I’ve seen the idea of QR Codes coming up a few times recently. There was a piece by Gina Trapani and some discussion around the issues with their use at SXSW.I thought it might be time to do some looking around.
QR (Quick Response) Codes have been around for about 15 years (Wikipedia). They are a black and white image that can be found on all sorts of things. When I thought about it I realised I had seen them on posters and packaging for quite some time. Apparently they are very popular in Japan – while the rest of us have been slow to catch on.
Like any barcode, you need a scanner to capture and decode the information. My Nokia E71 has a barcode scanner and I wondered why it didn’t work on ‘normal’ barcodes. It’s because it’s a QR Code Reader. There are lots of QR Code scanners out there! i-nigma make applications for lots of phones. Their Symbian Series 60 application is a lot faster than the one that came with my E71.
So what can you embed in a QR Code? Quite a bit of information! Many companies simply embed a website address so that a consumer can use their mobile phone to scan the barcode and see extra product information immediately. Someone like me could add a QR Code to a business card. Some one who sees my card could scan the code, go to the website and see an up to date resume or contact details. The embedded data could contain competition information or treasure hunt clues.
Download a QR Code scanner for your phone and scan one of the codes on this page – better yet make your own!
Note: The two codes on this page were made with two different generators. I used http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ for the top one (which links to a page about my work) and I used http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-generator/ for the second code (which is a message about my Twitter accounts).
My catch of the day at the Huka Falls Prawn Park
A new decade – a new start?
It would be nice to be able to resurrect this space and do some “fun” writing again. The pressures of the last eighteen months have meant that, apart from tiny Twitter-bytes, I haven’t done any real writing about the things that I care about. These holidays have been tagged for a bit of R&R&R – Rest and Recuperation and Resurrection.
It’s not that I haven’t been doing the things that I love. We’ve done a lot of travelling around the place recenttly and I have uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr account. Visits to Wairoa, Hastings and Wellington have been photographed, tagged and put online. I’m uploading some shots that I took around the lower Kaipara Harbour after an amazing cruise we did on Thursday. There are family photos too.
I’ve been geeking around too. Dropped 500GB hard drives into my laptop and netbook and upgraded them both to Windows 7. I’ve been playing with some Linux and Windows PE live CDs and looking at how these environments can be used in my world. This week I finally got around to setting up some extra network stuff so that our whole house has the right kind of internet access. Benn and I have taken on the task of stripping down all of our old junked computers and sorting out which parts go to TradeMe, which we can use and what just needs to go to someone else to recycle. Our home network is pretty shoddy at the moment – I need to think about placing our equipment more efficiently so that it serves us rather than we serve it.
We bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas and have really enjoyed playing some of the games and activities. The Wii Fit is getting a daily workout too! I’m planning to have a play with the ideas behind the Wiimote Project.
Porthole to history at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea
This year sees a bit of a change in direction for me. I’m going to start my post graduate studies. After several years heavily immersed in the educational ICT arena it’s time to step back and take another look at the world of silicon, ones and zeroes. I’ll still be doing my schools’ tech support work, my websites and looking after my business clients, however, it’s time to get thinking again and to think more widely.
The world of educational ICT is a great place to visit but it’s not the world that I want to stay. There are a lot of amazing thinkers in that world but unfortunately there are also a lot of people who can’t see beyond their own sphere. I think that it’s time for me at least to break out and to see if I can get a wider perspective on things. So that’s what I hope to do this year. I’ll still be on the fringe of the education world but by being outside of the ICT PD network, hopefully I’ll be able to see things with more clarity.
Remembering Sir Howard Morrison who died in his sleep this week. My ex-mother-in-law maintained that he and John Rowles were relatives of the family. Fairly tenuous relationships but who was I to argue with a magnificent old kuia?
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Speaking of Kiwi Culture, said ex-mother-in-law’s eldest child was Pixie Wiliams who was the vocalist on New Zealand’s first ever ‘pop song‘ Blue Smoke. I took this photo of Ben with his Aunt’s record on a visit to Te Papa a couple of years ago.
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The Creative Freedom Foundation has had lots to talk about this week. Earlier it was the way that school students have been fed one side of the copyright debate. By the end of the week they were looking more deeply at some of the Public Library copyright tensions.
My partner came home from school tonight with a story of the young ex-student who visited to show and tell a liver transplant scar and to thank her year six teacher (my partner) for the belief in herself that she learned just four years ago. She said my partner was the most memorable teacher that she had ever had. Red eyes and tears in our kitchen.
Within ten minutes my son, who attends the same college came into the kitchen to ask if I remembered a student that I taught a couple of years earlier who has chosen to shave her heair off to raise money for cancer.
I spent the day surveying teachers about Inquiry and Problem Based Learning. It’s easy to think that what is taught in the classroom stays there. I would like to think that the today’s lesson of the day is that we have a far greater impact than we realise. I hope that we, as teachers develop learning experiences that allow kids to think about how what they have learned can make a difference to other people.
This Google document is a sortable spreadsheet of all of the TED Talks made available up to 2nd September 2009. It’s a great way to see who and what you missed.
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How many people remember DOS? Or shoulder pads? A quick blast from the past at Everything is Terrible.
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Should Twitter monetize? Mashable asks their readers what they think in the light of Twitter’s expanded Terms of Service.
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And a reminder …
Last weekend a member of our family circle was involved in an awful accident. She was horrifically injured, and although now making some tiny steps towards recovery, will be in hospital for several months. Her life will never be the same.
At first the news came through to the family via phone and text. My heart started pounding and an old familiar phrase rose … “I’ll pray …”
But I don’t pray any more. I left that life a long time ago. So I got on the internet and found a news report. I scanned the family Bebo and Facebook pages but just hours after the event there was nothing.
Over the weekend we sent and received texts and phone calls of disbelief, hope and love. Then slowly the Facebook and Bebo pages started to fill with little messages. First it was other young people sending love, energy and affirmations to their friend lying in hospital. Then it was whys? and hows? Then the family started to leave updates and messages of thanks.
Social Networking as a twenty-first century prayer? It might sound facetious to many people. Consider, though, in times of disaster or emergency – personal or not – people want to get together and leave a token or a message that expresses a quiet public thought. Think about prayer circles that feature in Christian church communities the world over. Just last week I saw a little box in a school office, inviting parents to leave their email addresses in order to join an E-prayer group for those “less fortunate or in introuble”.
Social Networking as a twenty-first century prayer? Amen.
This blog served as my online home for several years. After a few years using Pyra.com and then Blogger I realised that what I wanted in a website could be best served by a blogging system. I found Wordpress in August 2004 and have used it ever since.
In the last couple of years I have been more interested in building websites using Wordpress than in writing the content. Nowadays most of the stuff I write is jammed into 140 character Tweets or slightly longer Facebook status updates. It’s short, it’s disconnected and it’s lost amongst people who want me to join a mob, buy a farm or go to a marketting seminar.
I’m starting to become a little disatisfied with that as both of these fine platforms are overrun with marketers and people who want me to buy a farm or join a mob.
So where to from here?
I’m going to write again. I’m going to start crafting again. Make my own connections again. And take back my interwebs.
Nathan Barry exposes how experienced web developers happily allowed someone else access to their Twitter network. Wth the exponential growth of Twitter and other Social Networking applications, people are excitedly giving away their passwords in order to quickly jump on the latest trend.
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I’m really excited to be attending Wordcamp NZ in a couple of weeks time. I started using Wordpress in August 2004 just love the way that it can be manipulated and stroked into amazing websites. I might not be the best manipulator or stroker but I still thik it’s the best blogging software out there. I’m really looking forward to meeting other Wordpress geeks and afficionados.
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Another favourite, MetaFilter, celebrated its ten year anniversary last weekend. MetaFilter is the best community out there – bar none. The site is not a Web 2.0 site and that’s one of the best things about it. The community is intelligent, snarky and real. They are (mostly) self-moderating, full of real personalities and a site with really interesting subsites.
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Download Wired editor Chris Anderson’s Free, for free.
But the funny thing about waste is that it’s all relative to your sense of scarcity. Our grandparents grew up in an age when a long-distance telephone call was an expensive luxury, to be scheduled and kept short. Even today, many find it hard to keep people of that generation on a long-distance call for very long—they still hear a meter ticking in their head and rush to finish. But our kids are growing up in an age when long distance is free on their cell phones. They’ll happily chat for hours. From the perspective of 1950s telecom costs, that’s incredibly wasteful. But today, when those costs have fallen to near zero, we don’t give it a second thought. It doesn’t feel like waste at all. Wired Magazine
And there is much, much more.
I have put together a quick and dirty page for tomorrow’s blackout – http://www.nixit.co.nz/blackout.htm - feel free to use, remix, whatever 
I’ve had a fiddle with the Maintenance Mode plugin (which is where I got the idea) and will see how that works.
Find Me!