Registered: Feb 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 165

I was at the mall today and it occurred to me to swing by Radio Shack on the off chance they had any left (Radio Shack is giving away these barcode scanner "cats" (Cat/mouse, get it?) They did, and I finished installing it about half an hour ago. I'm not really interested in using it for its intended application, but a free barcode scanner is a free barcode scanner.

The idea behind the thing is that people, for some reason, are too lazy to type in URLs, and that they've been wringing their hands with frustation over this terrible problem for years. (Sounds a little bit like "Internet Keywords", which are another big load of crap if you ask me) Enter the :Cue Cat - you're at your computer, reading a magazine for some reason, and you see and Ad for Nike shoes. Do you open a browser and type "www.nike.com"? Noooo, you pick up the "Cat" (AKA bar code scanner) and swipe a bar code in the corner of the page, which takes you to... uh, http://www.nike.com. (and sends DigitalConvergence all of the barcodes you've been scanning to boot, so they know what to spam you with.) You can also scan regular old UPC and ISBN bar codes, the idea being that you'll be taken to a web page with product/purchasing information for that product without having to search for it.

Ok, so even if you buy into this stupid program, here's the problem - 90% of the books and CD's I had lying around my desk just brought up pages on DigitalConvergence's site saying "Wow! You found an item we haven't entered yet! could you please tell us what it is and give us a url for it?" The only thing that worked was scanning a bottle of Coke, which took me to (duh) http://www.cocacola.com.

Whatever. There are already Linux drivers for the thing floating around, and hopefully somebody will hack something together for us Microsoft and Apple flunkies someday that will just scan stuff and write it to a text file or some such. Better yet, a Springboard that will do the same thing, so I can go to Barnes & Noble & scan the ISBN codes of all the books that I want, then add them to my Amazon wish list when I get home. Someday, when I learn how to fabricate electronics and program in C, maybe I'll do that

-Andy

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Registered: May 2000
Location:
Posts: 321

I want one... just gotta get to the Shack.

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Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 50

wired magazine sent one out to all of their subscribers. i still haven't got around to installing it yet, though. maybe one of these days...

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

I'm not TO sure I like, their tracking policys. Check out this Slashdot discussions for more about this. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/08/22/2140248.shtml

It is FREE though, so maybe it's worth a try.

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Connecticut USA
Posts: 2682

You can get more details about the :CueCat and even order one online.

quote:

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Originally posted by Usonian
There are already Linux drivers for the thing floating around, and hopefully somebody will hack something together for us Microsoft and Apple flunkies someday that will just scan stuff and write it to a text file or some such.

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God bless America, my home sweet home...

Registered: Nov 2000
Location:
Posts: 1

Windows Driver

the folks over at Azalea Software ( http://www.azalea.com/QTools/ ) have a pointer to a nifty utility called Catnip, which monitors the keyboard data stream looking for the kitties unique header. Once it sees it, it grabs the data from the scanner & massages it, converting it to ASCII, and optionally removing the serial number and/or bar code type from the data stream.

This would allow you to use the kittie as a
<<< real...bar...code...scanner >>>

Just imagine the possibilities...

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
Posts: 790

There is another thread here.

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Jeff