scott wrote:
>> It's great fun. EAN-13 is apparently an "extension" of UPC-A,
> 
> Those are used in supermarkets mainly, which is why you find them on all 
> products sold to the public.

Yeah, apparently UPC-A is for America, EAN-13 is supposedly for 
everywhere, but almost all scanners support both. They can only encode 
numbers though - usually standardised product codes.

> For non-public uses (eg on shipping cartons, internal parts of products 
> etc) the company is obviously free to make up or use their own standard 
> for the bar code.

Yeah, the shipping box I've got has several extremely wide barcodes. 
These codes encode letters as well, but I can't determine exactly which 
system they are. (Assuming they're even a standard one...)

> You didn't find any 2D barcodes?

None.

However... The Royal Mail allow you to print your own stamps, for a fee. 
You give them money, they give you a PDF file containing a 2D barcode 
[which presumably encodes the date of purchase, since it apparently 
expires after so many days].

Now I'm thinking... it appears to be a standard Data Matrix barcode, so 
if I could figure out WTF the data encoded in it is, I could print as 
many of them as I like, without a fee...

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