Having come up with a viable (meltybeads!) tiling scheme, it’s time to officially launch! If anyone wants to deploy a mediated toynbee tile in their neighborhood, fantastic. If you’d let me know, with a picture and a location, even better. My tile dropping will have to wait on warmer weather but you can expect daffodils and QRCodes to bloom simultaneously up here.
OK, now I’m really dangerous! Twelve thousand melty beads in the mail today; 6k white, 6k black. I need to figure out a bombproof container – picking them out of the rug (or worse yet, having the dogs pick them out) is not my idea of fun.
The abridged version of what the project is all about: QR code tiles that lead you to a page with random pictures of Toynbee tiles. For a more complete explanation, click here (or on About above or in the right margin). I’m hoping that someone may decide to install a mediated toynbee QR code tile in their neck of the woods…
As you can see from the post below, I’ve been experimenting with Perler (aka melty) beads. The starter kit I bought didn’t have enough black and white beads to finish the QRCode and I didn’t want to buy any bulk bags until I’d proven the concept so everything waited until today, when I swung by the local craft store and bought a mixed refill bag. Voila!
*
A big thank you to Eric fritterfae Riley – steps 3 and 4 of his cross stitch Instructable really simplified bead layout. And the test run:
*
I don’t think my cell phone camera/scanner SW copes well with low-light conditions – it wouldn’t scan in late afternoon ambient light and I had trouble scanning a QRCode in a movie theater lobby (dim) recently. At least, I hope that’s why scanning was temperamental; more testing wll be done tomorrow.
And the explanation for the post title (for those of you who haven’t seen other references to it on the blog) is here.
Doing a little practicing with melty beads – my iron-fu is not strong. Regardless, I managed to create a condensed Toynbee tile knock-off; now, on what should it be epoxied?
To save you the trouble of scanning off your screen (it worked for me), the code resolves here. With the goog doing QRCodes, can general American acceptance be far behind? (Probably yes.)
A little self-referential, what with scanning the QR Code from the blog rather than from a tile on the street – so shoot me. In any case, here’s the sequence – 1) scan QR Code, 2) go to scanned URL, 3) see a Toynbee tile.
It all started with John Young. Back in April (of 2009 – who knows how long this will last) I saw some photos on his Flickrstream and a blog entry that made me grin and then started me thinking. “Hmm, what about a literal QR Code Toynbee tile? A symbol that encodes a URL – [...]more →
