Out of the six ways for me to store a QR code (in this case a year-long entry pass for a local museum), the one I chose today was the worst, most unreliable, least efficient, but way coolest method: I drew it by hand in the back of my Techō Weeks paper planner. It took one hour but that includes starting over because I messed up the first attempt.
It was a 21 × 21 module grid and I used 1.5 mm modules, using a 0.5 mm pen for the corners and single-module areas and a 0.8 mm pen to fill in bigger areas. The Weeks has 3mm grid paper so I made modules one quarter the actual grid size, freehanding that half of them while following the grid lines where they did align. Maybe a ruler would’ve been good, I didn’t think of that.
I tested it, it works!
When I first wrote this I thought the second coolest method was gonna be a transfer pen. My printer is laser and I wondered if printing it out, mirror flipped, on normal printer paper would work with transfer pens, but I couldn’t test it at the time because I didn’t have a transfer pen. Onre I did test it later it tutns out that it doesn’t work for hi rez QR codes, the rubbing process blurs everything and just transfer without rubbing is too faint. So now we know. Transfer pen is the actual worst, most unreliable, least efficient for this, and it’s not as cool as hand-making them.
Third coolest I could’ve done: printing it out, cutting it out, and pasting it in. I’ve done that with train tickets sometimes.
Fourtlh would’ve been printing it out and keeping it folded in the calendar’s back pocket, and fifth would’ve been printing out and keeping it at home and just trying to remember to bring it. (That’s what I did with my concert pass last summer, downside is that it got pretty banged up in my bag.)
Sixth would probably have been the best and smartest, although it (like the first method, admittedly) only works for 21 × 21 QR codes: crop the image out tightly and use an USB cable to put it in the “gallery” section on my then Nokia 8210 4g dumb phone. Higher rez QR codes don’t work on this stamp-sized screen, but I’ve tried this QR resolution on the Doro 5517 which had pretty much the same screen and that worked. That’s what I used to do for movie tickets. Once movie theaters stopped requiring Macromedia Flash to buy tickets. That was a dark time where I never bought any tickets for years.
Least cool because it’s still flashing my phone like a dork but least work and also best for the environment. I thought that once Light Phone III arrives that’s probably what I’m gonna do, put the file in the gallery section or just take a photo of the tablet screen, and I did that a few times. Just photographing the QR code also works. Now that you can install apps on LP3 (kind of defeating the entire purpose but at least I could set it up in a way were I can only install apps at home and can’t access F-Droid or web browsers on the go) I have an app called Passes installed. It lets me save QR codes, it’s like a memory jar for them. So it completely solves this problem. I also now have a receipt-style thermoprinter for a more hipstery (but worse for the environment) solution. I can have li’l QR “receipts” in the back pocket of my Techō. That’s what I usually do now even though my “backup” of having them in the Passes app might as well be the only solution too. Either approach (Passes or the thermoprinter) would do it on its own and having both is just redundant.
QR codes are gateways between internet and reality. I hate them when they are just portals polluting our real world trying to suck us back into Screenland but I really do love them when they are a way of reifying and incarnating data, bringing a piece of internet with me in a way that’s detached from it. Since Screenland is a toxic glamered Feywild, having a useful QR code in my pocket is as if I have a bit of fairy gold that somehow managed to slip by the unseelie gatekeepers.
SJ train tickets are a perfect example of QR at its most awesome. In a worse timeline we’d have to mandatorily bring our computers with us and plug them into USB holes at our seats or worse yet plug in our own brains there. But instead we can just bring paper, or a digital image on our pocket cameras, and that image is our ticket.
Now, SL train tickets are another story. They abuse QR by only working with dynamically generated hyper-ephemeral codes so that you need to bring the app with you because the codes need to be so fresh. That sucks, obviously. That’s closer to that dystopic vision of QR.