François Marier has a cute trick to make using long and secure passwords on your WiFi router a little less painful. Setting a, say, 64 random character password isn’t too much trouble if you’re the only one using the router and you have a single device. But as soon as you have multiple devices or multiple people—guests, say—needing to use the router it becomes a nuisance. Marier’s idea is to store the password as a QR code so that it can be scanned by devices needing access.
That will work better than you think it might because both iOS and Android devices will recognize that you’re scanning a WiFi password—that information is part of what’s encoded in the QR image—and ask if you want to join the network. You don’t need a special app for your phone or tablet, you just use the camera app as usual. That’s pretty neat.
Marier uses the qrencode library to generate the QR code. His link is to the Debian package but other Linux distributions have packages for it too. The above link has the source if you want to build it yourself but there are a lot of dependencies. If you’re on a Mac you can get the binary from Homebrew.
The iPhone has a nice way of sharing WiFi passwords with other iOS devices but Marier’s method works outside Apple’s ecosystem so you may find it more useful.
UPDATE : There’s also a nice Emacs interface to qrencode if you want to expand on the idea.