WARNING: QR codes are not suitable for upgrading your C64's RAM.
Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Well not with that attitude.
This is how YouTube videos are born
Now this is a shower thought. I love it.
And the Commodore 64 can't decode them. Even if you fed it an algorithm that could decode them, you'd be out the memory of the algorithm.
All sounds fun on paper, but I enjoy storing terabytes of data on the Internet Archive, and sticking that to a QR code, just for fun.
Bullshit, it could decode them just fine it would just take a while. It would only need a source of storage like a tape or floppy drive.
Back then and now we have our computers often do tasks which process more data than we have ram available. It's not a hard problem to solve and we even solved it back then.
You are right, QR codes are very easy to decode if you have them raw, even the C64 should do it in a few seconds, maybe a minute for one of those 22 giant ones. The hard part is image processing when decoding a camera picture - and that can be done on the C64 too if it has enough time and some external memory (or disks for virtual memory). People have even emulated a 32-bit RISC processor on the poor thing, and made it boot Linux.
Of course. But a fun (actual) showerthought nonetheless. As I remembered it earlier today, a qr-code (version 40) can hold about 3000 bytes.
Version 40: 177x177 modules, can hold up to 7,089 numeric characters, 4,296 alphanumeric characters, 2,953 bytes of data, or 1,817 kanji characters.
Indeed!
I actually encoded a 256 byte DOS assembly demo (not written by me) into a self decoding plain text batch file, and then for the hell of it encoded that into a QR code.
Again, disclaimer, I didn't write the original code, but it was fun to convert into a QR code.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=LSAJTQiQ0DA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
MattKC totally made a version of snake that fits in a QR code, his website covers it too
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
totally made a version of snake that fits in a QR code
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Tiny nitpick, 23 qr-codes are needed as one can contain 2,953 bytes and c64 has 65,536 bytes of ram. 65536/2953=22.19
Finally, I can download more RAM
RAM manufacturers hate this one weird trick
What sized QR code?
Billboard sized or business card?