@raymaccarthy many of the redirect services also offer useful usage stats - I used to use bit.ly for this reason. To know which QR/urls were getting hits so we could work out which media/formats/locations were effective for QRs. (I used to be involved in organising things like CAMRA beer festivals, and similar sorts of events and we put QRs in advertisments, on beer mats, and on posters.)

But then there are possibly some privacy concerns - i.e. as a person/business I am sharing some level of metadata with bit.ly if I use their shortened URLs (as well as the URL they get things like client IPs and user agent strings for example.)

So I bought my own short domain so I could fully internalise that analysis and still have nice short URLs for marketing/advertising purposes.

In reality I expect most people who'd not hesitate to scan a QR probably don't care about any of these details. (Though I think greater public awareness of the risks would be a good thing.)

@sundogplanets

@raymaccarthy I think "evil" is a bit strong... they're effectively just a HTTP redirect. But I totally get the issues with the effective obfuscation of the target URL and am aware that has been used for nefarious purposes. There is no good reason to be using them on things like forums where there are no character limits - that's suspicious behavior! Blocking them on such sites makes sense.

Their origin is certainly in sending URLs in short text formats - be that early Twitter or SMS/text messages. Still useful for the latter.

For QR codes a shorter URL means a simpler QR code. A simpler QR code is both more robust and better to scan from distance (depending on print/display size of course, but especially for if they're going to be on slides at a talk.)

These days I'd expect most good QR apps should automatically preview the redirect target URL. On desktop I use wget -S to check the targets of any suspect short URLs.

@sundogplanets

@sundogplanets a lot of them include a url shortener which makes for simpler QR codes that scan more easily... I always used bit.ly in the past, it was fine, and gave some useful stats. But it has been a long while and I got my own shortish domain so just started using local software instead. If you just want straight up QR code generation then QR Code Monkey works fine too IIRC.

@a32 the place has very badly installed "instantaneous" electric water circulated central heating.

We rent so have to make do with minimum of intervention.

Budget, if we do anything at all, is in the region of a couple of hundred quid.

Anyone here using one of those little diesel heaters to warm rooms in a house? Like: https://www.amazon.co.uk/HCALORY-Adapter-Control-Controller-Portable/dp/B0D97HHV75

I guess adequate (safe!) exhaust arrangements are the key difficulty.

Even without using the electric central heating our electricity bill really spikes in the winter from the sporadic small electric fan heater use, and I'm a bit tired of living so cold and damp.

Not sure if burning diesel to save on electricity fits for the #SolarPunk hashtag or maybe something else, like #EnergyPoverty. Our UK normal waking hours electricity costs something like 33p/kwh (0.38€, 0.44$US, 0.67$AU) — I'm surprised there isn't more uproar about it really. (I also have the solar panels I git cheap and hopes for a small solar project for our "office" power, but that needs a fair bit of spend on battery and charge/iverter stuff.)