I remember it was around the same time that Obsidian got native callouts, so my notes for that project are all colourful & contain valuable admonitions like this:
```
> [!todo]
> That feeling when you're wasting hours of your life trying to make something you know is abandonware work just because it looks nice. There should be a word for that feeling. In Danish or Japanese. Or German.
```
How about: fröbelen
https://nl.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fr%C3%B6belen
Roughly means: To be creatively busy for fun
or a phrase, like "beating off a dead horse"
The phrase would be "flogging a dead horse".
If that’s too broad, try https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic
We made a cute Christmas video to include in our card this year. My wife created a QR code from a random website and included it in the card as a picture. It linked to our video. We sent all of the cards out. People loved it.
... except we got an email from the QR code company about a week before Christmas. We went over our "free" click (the QR code went through their URL shortener). If we wanted to keep the QR code active we had to pay $20/mo.
We got absolutely fleeced. Never again. Control the URL and make the QR image yourself.
My other favourite QR-code related fuckup is designers trimming the quet zone to just 1 module "because the white border looks ugly" and not checking if the codes are scannable. That and light-on-dark codes, which according to the standard don't exist, but most scanner apps can handle them these days thanks to endless complaining by designers.
My sister used some random free QR generator to open your email app with a “to/subject” filled out. There was no sign up and she didn’t know to check to QR code itself. Instead of being a normal QR code (QR codes support the email case directly, as part of the “spec”) it was a link to the QR company’s website that immediately bounced you to the the right url to open your email.
After a month or so they emailed her (using the email address she entered for the code) and told her to pay up or the code would stop working.
These people are scum. Make it clear it’s not a standalone QR Code (and there are potential upsides to this, to be fair, like updating where the qr code points) and don’t bait and switch.
A even if you can force nearest-neighbour interpolation (in CSS this is only possible since 2015 in Chromium and even later in Firefox), the result still won't be perfect at non-integer scales (see [0]). Other use-cases (like PDF files IIRC) don't give you the option to force scaling modes at all, so drawing them with vector paths is the only option to make them crisp.
I should note that qr.js never supported the correct Kanji encoding and optimal encoding based on dynamic programming, but otherwise it is functionally complete and I think it can't get much larger than that. There are lots of rooms to cut from there and I will say 5 KB is a fair estimate for the minified size after modest but correctly guided size optimization.
[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/qr.js (predates the modern JS, but surely more popular than LeanQR I believe)
Works great and it does svg too. There are a few alternatives to this around as well but this one seems good enough.
