Thyroid update 7
6 months ago
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About Me
- Buddy Tignor
- Grew up in Virginia. Attended Virginia Tech and the University of Florida. Currently, I am an educator / administrator.
Blogs Worth the Time
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At the Lady Lever Museum12 years ago
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Along the lazy White River...13 years ago
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Little Small World14 years ago
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On the first day of the Paro Tshechu14 years ago
7 comments:
I am as smart as a jackrabbit
Seriously? You can see text in that? Unfortunately I am one of those people who can't see those 3-d pictures either. Phooey!
Nope. I could not 'see' the text.
For the record, I got the answer the way I was suppose to, but there's a way to cheat on this particular one also.
Ummmm ok. How?
If Buddy gives the all clear though, I'll post it here.
If not, email me and I'll send you the info. It doesn't feel right to completely destroy Buddy's sociology experiment by telling people a way to cheat to find the answer.
James, you have the all clear. NICE SUMMARY QR codes are supposedly all the rage in Japan first as a big improvement over the amount of data you can encode vs. a standard bar code. Very useful for inventory tracking, etc. Also up to 30 percent of the QR code can be missing and the data can still be retrieved.
...but secondly and more importantly as a marketing gimmick, apparently there are even people with tattoos of these.
With an appropriately outfitted cell phone (software and camera) you can take a picture and get several thousand characters worth of info and even URL's.
James pointed out an important flaw in my test....by checking where I made the image via source code or closely examining the image link (like smarty pants James did :-) you can figure it out.
So here's what I was going to put in a comment prior to decoding the text and figuring out the instructions:
I first noticed that you couldn't click through on the image. So I did a right click and selected view image. That results in a really long link that sends data to:
http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
Because of the way you embedded it, it passes all the data back to the server and recreates the image each time. If you know that %20 is a space (I do) in URLs, then you can kind of make out what the text says right there. But I decided to simply visit the URL where lo and behold, there's a QR Code generator.
Then I had to read up on what QR Codes are and how they're used (because to be honest, I had never heard of them). Apparently they're a gimic to embed URLs in graphics and make you decode the graphic so that you don't know what you're decoding ahead of time (pretty neat to rely on people's curiosity to compel them to decode it). Then I needed to find a program to decode it, because I'm not seeing how to decode it just by looking at it (if we were suppose to figure that out, I failed miserably at this task).
So I looked for programs on the web to decode it. Didn't find any that would work outside of a phone. But then I stumbled onto a project in sourceforge. You can download the source code here where it says download tarball. Then I had to extract the code, set up my classpath and compile it (since it's written in Java and I normally write software in Java, compiling was actually one of the easier parts of this puzzle).
Then I merely had to input the image (that I had captured from the blog via a screenshot) into the program (which has a nice little gui for inputing an image to decode) and voila: the QR Code decodes to:
=====Start=====
Please leave a comment for this Blog post with the text.
'I am as smart as a jackrabbit'
Thanks, I am curious how many folks readily recognize and know how to decode QR data.
======End======
FYI, it's pretty easy to tell what it says if you cheat. If you right click and view the image, link passes all the data to recreate the image every time, you can manually look at the the URL and mostly determine the text (sort of, it's still a bit cryptic), but as you can probably tell, I decided to not cheat.
Yep, there's about an hour of my life gone forever. Thanks man.
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