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Barcodes: The Number of the Beast
Boomzilla continues: Barcodes were first developed in the railroad business to keep track of which cars went with which engine. The barcodes were imprinted on the side of the railway cars. The barcodes on each car could then be read together to compile information on that particular grouping; what station they came from, where they were headed, etc. thus automating the process of marshalling. When the business world realized how well this system worked, these railway barcodes evolved into the UPC system with which we are all familiar. To really be able to take in the wonder that are bar codes, check out the excellent FAQ created by Russ Adams and an article from the BBC.
Coming full circle, the clever folks at Bekonscot Model Railway in the UK have utilized barcodes at every turn of their expansive system. For example, an MP3 player is driven off barcodes attached to trains. The trains are announced before they arrive and when they are leaving, stating their destination, route and at what stations they will call.
Want a barcode of your name?
I got a big tattoo of my SSN in barcode format right on my forehead.
That way people know who I am.
It is unclear from any of those links if this makes me cool or not.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Barcodes: The Number of the Beast
It never occurred to me that Satan might be living in my UPC symbols. Now I need a priest to accompany me to the grocery store.
The coolest voice ever.
Standard UPC bar codes consist of a set of lines to mark the start of the code, the left hand part of the code itself, another set of marker lines, the right hand part of the code itself, and a third set of marker lines:The marker lines are "0101", "01010" and "1010" respectively, where 0 is white and 1 is black.
Now, the encoding scheme is complicated, but it just so happens that "0101" if treated as data on the left hand side would decode to the digit "6".
Similarly, "1010" on the right hand side would decode to a "6" if it were data. The middle also has a "1010" or a "0101" depending upon how you want to look at it.
Hence every UPC bar code has "6...6...6" built into it.
There are some technical niggles with the theory. The middle marker has that extra white bar on the left, but this can be explained away by saying that a gap is needed before the next coded part starts, or that it is to make the thing scan both ways. Yup, it even reads "666" if you play it backwards.
In "The Master of Space and Time" Rudy Rucker jokes about this theory by having an alternate universe where people pay for their groceries by having the checkout operator swipe a UPC code that's tattooed on their foreheads.
Does anyone remember the game barcode battlers??? You used bar codes from anything you could find and swipe them through a reader and they would give you stats for your character to fight other characters. Really neat idea. Ahh early 90's technology... hehe.
Mediachest.com lets you scan in the UPC's and ISBN's on the back of DVDs, Games, CDs, and video games and keep track of your collection. You can even use an CueCat to do this.
http://www.mediachest.com/
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
Even cooler than barcodes is RFID. You don't even have to aim to get it to scan correctly. The only problem is the printers that you let you arbitrarily mark the tags are expensive; about $1000, whereas barcodes can be printed on anything with black ink.
BUT!!... optical scanners are expenive ($250 and up). Yet you can get a RFID USB reader for about $60. It comes with a few premade tags. You can buy pre-signed RFID tags for less than $1.00 each, and a sheet of them can usually be run through a printer; then you could have barcodes AND RFID.
We're considering using such a system to do inventory control. Fun!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...with the recruitment policy of our local hardware superstore.
:
B&Q is a large DIY chain in the UK. They might be in the US, I don't know. They have a policy of only employing people over 95 years of age.
So you get to the checkout with your self install kitchen. A little old 97 year old lady has now got to try and
a) locate the barcode on each item of your self-install kitchen, containing many items that are several orders of magnitude BIGGER THAN SHE IS.
b) having located the barcode, get her scanner to it.
O.k. - I never thought I'd find a forum where this story might even have the slightest relevance but here we are.
For a few years I worked for Safeway Food and Drug as a File Maintenance Clerk. I printed pricing labels and hung them on the shelves. I made price signs, applied the batches to change prices, etc.
Safeway has a system in place on the registers where certain activities require a manager with an override card. Checks of a certain amount, large voids, all kinds of stuff.
Since I worked on the computers all the time I was the one who changed the message on the bottom of receipt tapes- with the manager name- when we got a new manager. One day I'm moving around in the file that contained that information and I find all these long numbers in one location. They were all the managers override numbers.
Here's where the barcode part comes in. I wanted my own over ride card. I went into the software I used to print price labels and took a single record and changed the UPC of a product on the label to an override number. When I printed the label- the barcode in the corner for ordering now read the override number.
I cut the barcode part out, peeled the back and stuck it to a card I carried in my wallet. Now any time I needed an override I could just scan that card over the register scanner.
On a side note- I called company security and told them that all the manager codes were in plain text where anyone could see them in the machine. They told me it was o.k. because noone would ever look there. Kind of funny. It is probably still that way.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
but here you go:
Microsoft's latest wall poster
No, I don't remember who sent it to me. And I'm turning off the webserver in half an hour so I can go back to getting real work done, so somebody mirror the damn thing and stop hammering my home DSL. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Please try again Mr. AC troll...
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
This was before I'd seen a computer. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.