sequelguy posted a photo:
Bear Flag wine has a cool label and has the barcode wrapped around the neck of the bottle.
Checking out at a grocery store to which I rarely go, the cashier asks me if I want an
Albertson's card. I respond sure and she hands me the form on which I give up my personal information. I ask if I need to fill this out now, and she says yeah and it will only take two minutes,
which surprised me because at QFC they just hand me a new card and send me on my way. I fill in my phone number as the first ten digits of pi so I don't have to worry about getting phone calls but
its something I can remember next time I'm there and don't bring the card.
I turn to leave and the cashier asks me is that a '759' or '159' in my phone number. I stop for a second because I only know the digits as a sequence from the start and pause long enough reciting it in my head that its clear its not my phone number. And she calls me out on it: "Is that your real phone number?" I sigh, "No, does it have to be? Are you going to call me?" "Yeah," she says, "I'll call you." (ha ha) "Well I'll try entering this number," she says doubting the computer will accept the fake phone number. "On the number's already registered," she says, "So you already had a card." "No," says the manager who had walked up during for this exchange, "It means someone else used that same number." So the moral of the story is, try your fake phone number before trying to use it to get a new card.
I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile
phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing
bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code
displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular
URLs to my cellphone as necessary.
Another use for my new phone is as a replacement for my grocery
card, those little plastic cards with a bar code on them that the grocery store gives you to track your purchasing habits. I've previously gone to great lengths to increase space in my pockets by
removing infrequently used keys and reducing my wallet to the essentials. So I was glad to get rid of the QFC card and replace it with a photo of its bar code on my phone. Since the important part
of the QFC card is the bar code which is just an image of black lines, if your phone has a camera and a screen with a reasonable resolution you can take a photo of the bar code and later display it
to a reader. I've so far been able to try it once and successfully at a normal checkout line, but the reaction from the checkout lady was enough that I may in the future just keep a card in my car.
She was very excited, asked me what kind of phone I had, called over another checkout person and generally made a large fuss. Also the checkout people generally don't mind giving me a new card if I
don't have one with me.
Another demo of our talk "BadBarcode" in PacSec 2015: start a shell by
one single boarding pass.
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