URL Barcodes

What's this new-age art? No. I met this interesting fellow named Leo. He is one of the few people, when I explain what I do, actually knew what I was talking about, and knew some of the people I have had dealings with. Leo is a unicyclist who does computer networking contract work to pay the bills. Or maybe its the other way around: A computer/network contractor who does unicycle stunts to pay the bills.

Anyway, he told me of one of his cool side projects with making barcodes easily importable into an iPhone. You go to this website called "zap.cat" and enter a URL. The URL gets coded into a barcode like the one you see above. (The service to do this is free)

You post this on a poster, or at the bottom of an advertisement or whatever. Somebody with a camera and the right kind of software takes a picture of the barcode, and then the software determines the barcode. You don't have to have an iPhone, the software is supported on lots of different mobile phones that have a camera. Unfortunately, my blackberry does not have a camera, so I can't play around with this.

You can view Leo's Unicycle page at http://www.unicycle.net/