okay how have i never heard of nor seen this until now?
Cauzin Softstrip: a barcode format of encoded data that you could scan into your Mac and decode into a working piece of software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauzin_Softstrip
this sure looks like a job for a thunderscan to badly munge
@vga256 sounds brilliant compared to manually typing in listings from magazines or books, ugh. I hate plenty about the current day world, but that is one thing I do not miss.
@vga256 Wow. I'd never heard of this either.
Sounds like a genuinely cool idea that was hampered by technological imprecision and high prices.
Oct 11, 2026, 5:12 PM@vga256 Thunderscan, you say? If you can get a decent scan of the page, I could print it here and see what the Thunderscan makes of it! Depending on if the decoding software is out there somewhere too.
Oct 11, 2026, 5:13 PM
Oct 11, 2026, 6:50 PM@billgoats @vga256 It’s my little iOS app, PaperVault: https://papervault.eu/
It allows storing text-based information on paper, fully encrypted. I wrote it to store private keys (ssh, wireguard, etc) so I could access my backups if I had a total loss. It uses QR Codes, and documents can be arbitrarily long (multiple pages with multiple codes per page).
@billgoats what a vile idea.
let’s do it
Oct 11, 2026, 5:16 PM@vga256 Yessss!
Oct 11, 2026, 5:48 PM@vga256 Nice. I remember other methods. #DigitalPreservation
Oct 11, 2026, 10:46 PM
Oct 12, 2026, 12:31 AM@vga256 Having recently re-read Snow Crash, this feels vaguely threatening. 🤣