Ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive; act accordingly.
Those who have been watching may have noticed I quietly started developing an Android application in the last month or so. It’s still super-buggy and far from feature complete, but I thought it was time to announce it here (”release early, release often”). It’s not ready for real users yet, but developers may like to take a little look.
A quick post to share some bookmarklets I made.
I’ve found QR-code “2D barcodes” really handy when playing with my Android phone.
Sometimes, I have a web page open on my desktop PC, and I want to quickly load it in the Android Chrome browser to see what it looks like. Rather than re-typing it with my thumbs, the Barcode Scanner application allows me to scan a QR-code from the screen of my computer, and if the decoded text contains a URL, open it in the Android browser.
These two bookmarklets turn the URL of the current page that is open in your browser into a scannable QR-code:
Google Charts API based bookmarklet: Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is: javascript:location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chl='+escape(location.href);
Alternatively, I made a Kaywa QR-code generator version. Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is: javascript:location.href='http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d='+escape(location.href);
They both do the same thing, so you probably only want one. Only tested on Firefox.
(Update: seemed Wordpress ate the javascript in the bookmarklet links … should be okay now)
Since I got a new toy for Christmas, I’ve become interested in geolocation and the fun things you can do when you have an internet-connected GPS-enabled device in your pocket. I’m also a compulsive delicious tagger, so I quickly discovered the existing practice for geotagging delicious bookmarks.
Essentially, this seems to be: add the tag ‘geotagged‘, along with the tags ‘geo:lat=X.xxx‘ and ‘geo:lon=X.xxx‘, where the X.xxx’s are the latitude and longtitude numbers that are likely to come straight out of your GPS, in decimal degrees (WGS84).
This is all very nice, but the problem with tags in this format is that there is no easy or efficient way to use them to retrieve all items tagged for a particular locality. Sure, if I’m standing right on top of the Eureka Tower at -37.821362,144.964213, I can search for tags geo:lat=-37.821362 and geo:lon=144.964213 to find all the geotagged links for that exact location, but what if I’m standing 50 metres across the street looking up at the tower and want to search for links near my current location ? Continue reading ‘Delicious geohashes … mmmm … tagging *drool*’
