We had a need for identifiers that could be used by humans. The requirement to be able to say these over the phone complicated matters.
Most people approach this problem by using a phonetic alphabet. The trouble comes when you hear people saying stuff like "A as in ... uh, Apple?" (should be Alpha, of course) and "U as in ... um, what's a word that starts with U?" It gets worse. Ever been to a GPG keysigning? Listen to people attempt to read out the digits of their key fingerprints. "...C 3 E D 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 B D B D..." "Did you say C or D?" and "how many zeros was that?" Brutal.
So what we need is a symbol set where each digit is unambigious and doesn't collide with the phonetics of another symbol. This package provides Locator16, a set of 16 letters and numbers that, when spoken in English, have unique pronounciations.
Also included is code to work in base 62, which is simply ['0'-'9',
'A'-'Z', and 'a'-'z']. These are frequently used to express short codes
in URL redirectors; you may find them a more useful encoding for expressing
numbers than base 16 hexidecimal.