Daily Dose of English 64
QR Codes
Daily Dose of English 64
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're talking about QR codes. A bit of an, A weird topic today, very different than I think the other ones, because this is pretty specific. A QR code is a very specific thing. QR codes are those little square codes, things that you scan with your phone, and they go to a website, a link. They're really just a link that is readable by a phone camera. And we've seen them all over the place nowadays. They're on announcements, on advertisements, they're used for going to the menus of restaurants. There's a ton of different uses for them and you'll see them everywhere in the world if you look because they are really quite useful. QR codes have gotten a lot more popular now that pretty much everybody has a phone which can use them very easily because it's a lot harder to type in a website, right? If you have to go to www.benslanguagelab.com slash daily-english-65 to get to this episode's transcripts, you could do that, but that's a lot more difficult than just opening your phone, going to the camera and scanning something and it just takes you right there without you ever having to think or worry if you misspelled English or if you used an underscore instead of a dash or something like that. So that's generally what a QR code is. It's that simple black and white kind of boxy pattern that we use very often. Nobody actually knows what it stands for, QR. Well, okay, people do, but the regular person doesn't know what it stands for. We just say QR. I actually had to look up what it meant, and it means quick response code. The QR stands for quick response, because the idea is that it's very easy and quick for a computer to read, right? The white and black text makes it really, really easy, and there's these markers in the corner, so there's sort of four big sections or three big sections on the code, which makes it easier for the computer to go, okay, here's point A, B, C, done, and now I can read the code, easy. And so this makes it a lot faster for your phone to read a code. In fact, if you have your phone right now, and you can probably find a code on the internet or somewhere, and it reads it and it finds it very quickly. So I can point my phone at a QR code right now, and it takes less than a second to identify the code, to read the code, and say, all right, you wanna open this website? Which is pretty impressive, honestly. It's so fast, and that's why they're really useful. And so that's where the QR part comes from, is from quick response. And so I wanna talk a little bit about QR codes and how I, I guess, think about them and how I use them because they're kind of cool. In 2024, so as I'm recording this, they've become a lot more, they've become pretty common. Pretty much everybody can recognize them and understands what to do. They're pretty easy for using your phone just to scan something and go to a website and They're all over the place, right? Like I said, you can find them, especially in businesses. They're like to connect to their social media, or to go to their website, or to see their menu, or to whatever, because they can take you to any website, so anything that has a URL, which is what you search in your browser. In your web browser, you search the URL to go to a website, and the QR code functions just like that, and so they're very, very handy in that sort of thing. There's also lots in stores for more information about something. They're painted on the sides of buildings. There's so many different ones that are used all over the place. What I'm most familiar with, what I've seen most, is the ones that are used in restaurants. I feel like I see QR codes all the time in restaurants because, especially during COVID, they got a lot more popular because people didn't want to have gross restaurant menus, rather. Menus are the thing that you look at to order what you're going to order. You don't have to know what you want to order for food at a restaurant until a menu has all the lists of the things you can choose from. And so a digital menu, so a menu that's only online, is very handy if for some reason you don't want to have physical menus. And so scanning a QR code becomes really, really easy and popular. They also can be pretty annoying, right? If you go to a restaurant and you don't have cell phone service or there's no free Wi-Fi or something's happening, or if the restaurant messes up, it can be a pretty big annoyance, a big problem, which is annoying. I guess a pretty, only really a problem if it's like, if you're somewhere, it's not really a problem is what I'm trying to say. We often call those first world problems in English. A first world problem is something that as a human, it's really not a problem. If you can't see a menu and your phone's not working, that's not really a problem in terms of survival. But it's annoying. And so it's still a problem. It's just a problem that you only have if you have all of your other needs met. You have a home, and you have water, and you have food, and all these things. Then you can start to complain about whatever else. And so that's why we might say a first world problem. Something that really arguably isn't actually a problem for human survival, but you're annoyed by it. So for example, your phone not working is a first world problem. And so I do still prefer to have some sort of physical menu if I can, just because it's faster and easier. But I do admit that QR codes are probably the next best option, as long as they work. Because I've definitely seen a lot of restaurants that just have broken codes that just don't go to the right place. Which reminds me of another use of QR codes, which is to put on things like business cards. I have some business cards that say like my position and have the company information on it. And on the back, there's a little QR code that you can scan and go to the website of the company. I can speak English. And so that's really useful. They're great to put on things that are gonna be printed out and given out to people, that sort of thing. And so they're really handy for that. However, because it is text, essentially, you can't update a QR code once it's already printed out. And so a good trick that you can do if you wanna make your own QR codes for whatever reason, is to use what's called a short link. A short link is a URL, so a link that you might send to somebody to click on to go to a website, which you can actually change where it goes. So for example, we use short links all the time at Refold, the company that I work for. And so we have every short link starts with refold.link slash, and then we put something there. So if you go to refold.link slash Spanish, for example, it'll show you a ton of Spanish resources for learning Spanish. And that's called a short link because we actually can go into the back end of the code and say, hey, whenever somebody types in refold.link slash Spanish, actually go to this website. And then we can change that in the future. So it's really, really handy. I'll probably set up short links at some point for my website. I don't have them yet. But they can be really useful if you want to change something in the future, but not necessarily change what it is for other people. Because it can be annoying to be like, oh, actually, you have to go to this website now. It's different. Instead, it would just change and nobody would notice. And so that's what's useful for short links. And I wish that websites or restaurants would do that in order to always have their menu up to date and work functionally. So, small annoyance. The last thing I'll say on QR codes is that they're kind of fun to use as just a regular person. You can make them for free. Just look up like QR code generator on the internet and you can print them out and you can put them places. For example, you can make a QR code for your internet at your home. You can print out a QR code that actually allows somebody's phone to connect to your Wi-Fi network and you can put that in your kitchen or somewhere where it's really handy to just scan the code and it logs them into your Wi-Fi. Or you can do the same for sending them to a form or a spreadsheet or your blog, right? There's so many different ways that you can use URLs as a regular person. You can even do them as like shortcuts to go to a website that you want to go to that you often use. For example, maybe you have some sort of, I don't know, tracking spreadsheet that you use very often every time you go to the grocery store. I don't know, I'm making something up. And so you put this QR code right next to your door so that every time you go to the grocery store, you scan it on your way out and then you just have it on your phone without having to type anything out. Stuff like that can be a small project that actually helps your life in some meaningful way. Although I will admit that typically it's not that useful. There's some pretty small niche uses. But if you, for example, ever give a class or a lecture or make a website, it can be really, really helpful. But anyways, OK, I think I'm going to leave it there for today about QR codes. I hope that you enjoyed this kind of weird episode and maybe learned a word or two here and there. And I'll see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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