coderchris.com

Recently I saw a symbol on the side of the pepsi can that looked something like this and all it said with it was want to know more... visit us, with some url back to pepsi's website.

I thought that was all a bit odd, but unusually for me I disregarded it as some kind of new marketing game I wasn't interested in.

Today however I was starting to catch back up with months of missed Google reader posts, saw a similar thing on Matt Cutt's blog where he was talking about the chart types that the google charting API can produce and found out these things are called QR codes.

And apparently "QR codes can be read by any device that has the appropriate software installed. Such devices range from dedicated QR code readers to mobile phones."

When I received my Nokia E71 a year or so ago I noticed it had bar-code reader software pre-installed on it, but had no idea what that was really for, until now, it's for reading codes like this!

So why not try it yourself. If you have a phone with bar code reader software built in and want to give it a try, point it at the screen and find out what this says:

If you have an interest in having these codes produced please get in touch!

I love last.fm

It's basically made my mp3 collection redundant over the last few months (no mean feat, believe me) but until today I hadn't junked it completely because I didn't have a way of listening to last.fm on the move.

Yesterday I however I received my shiny new Nokia E71 on a slightly different contract from 3 which gives me full power to use the internet as I like (well subject to their fair usage policy anyway).

At the same time I noticed the new INQ phone from 3 also supported last.fm and went hunting for a last.fm mobile app, and that's when I found mobbler a free, open source version of the last.fm scrobbler for Symbian based mobile phones i.e. those made by Nokia

I'm glad to say it works really well and as a result I'm going to archive the mp3's and free up a good 100 gig of disk space - woo for social radio!