[carfacts]

This format was discussed in a HN first page post just this week:

> This alphabet, 0123456789ABCDEFGHJKMNPQRSTVWXYZ, is Douglas Crockford's Base32, chosen for human readability and being able to call it out over a phone if required.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794186

[davidjytang]

People in my industry in my country has specifically avoid using B and D together as they sound too similar over the phone.

Also 2 and Z can be similar in writing.

However it is nice to not see 0 and O, 1,I,l in the same string.

[FabHK]

F and S sound similar over the phone, at least on POTS landlines, as they don't carry the higher frequencies (> 4 kHz) that distinguish the S from the F. Note that cat names tend to have S sounds.

POTS = Plain old telephony service is restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz [from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service ]

[jandrese]

Anybody who has to relay things like API or CD keys over a POTS line on a regular basis quickly learns the NATO phonetic alphabet.

[et-al]

If you're worried about clarity over the phone, you should look into the NATO phonetic alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

[cperciva]

I prefer to use Aeon, Bdellium, Czar, Djinn, Eye, etc.

[slavik81]

The bomb defusal scene in Archer was an absolute classic for this. https://youtu.be/_4jxLxZrMfs

[oldsecondhand]

> Djinn

Fun fact: dzs counts as a single letter in Hungarian (e.g. in alphabetical ordering).

[davidjytang]

Quite a challenge for non-English crowd.

[layer8]

You still have to know that 0 is 0 and not O, and that 1 is 1 and not I or l.

[tapas73]

but if mistake is made, and you wrote down L instead of 1, and sent me in a e-mail. I, knowing that it is crockford 32, would easily deduce what mistake was made.

[layer8]

Right, I didn't realize the decoder is specified to be lenient in that way, so the confounded characters are actually equivalent in the encoding.

[mhoad]

Yeah when he lays out the arguments for it in the book you can clearly see why it makes a huge amount of sense. The usability, the performance, the value of a checksum etc…

[Zamicol]

Looking for that quote I can't find it on that page.