At #GPN20 @ln got a SIP call from Chaos Post while we were doing some grocery shopping. I'm paraphrasing here a bit
- Hi Elen, XY from #ChaosPost is speaking. Where are you?
Elen, confused: ...
- Shopping groceries at (location)
- Which station?
- (station name)
- Alright, stay there, your post will be delivered in 10 minutes.
on closer inspection of the postcard's contents, were description of Unicode characters:
\N{BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-123467}\N{BRAILLE PATTER
N DOTS-123456} and so on
as I was taking these photos in the Gulaschgarten, and was contemplating how am I going to OCR this, I caught the attention of two fellow nerds. one of them wanted to try the OCR function of their iPhone, and while I was talking with other people, they finished copy-pasting the whole thing together (from 5-6 photos, I think) and sent me the results in email.
on the train ride back home from #GPN20 I read a bit on the Braille codepoints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_Patterns#Identifying,_naming_and_ordering and before Augsburg I decoded the message. Attaching it as an image not to mess with screen readers.
Here is my Jupyter notebook, the source text and the decoded text if you're curious:
https://gist.github.com/zoe1337/65b73de290e93b7d26de216ff46f4908
also I realized that on the train back home was the first time I started my computer during the entire #GPN20
@uint8_t It feels like a large part of Chaos Posts motivation stems from creating moments like these :)
@uint8_t i have so much respect for the content and delivery method of this postcard, wow
@uint8_t These stories are what chaos events are about. You're putting a huge smile on my face.
@uint8_t I kind of feel like that I really should update the code I wrote for @ChaosPost that is driving the thermal printer responsible for it. In the past it was mostly some emoji so we could (often) get away with `s.encode("latin-1", errors='namereplace')`... We also had messages that long which were some block characters resulting in a QR code.
@uint8_t The message originally looked like this in our backend so the three meter postcard is "just" a printing artifact.
@trilader oh I might have inverted the dots when decoding, haha
@uint8_t mood, and I even carried two computers
@satanskrapfen
♥ people >> computers 🖥
and they call us nerds haha
@satanskrapfen you had LF OS running though ^^
@uint8_t I still haven't started mine. Tried it once in the train to the GPN but Bahn WLAN foiled my plans
@uint8_t Beautiful.
just as foretold, within 10 minutes a barefoot nerd emerged from the tram, ran to us, and quickly handed over a 3 meter long postcard, as shown here
(photo taken shortly after delivery)