Friday is Leap Day!

Yep, 2008 is a Leap Year. Those of you born on February 29th can get the cake & candles out.

Trivia question of the day: what are those born on Leap Day called? See the above page for the answer to today's question.

Barcodes in Menus?

Most people read about using barcodes in restaurant menus and see some measure of utility in it. It's faster, easier, uses machines instead of people. So goes the logic behind The Deli Touch pen. If that isn't enough, try the video. I can't speak Japanese but it's worth watching just for the end.

Someone says "barcoded menu" and "scanners for all customers" and I hear "prank waiting to happen". How hard can it be to substitute your barcodes for the ones in the menu? Think barcode fonts and Avery laser labels. Take a menu home, scan the barcodes, and figure out what they're doing. Re-do it for them and swap out the menus.

This is from someone who "played with" the CueCat back in the day...

Barcodes & Interior Lighting

Some may think that there's no intersection between barcodes (our favorite topic) and lighting design. Think again. Introducing barcode lights.

An idea whose time has come.

BTW, what do they scan as???

Finally, a reason for cell phones & barcodes

The Voice of the Street from Leif on Vimeo.

Lauren sent me news of this cool street art project that involve cell phones & barcodes. QR codes linked to voicemail tying artist to viewer. It's from The Voice of the Street. Check it out!!!

Can Barcodes Help the Vision-Impaired?

Peter Abrahams hopes so.

"For anyone who is blind or cannot see well the kitchen can be a real challenge. The first challenge is to know what is in all the similarly shaped tins and packets in the cupboard or fridge/freezer. A related challenge is to know what is written on each of them such as the cooking instructions and ingredients.

..Any packaged product has a barcode so this seems the obvious place to start. So scanning the barcode should provide a key to all the information about the content."

Combine barcodes textured with simple bumps or ridges in the packaging with a text-to-speech doohickey, it seems an easy, elegant solution.

All that's left is for the supermarket industry to get on board with a centralized interactive grocery database. A robotic voice reading "Two three four seven six five five eight two three four five" doesn't help much in deciphering a can of pet food from one of corned beef hash (though the distinction between these two particular examples is debatable).