If you have an integrated webcam there's a nifty package called 'zbar-tools' in debian repos that has a utilty named 'zbarcam' that identifies barcodes from your webcam and outputs them to standard output. Too little too late, I know, but nifty to have in the future.
I can thank Rangarok Online and Lineage 2 for teaching me Unix administration and scripting at a young age. While the eAthena project has rested, there is a fork rAthena that is still surprisingly running. The truth though is that Aegis (the official software) was stolen by an RDP hack on Gravity's servers back in the day. That was a boon to the jAthena and later eAthena projects.
Data is expensive in QR land or your resulting QR code becomes larger in size, requiring more physical space to display. URL encoding has a lot of overhead. Also '\' escaping has preceded the existence of URLs. I'm not sure who is doing the reinventing here.
In countries that do not use English as the main language, it is fairly common to have non-English SSIDs. URL encoding is incredibly inefficient when encoding those characters.
QR code is not particularly dense (like compared to something like a hard drive) - why waste space that could not be put towards more redundancy (error correction)?
Can you encode a BSSID (MAC-based) or just the ESSID (assigned name)? The formatting isn't very pleasant I imagine for putting a MAC in with all those backslashes..
Well, firstly you have to have a password of >=8 chars for WPA. Secondly, having such a short non-complex password is going to easily be crackable with a deauth and 3-way handshake capture attack. Would easily crack on a 5 year old laptop in minutes even w/o GPU.
wow, these hackers sure are clever & patient: they're hanging around outside your house, just waiting for you to have a guest, so they can use your limited-BW guest network where you can log everything they do.
OK, go ahead and set up a QR code. Who said you can't?