title: How to shorten a UUID?
body: <p>In a project I have to deal with UUIDs in v4 format, such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>931d4657-2e07-477f-be0c-5dd02906a516
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Basically, everything is fine with them, they are just pretty to long to type them manually. Hence I am thinking about ways to shorten them – but without losing the ability to get back to the original UUID. So just taking the first <code>n</code> bytes into account is not an option ;-)</p>
  
  <p>My first idea was to represent it as unicode characters, instead of hex codes, but this leads to non-printable (and non-typable) characters. So that's not an option as well.</p>
  
  <p>Then I though about Base64 (Base58, …) encodings, but they do not really make things noticeable shorter (I don't have a specific target length, I just want it to be a relevant amount of characters less, and saving 2 characters is not what I mean ;-)).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a clever trick to do this, while keeping the option to get back to the UUID? Does anyone have an idea?</p>