[nzlug] computer read/write access to paper?

[Toby Collett]

Have a look at artoolkitplus
http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/artoolkitplus.php
They have a set of 2d tags that can be recognised with low quality web cams
(possibly not the data density you are looking for, but you could create the
patterns on a local sports field or farm and recover them from google maps
in a few years :)

MIT (not manakau) had some interesting marker research where data was
incoded into the spacing of letters so that you can embed data into standard
text (logo's, advertising posters etc)

Of course all these are Augmented Reality based projects, so probably not as
practical as boring old industrial 2d barcodes, but you did mention the
three letter f word...

of course a base 10 encoding of the font using a chequebook font would work
will with OCR and would be able to be manually recovered in the case of
technology failure (as opposed to 2d barcodes which would be difficult to
recover if you lost the decoding software)

Toby

On 6/22/07, Karl. <kmw1 at free.net.nz> wrote:
>
> Every now and then there are small files (encryption keyfiles) that I'd
> like to store in some robust offline fashion.  I have a vague
> recollection of software to print out a file as a 2D barcode, and then
> something to read it back from a scan of the page.  Anyone here got any
> pointers on how to do this?
>
> Vague thoughts:  I could hack up my own method by choosing a subset of
> characters which are consistently well recognized by ordinary OCR
> software.  eg.  don't use Q because it looks too much like O, etc.  I
> could just map my data onto the reduced character set, fold in some
> forward error correction, and then just print it in a nice sans-serif
> font.  Good clean fun.
>
> It'd be nice to use something that someone else had done the work for,
> though - this isn't really the most important project to be sinking my
> time into  :-)
>
> I could also just write my keyfiles to CDR and store them somewhere
> safe, but where's the fun in that?
>
> Karl.
>
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