Fine Print

I've bought myself a Brother P-touch D400.
I was getting a little tired of trying to work out which power supply went with which unit by following the cables. I had previously just written on the PSU with a silver Sharpie, which is fine when you can get in close enough, but I have to use reading glasses and sometimes digging those out for 3 seconds use is a pain. The Brother label printer at large font settings is much easier to read, and I don't need my glasses.
Me being me I couldn't justify the short term use of the machine even if it wasn't that expensive. I was very happy when I found out that I could print barcodes like the one above. Barcodes can be read by any phone with an appropriate app. If you have such an app try it on the picture. Because Code39 and a few others accept ASCII characters I thought, why not use it as a code transport device. I'll be extending a script I'm publishing at the moment to write encrypted text to both bar and QR codes. All quite easily done in the Linux CLI.
I have also resurrected my bluetooth thermal scanner for QR codes. I'll try and get that connected to my laptop, it might work. It currently works very well with my phone but I'd like to use it away from that particular device.
I have 2 weeks holiday coming up. I imagine a large portion of that will be spent in the terminal, and I'm not talking airports.