alt Hacker NewsSo interesting and clever.
Hexadecimal can be done with 4 bars, representing 4 bits, on the top right = one hexadecimal digit.
For four quadrants, we get 4 x 4 bits = 16 bits = 2 byte digit.
0-65,535 in one digit. A digit reduction by a factor of 4.
Just a byte could be represented by a half-height vertical line, with only left and right "quadrants". A lower case number!
And a 4 byte = 32 bit number could be represented with one digit, with vertical and horizontal main bars. I.e. 8 quadrants. One "digit", 0-4,294,967,295.
Replies
carlob • yesterday at 1:03 PM
add some error correcting codes and you have invented some sort of qr code
You could also present 4 hexadecimal digits in a rectangle to represent values from 0000-FFFF. Currently used to display unicode characters for which your font has no glyph (the kind of tofu known as hexagana - on the wikipedia page on .notdef firefox on windows displays one with a 6-digit hex number )