 |
| Me in 3D |
Friend on mine emailed me this morning to let me know that someone has apparently hacked my Facebook account and is using my name in vain. I don't really care, I haven't used Facebook in years, but I suppose I ought to secure my account. I mean, taking my name in vain! How dare they! Where the heck did I stash my lightning bolts?
Ezekiel 25:17 - Pulp Fiction (3/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD
Movieclips
So I try to logon on to Facebook and I fail because I have no idea what my password is, so we go through the usual forgot-your-password routine where they send a secret code to my email. That only gets us through the first barrier, now Facebook wants to confirm my identity, so they put up the names and photos of five friends who I am supposed to call and ask them for secret codes. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen, even if I knew these five people, which I don't. I sort of recognized one of the names, but the rest of them are complete strangers.
There is another method, you can upload a photo ID like a copy of your driver's license or passport, which sounds worse than handing over your Social Security number, but Facebook is a good corporate citizen, they wouldn't use my driver's license for any nefarious purposes, would they? It happens I already have a scanned copy of my driver's license so I upload it but it's not good enough. They want an image that is at least 1500 pixels wide. I could take a photo with my phone, but I still haven't figured out how to take close ups of small objects that are well focused. (I get them sometimes, but it's mostly a matter of luck and a lot of messing about.) I also have a scanner that claims to have a high resolution mode that will scan at 600 dots per inch. Let's try that.
Load my driver's license into the scanner and point and click and I have a high res image on the screen. The scanning software won't crop anything that small so I use Pix to cut it down to size. I was a little worried that the image would not be large enough for facebook, I mean the driver's license is only a couple of inches wide. Times that by 600 and you are only up to 1200 pixels. I check the dimensions and it's fine.
Now I upload it and Facebook ignores it. It's like it doesn't even see it. Might be the wrong format, though that seems unlikely being as everyone and their mother seems to be able to handle most any kind of image format you have. Whatever, I'll try again later, if I remember.
Poking around I come across their requirements for the photo and I realize that the smaller image probably would have worked if it just a big fat border around it. Curse my compulsive image cropping.
While we are on the subject of ID's, Home Depot has some new tech. I returned a bunch of doo-dads and gee-gaws the other day and while most of it went back on my credit card (which they remembered, which was nice because the receipts had long since dried up and blown away), some of the refund went on the store-credit card, which is fine because a week doesn't go by that I'm spending a zillion dollars for materials for the next phase of my new house remodeling project. The clerk wants to see my driver's license for the store-credit, doesn't need it for the stuff that is going back on the credit card, but for store-credit she does. Now when I want to buy something using store-credit, I use the scanner to scan the store-credit card, but then I also have to scan the barcode on the back of my driver's license.
|
| Barcodes on back of Oregon driver's license |
No, not that one, not the one that looks like a normal barcode, scan the one that looks like a scrambled mess of black and white dots. That's the one they want. After some digging I turned up this video that goes into all the gory details.
How to Decode PDF417 Barcodes | Dynamsoft Tutorials
Dynamsoft
1 comment:
Wow. I see...
Post a Comment