Stocard app worked for me. Simple and has an Apple Watch app to boot.
Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
41–50 of 181 posts
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#42Those cheap laser "1D" bar code scanners cannot read off a screen (except maybe eInk). It sucks because the supermarkets I frequent have their loyalty cards based off barcodes. Fortunately, barcode readers emulate keyboards so you can just type the code on a keyboard.
I made a cheap barcode display-er with a Bluetooth MCU and an E-ink display, that works for all 1D only barcode scanners.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#43I really love barcodes and barcode symbology for reasons I cannot fully explain. I even wore the npm module named ‘barcode’ which I desperately need to update.
Fun fact about codabar, it is among the only barcode symbologies that can be implemented completely as a plain font.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#44So wait: you don't want to pay Apple $99 and you don't want to pay for one of the apps that generates a pass for you, but you'll extract the cert from one of those apps thereby piggybacking on another developer's $99 payment to Apple. That's uncool. On a slightly related note: a site I login to regularly uses Semantic VIP Access for 2FA. You can convert these to standard TOTP codes so that you can load them into the…
I think if you are locked out from doing what you want on your phone that you bought through arbitrary software locks then you should have the right to bypass that. This isn’t costing the app developer anything, nor were they even using the app to generate the pass, so I don’t really see any issue here
It's taking advantage of another developer's $99 payment. I just took a look at one of these apps and the in-app purchase to remove ads is $1.99. I think if I did this I'd throw that developer the 2 bucks.
Sort of like when you bum a ride from someone, even though it's not costing them anything, it's good form to offer to split the cost of gasoline.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much it costs to maintain a system to collect fares compared the small portion of funding most transit systems would lose from going fare free.
Going fare free would induce demand which would increase operating costs, so it's not that simple.
The other thing about going fare-free-- which people don't like to discuss but it is a real effect which has been measured-- is that it causes much more anti-social behavior on the bus, which decreases ridership among people who have only a slight preference for transit versus just driving their car. This not only makes traffic worse (which kinda defeats the whole purpose), it also tanks political support for transit, since fewer voters are using it and then they see no point in supporting it.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going fare free would induce demand which would increase operating costs, so it's not that simple.
The other thing about going fare-free-- which people don't like to discuss but it is a real effect which has been measured-- is that it causes much more anti-social behavior on the bus, which decreases ridership among people who have only a slight preference for transit versus just driving their car. This not only makes traffic worse (which kinda defeats the whole purpose), it also tanks political support for transit…
Can you point to where you found this measurement? This is the first I've heard of it.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#47Oooh, now do Orca cards next. Seattle is one of the tech capitals of the United States, and on top of the metro system just being not great, it's also technically inferior to nearly every single other major city that I've used public transit. Pick any European city, CDMX, Denver. They're all light years ahead of Seattle. Denver might have been my favorite. Fun fact, one of the orgs that runs Orca actually wrote a blo…
https://info.myorca.com/news/can-i-use-my-phone-to-pay-for-a...
Tap to pay coming to orca in 2023, they’ve got ~2 months left for it to be true
I’m optimistic because google recently put out a post that google wallet will support ORCA soon (as shared by another commenter)
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#48So.. I just added my card to Stocard and used it a King County. Took 2 minutes, on my phone, synced across devices. Or yeah, you could do it that way I guess.
If you are using an app for it, King County Library app already has the barcode anyway…
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#49Oooh, now do Orca cards next. Seattle is one of the tech capitals of the United States, and on top of the metro system just being not great, it's also technically inferior to nearly every single other major city that I've used public transit. Pick any European city, CDMX, Denver. They're all light years ahead of Seattle. Denver might have been my favorite. Fun fact, one of the orgs that runs Orca actually wrote a blo…
Related: isn't there a way to "clone" an NFC card using (rooted) Android? I have been looking into how feasible it could be doing so on iOS since my office door opens via an NFC card, but iirc Apple has a tighter grip on the NFC hardware than with general PassKit, meaning that a regular app can't do that.
Kinda. NFC is a broad spectrum of protocols. For example the old blue Orca cards are MiFare DESFire cards which actually store the card’s value in the card’s internal chip- this type (while having some flaws) cannot easily be copied onto a phone.
A simple NFC tag with binary data is trivial to copy though.
Re: Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if you are locked out from doing what you want on your phone that you bought through arbitrary software locks then you should have the right to bypass that. This isn’t costing the app developer anything, nor were they even using the app to generate the pass, so I don’t really see any issue here
It's taking advantage of another developer's $99 payment. I just took a look at one of these apps and the in-app purchase to remove ads is $1.99. I think if I did this I'd throw that developer the 2 bucks. Sort of like when you bum a ride from someone, even though it's not costing them anything, it's good form to offer to split the cost of gasoline.
It would be nice to do that but I don’t think this is some horribly immoral thing either