Journal: News & Comment

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Writing symbols

Not that it needs any more coverage, but I find the idea of warchalking fascinating.

In the Great Depression, hobos who roamed transiently across North America invented pictographic graffiti languages which were cryptic to the police but well understood in their community. They indicated good places to sleep and eat, warnings about police and guard dogs, and so on.

Warchalking takes that idea public and high-tech. Wireless Ethernet networks are becoming more common, and many people make their nodes publicly available as a service to those in the area -- and many cafes, hotels, and airports are beginning to do the same for their customers and even passersby. Warchalking (a word derived, ultimately, from wardialing, a method of brute-force dialing of phone numbers to find accessible computer systems) uses its own symbols to indicate, in chalk-mark pictographs, where public wireless access is available -- whether the provider knows it or not.

Unrelated to that, if you're tired of writing or sticking labels on CD-Rs you create, Yamaha's latest CD-R writer (model CRW-F1) can etch readable art into the data surface of CDs -- as long as you don't mind not being able to use the etched section for data or music. This Japanese page has better photos.

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