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During quarantine I designed a paper-based system for making QR codes by hand. Everything is very papery and bureaucratic, but also fun. Tables to look up bytes
by flixic 6y ago
During quarantine I designed a paper-based system for making QR codes by hand. Everything is very papery and bureaucratic, but also fun. Tables to look up bytes, long forms for calculating Reed-Solomon, and even transparent sheets of paper for comparing different masking patterns.
My goal is to film a video of generating a QR code without any computers or even calculators. It's possible, just might take two hours or so.
- AimForTheBushes 6y agoThis sounds pretty cool. Hope you share it when it’s finished!
- MrZander 6y agoI'd be very interested in seeing this when you are done!
- latchkey 6y agoThat's awesome. Reminds me of Ken Shirriff computing sha256 with pencil and paper... http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
- flixic 6y agoThis was the main inspiration! Also, the fact that I couldn't find anyone going through EVERY step of QR code generation manually (even if CPU-assisted) and in detail.
- IanCal 6y agoIt's a great way to learn. In my cryptography classes we did all of the algorithms by hand (often shortened, so 16 rounds of something would be dropped to 3 or min bytes dropped) on pen and paper as homework. Hard but it really did make a lot stick in my mind about how things worked.
- userbinator 6y agoIt's also a great way to debug. I've written video/image codecs and when things go subtly wrong, decoding the raw bitstream by hand and comparing carefully with the decoder output has been the best way to figure out the problem. It can be quite tedious, but as the phrase goes, definitely "builds character". Or as someone else put it, "How can you tell the computer what to do, if you can't do it yourself?"
- dang 6y agoPlease post it to HN when it's ready, and let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
- shostack 6y agoI want some hybrid that uses AR on my phone to help me hand draw and color in QR codes for when I can't print them.