I feel that barcodes (usually QR Codes) are underutilized; I forgot about them until I saw this post.
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I think barcodes could potentially be used to quickly transmit preset information to war victims.
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They could be used to transmit information on platforms that censor: Sharing Lemmy posts on Reddit (even though it’s currently redundant due to federation). (I just thought of this.)
I wouldn’t say it’s exactly creative, but a common useful application of qrcodes is for communicating wifi network names and passwords. If you use a GNU/Linux distro with NetworkManager, wifi-qr is a nice tool which can not only scan but also generate these phone-compatible wifi qrcodes for any saved wifi network your computer knows about. On debian-based distros, just
apt install wifi-qr
and run thewifi-qr
command and you’ll get a qr code right there in your terminal which you can scan with a phone.edit: actually NetworkManager’s commandline tool generates the QR codes itself, so you only need
wifi-qr
if you want to scan them. Just runnmcli dev wifi show
.Awesome!