Just popping in to say thank you to
stdP and others for the techxplanations. I am not this kind of nerd but I love being nerd adjacent with folk who use the terminology humanely and correctly. It helps me a lot to be a fly on your wall.
Thank you kindly, and you're very welcome - that's pretty much the nicest thing anyone could say about my ramblings, I just hope I managed to do it justice in retrospect. Like many professions, there's a lot of jargon-ridden/obscured snobbery in IT but most of the core concepts aren't hard to understand.
This is an interesting workaround
I came here to post the exact same article; I was wowing over it when I read it at lunchtime - one of the most brilliantly simple and elegant and timely hacks I've seen in recent times. I'm a fairly experienced techie, but until today I didn't know that a hand-held USB barcode scanner basically presents itself as a simple HID - or "a keyboard" to most folk (never having used one, I assumed it was
much more complicated... but thinking about it, it's only as complicated as it needs to be). The article details an IT guy who
did know that simple fact; he turned those aforementioned troublesome admin and recovery passwords in to barcodes on his laptop, plugged a barcode scanner in to the laptop that needed recovery, and pointed it at the barcodes generated from the recovery passwords on his screen to "type" in the commands, so you can "type" in half the data you need with nowt more than a cheap barcode scanner.
In the words of Syndrome, I'm still geekin' out about it. I feel stupid not having thought of this (especially since I already have my laptop lock screen generate QR codes that decode to random phrases from my "stupid shit I'd like to say to nosey parkers looking at my lock screen but am too scared to say in real life" file). I was in the exact same position myself a few months back (when it turns out the other half had typed in their LUKS password incorrectly when it was set and I was forced to type in my ludicrously convoluted "master" password in order to open the drive) and I could well have done with this a solution like this then. But like most brilliant ideas it relied on applying some perhaps obscure experiential knowledge from one area with knowing hot to apply it to something largely unrelated and... well, that's about it really. Hats off to the guy, and I'll happily admit to being jealous as I don't think I could have come up with anything as clever if I'd been in his situation.
I imagine a
lot of people like me are also adding a barcode scanner in to their toy budgets as a result of this. If it wasn't so honestly presented I'd have sworn this was a brilliant marketing campaign for some barcode scanner company.
that's serious level confusion poor mite 
