of ways they have used QR codes: label­ing shared lab equip­ment or get­ting on the VIP list at Tokyo clubs. Inter­est­ing they are; world-changing they’re not.

Of course, there’s also the idea of pro­vid­ing rich­er infor­ma­tion about wine than a sim­ple bot­tle label could dis­play, which I find a step above the oth­ers, and giv­ing extra con­text to muse­um art, which I think gets us even closer.

Yet I still think QR Codes have even greater poten­tial… but poten­tial isn’t even half the battle.


  1. Yes, they’re basi­cal­ly brain crack.[]
  2. Nat­u­ral­ly, the bar­ri­er to adop­tion is con­vinc­ing the aver­age per­son to both­er solv­ing for them­selves a prob­lem — easy URL/text/contact entry on their phone — they did­n’t real­ize they had.[]

Uncommon Knowledge: Twitter @replies

I’ve been think­ing late­ly, and I’m going to start a new series here on the blog, ten­ta­tive­ly titled stuff I know and take for grant­ed, but it’s stuff that a lot of peo­ple don’t know, you guys!

I may need to think of a bet­ter title.

I won’t, how­ev­er, let that stop me.1 These are things that the world may or may not need to know, but should cer­tain­ly have the chance to know.

Here’s my first one:

If you have a com­mon name on Twit­ter, you prob­a­bly get lots of errant ‘@replies’ because peo­ple don’t know how to use them.

A lit­tle back­ground: if you use Twit­ter — and I won’t fault you if you don’t2—you’re prob­a­bly aware that you can direct your post to anoth­er user by plac­ing their unique Twit­ter user ID after an @ sign some­where in your post. For exam­ple, if you want­ed to tell me I’m great, you’d say some­thing like:

I think that @everett is great!!

(@nobody Hey, thanks!)

…and then my Twit­ter soft­ware client would alert me that some­one direct­ed a post my way. These are usu­al­ly called “replies” or “men­tions” depend­ing on the client you use. Sim­ple stuff, right?

Note that it just so hap­pens that my Twit­ter ID is “everett.” This is so because I reg­is­tered my account in mid-2006, ear­ly enough that first-names were still unreg­is­tered, and thus, avail­able as user IDs. Because I chose a com­mon name for my ID and quite a few peo­ple out there know peo­ple named Everett and some of these peo­ple don’t know what they’re doing, I often get posts direct­ed at me unintentionally.

I’ve got­ten used to it. Here are some exam­ples of places I was ‘men­tioned’ by mistake.

Not the worst advice, but I can’t take the credit.

This nev­er hap­pened. Really.

Not sure where I was on the evening of August 19th, but I’m not sure where Eli­jah’s sense of enti­tle­ment comes from either.

This exam­ple is inter­est­ing. Thanks to Twit­ter, I’ve learned that there’s a chain of bar­be­cue places in the Oak­land area called Everett & Jones, which a lot of peo­ple like to go to. Men­tions of E&J actu­al­ly get mis­tak­en­ly direct­ed at me a lot… and from every­thing I’ve heard, it makes my must-try list if I’m ever in the Bay Area again. Thanks, Twitter!


  1. You could also say that I need to think of bet­ter ideas than this one, but I won’t let that stop me either.[]
  2. Despite all the hype, Twit­ter is total­ly non-essential, and you’re prob­a­bly not miss­ing that much if you don’t use it.[]

…I just want some snack cakes

I was play­ing some Scar­face: The World Is Yours ear­li­er this evening on my Wii and while the game is in many ways a series of mis­sions that don’t vary all that much, a part of the game that is pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing is talk­ing to ran­dom peo­ple on the streets. (What does that leave? A pret­ty stan­dard 3D open world, drive-cars-shoot-people-deal-drugs rush rush affair that hap­pens to take place in a Mia­mi I don’t quite recognize.)

But like I was say­ing, the conversations.

I can’t remem­ber what pur­pose this serves in the game, but you can have back-and-forth con­ver­sa­tions with the seem­ing­ly hun­dreds of unique NPCs that line the streets of the game. Walk up to one, press A and Tony spits out a line, to which they respond with some­thing that more-or-less makes sense. Press A and Tony replies with some­thing most­ly rel­e­vant to what they said. Do this back-and-forth exchange a few times and your “Con­ver­sa­tion” count increas­es by one. (You can only con­verse with any giv­en indi­vid­ual once, at which point talk­ing to them con­sists of seemingly-random one-liners that seem to either pro­pose sex­u­al rela­tions or bod­i­ly harm… or are just strings of Scarface-style expletives.)

So ear­li­er, I (well, Tony) was vis­it­ing our local bank branch when I decid­ed to talk to some of the peo­ple hang­ing around in the stair­well. We walked up to one African-American gen­tle­man in an ugly sweater and the con­ver­sa­tion basi­cal­ly began like this:

Tony: Mia­mi is full of pussy, meng. You just need to be rich to get it.
Gen­tle­man: Man, I don’t care about pussy. I just want some snack cakes.

I’m gonna let that one hang for a moment.

Okay, I fuck­ing love this game.

The current state of the art in comment spam

Write, geek! gets a fair amount of spam replies. This sur­prised me at first, when it began hap­pen­ing almost imme­di­ate­ly after the blog was set up and con­tent was post­ed. I should have known bet­ter; there’s almost no cost to spam­mers in spam­ming even unpop­u­lar blogs, so why would they make an excep­tion for mine?

I’m using the Akismet plu­g­in for Word­Press, so it’s not like any of these com­ments actu­al­ly make it to my blog. In fact, I’d nev­er even have to see them, if not for the fact that I reg­u­lar­ly clean these com­ments out of my spam fold­er by hand. I do this part­ly to ensure that noth­ing legit­i­mate gets fil­tered incor­rect­ly (which hap­pens some­times) and part­ly because I like to sort of keep tabs on the cur­rent ‘state of the art’ in spamming.

The cur­rent state of the art in spam­ming is this: the com­ments are get­ting bet­ter. No longer are com­ments jam-packed with dozens of links com­mon­place (one par­tic­u­lar default Word­Press set­ting prob­a­bly made those almost 100% inef­fec­tive), but they’ve been large­ly replaced with com­ments that mas­quer­ade as… actu­al comments!

The idea of noise dis­guised as sig­nal is noth­ing new if you’ve used e‑mail in the last 15 years, but that the noise is get­ting bet­ter (read: more dif­fi­cult for humans to detect) is some­what sur­pris­ing. Of course, these com­ments are no match for a large, dis­trib­uted sys­tem like Akismet, which all-knowingly sees what’s being post­ed to prob­a­bly mil­lions of blogs, but the well-disguised, large­ly pseudo-flattering com­ments are prob­a­bly now designed to get human blog authors to click the “Not Spam” but­ton, free­ing them the com­ments the spam box so that they can do their SEO-based dirty work.

Of course, gen­tle read­ers, I’m far too smart to fall for that, but not so blind­ed by my hatred for spam to be unable to appre­ci­ate a well-crafted work of author­ship, like this one I just found:

Spam that reads "Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!"

Sure, it’s not per­fect, but some­one out there put some mod­icum of thought into it, which is the least you could ask of the author of a work that’s going to be dis­trib­uted on a mas­sive scale.

Plus, it’s a lot bet­ter than this anti-gem I also just found:

Spam that reads "Why jesus allows this sort of thing to continue is a mystery"

Can you get more unin­ten­tion­al­ly self-referential than that? (No, you can­not… and yes, that was a challenge.)

How to transfer photos from a Game Boy Camera to a computer (in Linux)

A few days ago, I found a Flickr group thread that was prac­ti­cal­ly beg­ging for my input. It read some­thing like “Hey Everett, you’re sur­pris­ing­ly enough not the only per­son out there with these two inter­ests (one obscure and the oth­er semi-so). Would you be will­ing to help out quite pos­si­bly the only oth­er per­son in the world who cares about these things?”

Not only was I like, “Heck  yeah!,” but I decid­ed that this was wor­thy of blog­ging, in case a third indi­vid­ual hap­pens to devel­op these inter­ests. (If this is you, welcome!)

So, in case you find your­self want­i­ng to get crap­py pho­tos—a term I use most affec­tion­ate­ly — like these:

off of one of these:

red Game Boy Camera

and you use Linux:

(I kid!)

…like I do, read on.

The hard­ware I’m using to down­load pho­tos over USB is Smart­Boy USB car­tridge read­er (which is made by these peo­ple). And there just so hap­pens to be a great open-source pro­gram for facil­i­tat­ing this task using this device (or a sim­i­lar car­tridge read­er): gbcflsh.

So what’s the prob­lem? gbcflsh is only dis­trib­uted as source, and the source fails to com­pile under recent releas­es of Ubun­tu. I con­tact­ed the devel­op­ers of gbcflsh, and one gave me some sug­ges­tions for fix­ing the source code. They have yet to pub­lish the fixed source, so I’ll doc­u­ment how I got it to compile.

(If you don’t care about this, just grab the bina­ry I made: gbcflsh 32-bit, md5sum: 85b185706c3d5fe45b7787787f8510bd; gbcflsh 64-bit, md5sum: 4326e08fcfb5be39004c290df2a71988)

  1. Down­load and extract the source code.
  2. Install the fol­low­ing packages:
    gcc 4.3.3, qt4-dev-tools, libftdi-dev 
  3. Focus on the fol­low­ing files:
    src/Logic.cpp
    src/ReadFlashThread.cpp
    src/ReadRamThread.cpp
    src/WriteFlashThread.cpp
    src/WriteRamThread.cpp
  4. Add the fol­low­ing to the bot­tom of the #include sec­tion of each file:
    #include <cst­dio>
  5. That’s it! Com­pile it like you already know how to do (which I won’t get into here).

gbcflshWhen you run gbcflsh (you’ll need to do so as root, by the way), it’ll look a lit­tle bit like what you see to the right. Select the vis­i­ble options (USB, Auto, Ram: 128 KB) and click “Read RAM.”

If all goes well, you’ll end up with the con­tents of your cam­er­a’s RAM in the form of a .sav file. Great! The hard part is behind us, but we’re not quite done yet.

Next, you’ll need a pro­gram that will extract pho­tos from the save file. I believe there are a few, but they all seem to be for Win­dows. For­tu­nate­ly, the one I use works per­fect­ly under Wine. gbcameradumpIt’s called GBCameraDump.exe, and it can cur­rent­ly be found here. Down­load it, run it via Wine and select the .sav file you got from gbcflsh. You’ll have some­thing that looks like this screen­shot (except hope­ful­ly with bet­ter photos).

I would also advise you to — if this sort of thing mat­ters to you — check the order of the saved images. They’re like­ly to be out of order due to, it seems, the way Nin­ten­do decid­ed to han­dle the sav­ing of images to the car­tridge. (Also, you’re like­ly to find some pho­tos you thought were delet­ed, which may come as a surprise.)

So there you have it: how to get pho­tos off of this cam­era of the past, using the oper­at­ing sys­tem of the (sigh) future.

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0

The old adage (which I think I made up) about spend­ing more time geek­ing around with a Word­Press instal­la­tion than actu­al­ly writ­ing in the damned blog holds true, ladies and gentlemen.

I just fin­ished upgrad­ing this fine blog to the newly-stable Word­Press 3.0.

In case you were won­der­ing and/or sit­ting on the edge of your seats, I took great care to:

  1. Dis­able all of my plu­g­ins
  2. Dump a copy of my Word­Press MySQL data­base using the aptly-titled mysqldump
  3. tar a copy of my Word­Press directory
  4. Do the upgrade!
  5. Re-enable the plu­g­ins one-by-one, mak­ing sure each works (or at least does­n’t break anything)

While I know not every­one is so lucky, I’m glad to see that every­thing appears to work here, because I’d be death­ly embar­rassed if, you know, Google or Bing’s webcrawler came by and things weren’t look­ing up to my usu­al standards.

Fine wine games

There is a cer­tain class of video game whose exis­tence I’ve been slow­ly dis­cov­er­ing over the last few years. Let’s call these fine wine games.

My idea of a fine wine game1 is one that is best expe­ri­enced a bit at a time. You know, enjoyed in mod­er­a­tion. The kind you only pick up and play every once in a while… because it’s just that good.

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Why would you want to take it so slow­ly with some­thing so great? Well, here’s oth­er side of the coin: this sort of game also has an ele­ment of rar­i­ty, or scarci­ty to it. It’s not the sort of game that prints mon­ey, sell­ing mil­lions of copies, so the chances of a sequel being made aren’t very good.

So enjoy the game itself. Savor it as you go. Don’t cry because there won’t be a sequel; think of how lucky you are to play it in the first place! Wring every drop of enjoy­ment from the expe­ri­ence that you can.

Here are a few games you’ll find in my cask:

Zack & Wiki (Nin­ten­do Wii) The orig­i­nal fine wine game in my book. Crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed; sold quite poor­ly. Chance of sequel? Slim-to-none. Thus, I decid­ed that I’d only play Zack & Wiki sparingly.

With save dates as my basis, I’d esti­mate that I would pick it up every cou­ple of months, play for a day or two (enough time to strug­gle through my cur­rent lev­el feel­ing like the world’s biggest moron until final­ly feel­ing like the world’s great­est genius, which is what this game does to you). And then, back on the shelf it would go, to wait for the next time I’m in the mood for savory gam­ing greatness.

Thus, despite hav­ing bought this game in 2008, I only com­plet­ed it this past week­end. $40 so very, very well spent.

Soul Bub­bles (Nin­ten­do DS) While I bought my copy from an Ama­zon Mar­ket­place sell­er, this game was released in the U.S. as a Toys R Us-exclusive title. If this arti­fi­cial­ly lim­it­ed its audi­ence, that’s sim­ply unfor­tu­nate, because this is a beau­ti­ful game… one that I tend to for­get all about for months on end before redis­cov­er­ing it anew every time.

I’ve been tak­ing my time with Soul Bub­bles, and have more than half of it (read: years of enjoy­ment) left to go!

Mother/EarthBound series (Nin­ten­do NES/SNES/GBA) Enough has been writ­ten about this series of quirky, rather un-RPG-like RPGs, which have attract­ed a cult-like fol­low­ing. Thus, I’ll offer only this quick assess­ment: the fact that English-speaking gamers have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play any of the three games should be enough to make a fan thank their lucky stars.

While it could be said that three games released over the course of fif­teen years effec­tive­ly nul­li­fies any sup­posed rar­i­ty… hey, you know what? Fuck you. Nin­ten­do trans­lat­ed Moth­er and then prompt­ly shelved the Eng­lish ver­sion, Moth­er 2 (Earth­Bound) received one stinker of a U.S. mar­ket­ing cam­paign, and the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Moth­er 3 had to be under­tak­en by a team of incred­i­bly devot­ed fans.

Moth­er games in Eng­lish are some mighty fine wine.

Cave Sto­ry (Win­dows, Wii­Ware, et al.) Cave Sto­ry is the work of one ded­i­cat­ed ama­teur over the course of five years… work that was sim­ply giv­en away for free as a Win­dows game, and lat­er port­ed to a hand­ful of pop­u­lar plat­forms by fans.

I start­ed Cave Sto­ry a few times over the years, but the lack­lus­ter Lin­ux port kept putting me off of it; I knew I should wait for a good port to be avail­able for a plat­form I use. The Wii­Ware ver­sion was released a few months back, and the rest is his­to­ry. After years of antic­i­pa­tion, I swilled this one down in a decid­ed­ly non-fine-wine manner.

Whoops.

Whether games or oth­er media, what do you con­sid­er to be your fine wine?

https://writegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/prints_money.gifpr

  1. Ini­tial­ly, the idea I had was that a game of this sort (it was Zack & Wiki that brought this to mind) would be enjoy­able to play quite lit­er­al­ly with a glass of wine, as this is the sort of game that would be best enjoyed at a relax­ing pace, in a chill atmos­phere. But last week­end, I instead start­ed think­ing of these games metaphor­i­cal­ly; the game itself is the wine. I liked that thought, and knew I had to write this post.[]