Cool. I usually just use DuckDuckGo but it's nice to know there's a fully offline alternative.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
99 points (99.0% liked)
Today I Learned
28828 readers
799 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I have a keyboard hotkey to take the copy/paste buffer and display a QR code on screen. Straightforward to implement on macOS, and presumably Linux too.
macOS: pbpaste | qrencode -t ANSI
okay that’s a great idea and now i really want a widget on my phone that does that
I wrote one of my own from scratch, back in the day. More to practice my algorithm coding skills than anything else, make sure that I could. Not very difficult - easier than barcodes, in a way.
The thing that I found most interesting was that it uses the same Reed-Solomon error correcting code as CDs and DVDs, and for the same reason. Those codes guarantee that you don't get too many 1s or 0s in a row. That would cause difficulties with laser tracking in a disc player, or big confusing areas of white or black in a QR code.
The on-off-on-off pattern that joins the inside edge of the three squares isn't usually that obvious either, but when reading it, makes it quite easy to decide how 'big the boxes' are. You can store a very long piece of text in a QR code, although the pattern gets very finely detailed after a while.
In case you want an alternative:
The qchq in the url isn't a coincidence, this was created by the British spy agency. It is used fairly commonly amongst cyber security folk, so its been fairly well vetted that its not uploading stuff to their cloud, but you can always load the page, disconnect your network and do what you want with it if you want to be paranoid.
or just type "qr code ..." into duck duck go and it will generate one that contains the text ...
don’t paste anything private on there though (like “anyone with the link” share/invites)
the search gets sent to the server, and you immediately can’t be sure of its privacy once it’s out of your control
The pair of Zint and Zbar does everything Qr codes (and endless other codes)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zbar/
Added the urls, because it was a little non trivial to find them. Zbar was showing steel rebar as the first hits...
Online generators let you avoid the shortener if you tell them to encode "text".
Link QRs are just text QRs, but it's a link. In a pinch you can use the "text" mode to encode whatever you need.
I like Binary Eye on f-droid
That's good to know, actually. Thank you.
Now it will take much less effort to make quick prank QR codes.