The Tenuous Link

There is an application called "Barcode Reader" installed on my new phone. It's in the Menu>Office folder by default. It turns out it can't tell you the price of a can of beans as you browse round the supermarket, but it is useful ...

It reads "Semacodes", which are way of encoding little snippets of text, typically web addresses, in to a little block graphic that looks like this:

That's great, but I've never seen a semacode before, so why would I want to use that? It turns out it is easy to create them too. So, if I am using a desktop PC and I find a web page that would be really useful to view on my phone, then I can create a Semacode, quickly read it in to the phone, and then get on with what I was doing, without spending ages keying it in. (Or without spending money SMSing the link to myself from a web SMS gateway).

How do I create the Semacode? I paste it in to www.semacode.com/tag, and press the "Tag" button on the screen.

For anyone who wants to see what trains are about to leave London Waterloo railway station, point your camera here:

Really Nokia should have a "Bookmarks Editor" in their PC Suite application, but this is almost as quick, and does the job for now.

Update

And finally ... to save the Semacode image suitable for use in to your own web page in Windows using PhotoShop Elements:

1. Create your Semacode in the www.semacode.com/tag web page
2. Press Alt-Print Screen to copy the Semacode web page to your clipboard
3. Start the PhotoShop editor, and use File>New image from clipboard
4. Crop tightly around the Sematag
5. Convert the image to a black and white bitmap using Image>Mode>Bitmap
6. Resize the image down to your prefered size, selecting "Nearest neighbor" interpolation (interpolation type is not important?)
7. View the image at 100% and check that it works with your camera
8. Save the image as a gif
9. Add it to a web page, making sure to leave some white space around it

Tag sizes: The tags are made up of blocks of 26x26 pixels, and the more information that is recorded the more blocks will be used in the tag. To read these from the screen easilly my phone needed each 26-pixel-wide block to be 208 pixels wide in the final gif. Anything smaller requires "the knack" - I can read 104-pixel-wide codes off my screen pretty quickly, but anything smaller gets pretty frustrating.

Although I have managed to scan all of the codes on this page from the screen, the process was tedious. All of the tags on this page are too small. Try printing them out!

Labels: n95, semacode

// posted by Steven @ 11:10 AM 0 comments