Kris Howard @web_goddess@aus.social
Public

Google are breaking my mittens - Sonofa. Twelve years ago I knitted a pair of “self-replicating mittens” (web-goddess.org/archive/14046) with a QR code that pointed you to the pattern for the mittens, and I entered them in the Sydney Royal Easter Show. I was pretty proud of my cleverness. In the blog post (web-goddess.org/archive/11192) where I talked about making the mittens, I said:

I wanted my code to be as simple as possible, so I needed to use a URL shortener to mask my intended address. I settled on using Google‘s, reasoning that it was likely to be around the longest. (Though who knows these days, right?)

You can guess what’s happened, right? Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available (developers.googleblog.com/en/g) as of August this year.

Bastards are breaking my mittens. Perhaps I’ll have to add some embroidery. web-goddess.org/archive/56383

A knitted pair of mittens with a QR code. "404" is written over the image in red marker.
Kris Howard @web_goddess@aus.social
Public

A bit more context for those who don't knit or know much about QR codes: A knitting pattern consists of a lot of text (and in this case, also a chart) so it's not feasible to encode the pattern itself into a QR code small enough to fit on a mitten. Compare these two QR codes. One is 25x25, and one is 29x29. The bigger one points to the actual URL for the mitten pattern (web-goddess.org/mittens.php), while the smaller one is using the goo.gl shortener to redirect to that same URL. I had to switch to a much thinner wool to knit the QR code at a resolution that would fit on the mitten (and would actually scan), so I needed the shortest URL/smallest code that would fit. In retrospect, I shouldn't have trusted Google. Lesson learned!

A 25x25 QR code that encodes a goo.gl shortened URLA 29x29 QR code that encodes a url that points to my web-goddess.org domain
0
0
0

If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://aus.social/users/web_goddess/statuses/114171583072604646 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)