QRs For the Socially Inept

Shy customers at Harry's Bar in Singapore have a new way to stalk strike up a convo with someone they have their eye on: QR code tags hung on beer bottles, of course!

Buy the target object of your affection a bottle of brew, hang your customized QR tag over the neck of the bottle and send it their way. Bing bang boom, you're headed to the nearest hotel together. It's SCIENCE.











via mashable.com

Pair An Orphaned CueCat With Nerd-Toy Arduino & What Do You Get? Barcodes!

Hack a Day has a user-generated how-to for mashing up a CueCat with an Arduino board and making barcode-scanning magic happen.

It's not practical, and it doesn't save time or money but some things are worth doing because they're just weirdly cool.

Barcodes and Beer, Hurray!

Tim Nudd at AdFreak has a great piece about Guinness beer's latest QR code shenanigans: a QR that only appears when your glass is full of the brewed brown goodness.

Fiendishly clever!

How to Make UPC Barcodes in Excel

Needing a UPC barcode for your product/s really is a measure of success. It means you're working with established retailers or distributors who are fully engaged in the retail channel, upping the chances that your widget will be a winner. You're probably just days away from becoming a thousandaire! Hurray! Congratulations!

Once you've got your raw UPC numbers from GS1 (or from us!), you're ready to turn them into UPC barcodes. When you've got a lot of products, you'll have a lot of UPC numbers. And when you have a lot of UPC numbers the best place to manage them is in an Excel spreadsheet. And when your UPC numbers are in an Excel spreadsheet, UPCTools makes it easy, easy, easy to quickly turn them all into those lines and spaces we all know and love.

Azalea's Code 128 Software in Excel

When you've got a zillion Code 128 barcodes to create, you don't want to have to make them one at a time. That's one zillion opportunities for typos, transposed digits or fat-fingering your keyboard into barcodes that are wrong, wrong, wrong. And if it's wrong, what's the point? Barcodes are here to make our lives easier, like robot servants and indoor plumbing.

The best way to make a buncha' barcodes at once is to make 'em all at once in Excel. Following this week's theme of video tutorials, we've created an overview of how our Code 128 barcode software, C128Tools, functions within an Excel spreadsheet.

How to Copy Excel Macros

If you're anything like me, trying to use the advanced features in an Excel spreadsheet can be like trying to fly the space shuttle when you're used to riding a moped. Macros, user-defined functions, formulas, WHAT DO THEY ALL MEAN?!

A macro - a built-in call, action, or process - in an Excel spreadsheet is actually one of the most useful functions you can access. And there are a zillion macros out there already written for you! Azalea's barcode software can even be used within Excel, if you utilyze our easy macros.

This vid will get you started:

What Kind of Barcode Do I Need?!

Figuring out which barcode type (or 'symbology') to use for your data can be confusing.

Do you need a UPC barcode? A Code 128? An Interleaved 2 of 5 (ITF), Code 39, POSTNET or Codabar or PDF417?

If this is all gobbledygook to you, check out our super handy video tutorial for tips and tricks on how to pinpoint which barcode you should use for which project.