Ternary is a thing; however, there's a lot of times when you're hand-rolling a compression scheme. In those cases, it is common to consider all sorts of nonstandard bases. So, for instance, if you need to encode a pair of numbers, and that pair is in the (rectangular) range: `[0,2]*[0,4]`, then it can be efficiently encoded in a 4b value, using the generalized version of the technique outlined in the article. I know that a lot of GPU block textures rely pretty heavily on products-of-weird-bases, usually 3, 5, and 7. Here's some 'good' combinations (high utilization rates, easy to decode):

3^5 ~ 8b

5^3 ~ 7b

2 * 5 * 7^2 ~ 9b

2 * 3 * 5 ~ 5b

11 * 11 ~ 7b

3 * 5 * 7 ~ 7b

etc.