By far the best way to read QR codes is to use a smartphone with a barcode reader (there are a ton of them for the iPhone in the app store), but what if you don’t have a smartphone?

There are many people who either do not have a smartphone or don’t already have a barcode reader application. When I created SnapMyinfo, one of my original goals was to enable QR code reading for a larger number of people, making these 2d barcodes more useful. I’ve moved snapmyinfo in some new directions lately, but I still maintain the goal of making these barcodes more accessible.

It’s my belief that lowering the technical barrier to using these optical barcodes, even if the decoding method is sub-optimal, will increase their usage, exposure, and adoption. This led me to create a way to read these 2d barcodes without a smartphone. What I’ve built is an email-based QR code decoder that works on photo attachments. Initially this decoder only worked with snapmyinfo-specific QR codes but recently I’ve removed that restriction to start testing general QR codes. The only requirements are that your mobile phone have a camera and be able to send email or photo text messages to emails (e.g. verizon picture messaging). This includes many of the so-called “feature” phones that allow sending text messages to emails.

How do I use it?

1. Take a photo of the QR barcode you want to decode. It’s best to leave some white space around the barcode and try to keep the image sharp. (pull away if you have to)
2. Send the photo to the address shown via email or text message.
3. Wait for the response

This is still test software, so I make no guarantees at the moment, but it should work. The more examples of different devices, their picture, email and text characteristics will help me refine and solidify the decoder.

I’m opening this up so people can test it and let me know their experiences with it. I know I need to improve the formatting for text messages and I’ll work on it as I get example text messages.

I’m still working out kinks in the system so I’d love feedback.

SnapMyInfo now has a simple page to allow you to generate QR codes to experiment with. There seems to be growing interest in these kinds of two dimensional barcodes, so I thought it would be fun to allow you to generate barcodes based on arbitrary text and not just snap codes.

This isn’t the internal SnapMyInfo Barcode generator. While surfacing the internal barcode generator used by SnapMyInfo wouldn’t have been too hard, I often tweak the generator and didn’t want people to have to depend on this external service if I ever decided to modify the barcode output in any way. While poking around the Google Charts API a few months back, I noticed they now have support for generating QR codes. This page is basically a simple front end for generating QR codes using Google’s service. Simply input any text you want (up to 512 characters) and you’ll get a barcode image in return. These barcodes contain text but by using certain text patterns you can tell some barcode readers to do special things with them.

Barcodes as Physical Links

If you create a barcode comprised solely of a URL, including the ‘http://’ like http://snapmyinfo.com/ many barcode readers are designed to interpret the barcode as a link. That means they will, if a web browser is available, automatically take you to the site contained in the barcode.

Telephone numbers

Starting the text with the prefix TEL: instructs the barcode reader that this is a phone number. In many cases a smartphone will dial the number contained in the barcode when it is decoded.

Automatic Email

You can embed an automatic email message in a QR barcode. I’ve found this to be relatively uncommon, but the pattern is SMTP:[email address]:[subject]:[message]. Some barcode readers treat this pattern in a similar way to the ‘mailto’ url protocol in web browsers, creating an email in the smartphone’s email application ready to send.

Example: SMTP:support@snapmyinfo.com:Hello:Greetings to SnapMyInfo

Automatic SMS

SMSTO:7812189522:Greetings to SnapMyInfo!

This one also isn’t as common, but you can create a barcode with the following pattern: SMSTO:[cell number]:[message].

For example, the barcode to the right sends an SMS to TenZeroLab. If your smartphone’s barcode reader understands SMSTO then the barcode will automatically create a text message.

vCard

The barcode can contain a “vcard” as well. vCards are a standard format that’s often used for sharing contact information. This isn’t something you’d typically type directly into a barcode generator, but it does work. A typical vcard in a barcode might look like the following:

BEGIN:VCARD
FN:SnapMyInfo
N:;;;;
ORG:SnapMyInfo
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET;TYPE=WORK:support@snapmyinfo.com
END:VCARD

Boston Massachusettes!

Sometimes the vcard standard is also used to embed geographic coordinates in the QR code as well. The pattern looks the same except that a GEO: heading is included with latitude and longitude values.

BEGIN:VCARD
N:;Boston, MA
GEO:-71.059773;42.358431
END:VCARD

Others

There are a few other text patterns that are interpreted by various barcode readers not included in the above list, but these seem to be the most common.

I’m curious how people will experiment with this and what fun and interesting uses people will find.

It’s interesting that Google is officially announcing a “Business version” of ChromeOS. (Google Chrome OS ‘business version’ coming in 2011 — Engadget). I wrote before that I thought that the enterprise would find the kind of managed computing environment that Google is proposing attractive. I didn’t think they would specifically try to position ChromeOS for the enterprise though. It make sense, as a clear compliment to Google Apps for the enterprise. I can easily imagine a “full solution” with an application and data management bundle, Google Apps combined with a locally managed OS profile and document store on site at the enterprise. It will be interesting to see if this takes off or not.

I’ve been using exim under ubuntu for a while now, and while its split configuration system can be a little weird at times, overall I haven’t had a problem. That is until I decided I wanted to be able to relay email from a machine on my local network. Several futile Google searches later, I still hadn’t resolved my issue (and come across many posts of people seemingly having the same issue) so I thought I’d add a little note here.

I wanted to allow relays from one of my local hosts on a 192 network. In the past I’ve used an exim configuration variable: relay_from_hosts

So when I checked the split configuration files, I found it in /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs with the following statement:

hostlist relay_from_hosts = MAIN_RELAY_NETS

Huh? OK, so clearly there’s some kind of variable being set, but where? Grep’ing the config files, I could only find where this was used and not set.

I was about to chuck the whole ubuntu exim install when finally, after a bunch of frustrating searching, I figured out that the ubuntu/debian config generator is what sets these macro definitions. That means you have to edit the config file config (huh?) found at /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf. Checking the man page for update-exim4.conf I found this gem:

In either case, before outputting the result to /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated, update-exim4.conf generates a number of exim configuration macros from the contents of dc_something from /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and inserts them into the configuration right after the definition of the exim configuration macro UPEX4CmacrosUPEX4C (which is only used as placeholder for this case). The macro definitions are bracketed with .ifdef clauses to allow the local admin to override the values with earlier definitions. update-exim4.conf makes no other changes to the configuration. This makes it very simple to make small changes to the configuration and still have the benefits of debconf.

And of course further down in the man page is this bit:

dc_relay_nets

A list of machines for which we serve as smarthost. Please note that 127.0.0.1 and ::1 are always permitted to relay since /usr/lib/sendmail is available anyway and relay
control doesn’t make sense here. Sets macro MAIN_RELAY_NETS.

So you set dc_relay_nets under update-exim4.conf.conf to the IP address of the machine you want to relay from. Then you do the split config dance and run update-exim4.conf and you should now be able to relay email from that IP (or range of IPs).

So I think I pulled something following their config logic.

I’ve often been curious about the black magic in SEO. I was reading a review of a new SEO tool that, among other things, directs you to tag any of your older content with relevant keywords if they didn’t have them already. I happen to have a bunch of old content that I pulled in from various old blogs to centralize here. I’ve decided to do a little experiment to see if tagging older content on this blog has any effect at all on search engines. Took me a while to tag all the posts, but I’m guessing it will have little to no effect. We’ll see.

It’s 15:13:31 o’clock, do you know where your barcode reader is?

Here’s a fun hack using QR codes, qrtime.com – a QR Code Clock. Not very practical as a timepiece, but I could see this as a fun piece of dynamic QR artwork that could be placed somewhere.

I stumbled across this presentation about QR codes and their uses, specifically their uses in libraries and museums. I’m a sucker for the prezi.com style of presentation animation (ooh eye candy ).

In the “drawbacks” part of the presentation, it mentions that these codes require special applications. I was trying to address this exact shortcoming with snapmyinfo by creating alternate ways of decoding without specialized applications. Contact sharing was a good first target, but if there is interest, I still plan on opening up the email decoder to decode all QR codes.

I just read a post on augmented reality planet that mentions demos of face recognition at the mobile world conference. They also linked to this concept video, but apparently a prototype (albeit less smooth) was being shown off at the MWC by tat.

While I can easily see this as a next level in contact and information sharing, there are interesting privacy implications of using face images in this way. While the system shown in this concept looks “opt-in”, what happens when this technology becomes more pervasive? What happens when the identifying tags people are already applying to public photographs on social media networks are combined with this technology? There have already been news stories about the number of times people in major urban areas are photographed per day by CCTV systems.

This also makes me think of the scenes from the movie “Minority Report” where a fictional technology is used to identify people using their eyes. I can’t see how advertisers and retailers wouldn’t want to track our ad exposure and purchasing habits in this way.

Maybe we won’t have to wait until 2054 for this to become a reality.

I often think about the role that advertising has in the current landscape of startups, web applications and software. It feels to me that many of us, web startup entrepreneurs, see advertising as a means to an end, a way to support the work that we really want to do: build amazing products and software. The truth is, however, that if advertising is your business model, then that’s what you need to be good at to succeed, everything else is a means to that end.

I just watched an hour long interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire (my favorite TV show) at the Edinburgh TV Festival. At around 38:37, Mr. Simon answers a question about creating TV that’s not easy to consume and not for the casual viewer.

I think television as a medium, in terms of being literate and telling stories, I think it’s short changed itself from its inception and I think that’s because of advertising. It was an advertising medium and only when television managed to liberate itself from the economic construct of advertising was there a real emancipation of story.

American television up until the point of premium cable was about the interruptions every 13 minutes to sell you cars and ipods and jeans and whatever else. That was the point of the show, not the shit they put around the ads. The ads were the point.

So you had to bring the most number of eyeballs to that show. That meant dumbing it down making the plot simple, gratifying people by the end of the hour, more tits, more ass, more stuff that blows up. That was television.

Obviously it’s not a perfect parallel, but it does make you think.

Update: I also found the guardian has a a clip of just this exchange (if you don’t want to watch the whole thing).

A very cool demo of some of the integration Microsoft has been doing with their different technologies, bing maps + snapdragon + photosynth + world wide telescope + some interesting telepresence and augmented reality stuff. The eventual seamless transition between such vast amounts of data and meta data is pretty impressive. We’re living in the future.