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From: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" 
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Re: General question about QR code scanning
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2017 00:37:08 +0000
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In message , Paul  
writes:
>james@nospam.com wrote:
>> I got a thing in the mail about using USPS (post office) to ship holiday
>> gifts. It says to scan your QR code at home to speed up shipping. I know
>> that a smartphone with an app can do this, using the phone's camera, but
>> how can someone using a computer do this? (Or maybe it's not
>> possible)....
>>  I just take my stuff to the post office, but I always like to learn 
>>how
>> this technology stuff all works....

Me too. I'm puzzled: how are you supposed to get the QR code to scan 
before you've handed the parcel over the counter?
>
>Well, without knowing the answer, I'd say your machine
>needs "vision". Your desktop would at least need a webcam.
>Or alternately, if you have a point&shoot digital camera,
>you could take a picture of the offensive QR code, and
>load that into your computer.

Or a scanner of course.
>
>Then the next job, is getting a program to orient the
>picture so it can be decoded, then convert it into
>a URL for you.
>
>https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-scan-qr-code-on-your-pc
>
>So for fun, I took the picture of a QR code from that sample
>article (cropped it in GIMP so just the QR squares were
>in the picture), and uploaded it here.
>
>https://webqr.com/

Thanks for that - looks like a useful site. (Asked if I wanted to 
"share" my webcam! I closed the asking box this time, but presumably if 
I'd said yes, I could have held something with a QR in front of it!)
>
>And that site gave back a URL of "http://en.m.wikipedia.org".
>
>That means you don't even need a resident Win32 program
>on your PC. You can also upload the image of the QR to
>a web site and the web site can decode it for you. And
>out comes a URL. Or other textual info.
>
>   Paul
>
In practice, are QR codes - at least on products, in magazine articles, 
and the like - used for anything _other_ than URLs? I ask because I'm 
off and on looking for something that will interpret them for my blind 
friends (might well be an iPhone app.), but if all they normally contain 
are URLs, I doubt they'd be that useful. (In that most things that have 
them also have the URL printed nearby anyway, and OCR can do that for my 
friends anyway - and URLs probably aren't much use to them anyway, given 
the poor design [for VH/VI folk] of most web pages.)
-- 
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

She looked like the kind of girl who was poured into her clothes and forgot to
say when - Wodehouse
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