Previously on le craic….

Back in April I mentioned an application you can put on your mobile phone that reads special barcodes. Apparantly they are all the rage in Japan.

People are putting them on headstones, t-shirts and in Italy a newspaper is using them too.

Don’t know if it will catch on here, but I think it could be put to good use but only if a barcode reader is installed on phones here as standard.

Looks like you might be a new visitor to le craic. If you like what you see here and fancy some daily diversions delivered to your favourite feed reader, why not click to join Club le craic. Go raibh maith agat! Thanks a thousand!

Well, not quite - but you can be part of a world record attempt while sitting in your underpants and there aren’t many records you could break doing that. Unless you want to go for the world record attempt for longest time sitting in a bath of baked beans or something but that could get rather uncomfortable.

2,218 Irish so far… 700,000 worldwide. It’s the Firefox 3 download day - geeky but good.

Pledge to download it here.

You might already have read the post on Damien Mulley’s blog about the monthly blog award he has set up. It’s a good idea, so I’ve decided to add a widgety thing to the sidebar of this blog to promote the idea of the award. It was created using sproutbuilder and the code can be copied and used on your own blog if you so wish so that readers to your blog know there is an award out there - as not everyone is going to be aware of this.

I’ve also embedded the widget into this post as well. Just click on the share link on the widget and copy the code and you’re done!

It may have escaped your attention, but the games world has been buzzing since the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV 2 weeks ago. I’m staggered at how much money it has raked in – $500 million in the first week. There was a time when I’d have been out there on the day of release of a new game and heading back home as quick as I could to play it. Now, I just look on with a certain amount of fascination at the hype surrounding it.

Something similar happened when Halo was launched back in October. No MacGyver this time around, but still lots of hype all the same – maybe the game itself justifies it all. I’m half tempted to buy an Xbox to give it a go myself!

If you have even a vague interest in GTA IV, have a look at this Flickr set which has a side by side comparison of locations in the game and the same place in New York.

Prediction : expect to see these weird looking symbols in magazines and websites soon. They are “barcodes” which are readable by your mobile phone once you install a really cool application called Kaywa QR-Code on your phone.

The “barcode” above is the url of www.lecraic.com. In order for me to read the barcode, all I have to do is fire up the Kaywa application on my mobile, take a snap of the barcode and the content (in this case a url) is delivered to my phone.

Content providers can deliver wallpapers or ringtones this way as well as text, urls, phone numbers etc.

Check it out and download the app to your phone and give it a whirl. It will be interesting to see what uses will be made of this technology in mobile phone obsessed Ireland!