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• Missing Tokyo, Surviving Los Angeles

  Oct. 7, 2007

  

  A week ago this morning I landed at LAX, home safe from Tokyo thanks to Korean Airlines. It was the end of two weeks' vacation with my girlfriend, Zoe. I looked out at the 405 as the plane made its approach, and thought "I never want to drive anywhere again." I grew up in the country, where everything was miles and miles apart, and then to a dreary suburban city that was anti-pedestrian not by malice but by laziness. Then I moved to Los Angeles, the city of the car, with its overcrowded bus lines and train that doesn't ...

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• 2D barcodes

  June 4, 2006

  (image courtesy of B-Log Cabin TPJ) For some reason, matrix codes/2D barcodes have been infringing the borders of my attention these weeks. A few different friends of both the techie and non-techie varieties have brought up the topic in conversation. The most familiar 2D barcode, at least to folks who are familiar with tech in Japan, is the QR code. These can contain quite a bit of information - up to about 3KB of data. One could imagine a sort of super-durable storage in the form of a huge array of QR codes laser-etched into some tough surface. Today they ...

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