Very interesting to see another person also landing on using 4 base32 characters for labeling things - it really is enough for a human.

Personally I use it for labeling physical things - mainly boxes. With a corresponding note in my Obsidian vault it really helps with getting content, context, and history about random stuff in my basement.

Python oneliner for generating them I've aliased in my Bash config: python3 -c "import base64; import secrets; print(''.join(secrets.choice(base64._b32alphabet.decode()) for _ in range(4)))"

▲

fastball 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The space has 1M IDs available, which sounds like enough until you take into account how the probability of collision works (birthday problem). With only 1200 notes (not many in my experience running a notes platform), your probability of collision is already about 50%.

	▲	medstrom 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Aye, so this is fine as long as there's just one entity generating IDs, so it can automatically check for collision and re-generate. In a distributed system it's another matter. I'm currently using 6 base-40 chars (upcase and lowcase letters, so e.g. "SXJwzQY") that represent an integer Unix time. The base-40 alphabet is enough that all IDs up until year ~2099 will fit in 6 chars, and it's nicer to type on the phone when you only have to switch between two keyboard modes, the upcase and lowcase but not also the numbers and symbols mode.

▲

mungoman2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Interested as I have a basement full of stuff in questionable order.

Could you explain a bit more? If a box in the basement box is marked with 4 emoticons, how does this help you understand content, context, history of it?

	▲	high_priest 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can imagine a QR generator for "obsidian://" links, which would open tagged locations, could be very useful, to identify contents of boxes without opening them. If the codes are written by hand, then typing them into UI and manually searching for them could be tedious. --- Emojis/Random Images on boxes, could be used to quickly, visually find the right box in a sea of identical gray boxes.