Here’s an interesting example of where technology that tries to be helpful makes something really difficult when you step just a tiny bit outside the intended use case.

A colleague sent me a document with a QR code for an event—a link to eventbrite. There was no URL for the event, and I wanted to send the link to a group of students via email. Ok—let’s see if we can scan the QR code from the document somehow. No dice. There isn’t, as far as I can tell, any way to make my laptop QR scanner look at something on the screen rather than through the camera.

Ok, let’s look at it on my phone. Okay, taking a photo of my laptop screen on my phone detects the QR code, but it automatically forwards it to the eventbrite app, so I don’t have a URL. Tried searching for the name of the event on eventbrite, but it is a private, unlisted event so it didn’t show up in search.

Tried next to see if there was a website that converted QR to URL. Hard to find—most searches for “QR to URL” took me to sites that created QR codes from URLs, even with “QR to URL”, “URL from QR” etc. in quotation marks. Most of the “successful” links were not services to do it, but code fragments for coders wanting to build this functionality into a program. Found two sites that claimed to do this, took a screengrab of the URL, uploaded it to the sites, one didn’t recognise it, one just hung with “processing…” for several minutes.

Eventual solution. Downloaded a new QR reader app on my phone which, thankfully, didn’t automatically open the eventbrite app. Copied-and-pasted the URL into the Notes app, which synced with my laptop, then I was able to cut-and-paste into an email.