Slashdot Mirror
CueCats vs. Common Sense Marketing
ColaMan writes "I see via boing boing that two million CueCats are up for sale at prices of $0.30 each in quantities above 500K. CueCats, being an integral part of one of the most pointless marketing schemes ever devised, never took off, but they were great for hacking. Has IT Marketing learned its history lesson, or will it forever doomed to repeat it?" Err, I'd go in for a group order, but I don't need two million at once.
I volunteer pretty much every year at a local computer tradeshow. I remember a few years back when we started asking for donated cue cats. we used them to track the volunteers.
Each volunteer had a nametag with a barcode on it.
Volunteering for a single shift got you into the show for free (definitely worthwhile) volunteering for additional shifts got you some cheep gifts as well - toll kits and t-shirts, that sort of stuff.
Anyways, the cue cats were pretty useful in reading the barcodes and making the whole thing work easier.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
Of course, It's 40 bucks plus a firewire camera. and not $0.3.
What rock have you been living under?
People have been hacking cue cats for like what? 3-4 YEARS? Slashdot alone has had at least half a dozen articles on the cuecat.
In case you want one, you can find them on e-bay for rather cheap these days ($3-6 buy it now).
It is too bad they won't sell in lots lower than 500k. This could have been a great money making scheme considering how many geeks are still hacking and using these things.
Check one out. You need a ps/2 port for it to work and when you get one off of e-bay look for one that has been hacked already, otherwise you are gonna have to declaw the cat. Google will show you the way.
Happy hacking!
zosxavius photography
A quick eBay search (hey, I figured they might make a good scanner to keep track of my CDs, so what the heck) found a strange assortment of results. The first being, that out of 42 results, all but one or two were not "modified to output text without software". What the heck did they do to the actual device to make it always output raw text? The second being the fact that one of the CueCats is a USB model. Did they actually make a few USB ones or is this yet another mod?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
He's complaining about slashdot linking to blogs (boingboing) which link to news stories (or, worse, to yet another blog, which then links to some sort of actual news).
The problem isn't Slashdot linking to news stories. It's slashdot having so many stories now that are just links to blogs with links to stories. Why not link directly to the story? And it's getting really lame seeing slashdot link to a story on boingboing that links to a story on engadget/gizmodo that links to a story that was originally reported on G4TV/TechTV a week or two earlier.
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and it's a ps2 ... haven't used it much. My email address got stolen when one of their databases got hacked into, and I've gotten terrible spam at it since. I've had that particular email address for about 7-8 years.
What I'd really like is to get my hands on a usb one, so I can uh... ignore it like I do this one. If it's sitting in a dusty bin somewhere, least I know the usb one is much better.
FLR
It wasn't just that people sometimes had trouble remembering URLs - it was only usable if you were reading the magazine next to your computer. So the only time you could use it was when you could just as well type in the URL yourself. Also, this was back when most computers were desktops, and laptops didn't have wireless on them, so you'd have to be reading your magazine at your desk, not on your couch or the train or wherever.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
True, these are no good for commercial and retail use. But for home use... not bad, considering the cost barrier drops nearly to zero.
I use the cuecat for a home inventory system that has saved me tons of time and space. It works really well for disorganized scatter-brained packrats. I'm using some scripting to add bells and whistles (like native cuecat decoding support, integrated webcam snapshots, mysql backend and a tcl/tk front-end) but all that is really required is a spreadsheet with three columns (barcode, description, location), a "spayed" cuecat (hw mod is cheap or free), and a bunch of pre-made 3of9 barcodes, which you can do for free on an inkjet printer and a barcode font.
The cuecat increases ease and accuracy of barcode entry (and reduces the chance of error) and you can find all your crap after you store it by searching the tables... for me, the biggest psychological barrier to putting things away is not being able to find them when I need them, followed closely by a strong disinclination to high-level storing and filing strategies that most people use. The barcode & hide method sticks to the Keep It Simple Stupid paradigm, and works much better for a person like me.
The point is that all you really need to make it functional is the declawed scanner and a spreadsheet with 3 columns (1 for the code, 1 for the location, and one for the item description). The fact that I'm using it as a springboard for a production-quality system highlights another use of the cuecat -- cheap prototyping. You don't need to splurge right away on a $300 scanner to start working on the software portion of a point-of-sale or warehousing system.
Is the technology for barcode readers much different from that wich most optical mice use for position tracking?
If not, why not create a custom mouse driver that can recognize a barcode when the mouse rolls over one?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Here's the complete tcl/tk function for the photography, which as you can see did not take long to write (please forgive the formatting):
.top.barcode delete 0 end .bottom.entries.code delete 0 end .bottom.entries.code insert 0 $barcode
/tmp/out.jpg /tmp/out.jpg ] .middle.canvas create image 0 0 -image $picture -anchor nw
.top.barcode
proc check_barcode { code } {
set barcode [ CueCat::Decode $code ]
exec vidcat -p y -s 640x480 >
set picture [ image create photo -file
set mypic [ image create photo ]
focus
}
The CueCat:: native support is also represented here in one (1) line. I realized that using my webcam, adding photo support would also be trivial. This function runs when a barcode is scanned. Stick the code on the item, commit the changes to the db, and bam - you're done. The database 'code' also is really just a couple of sql INSERT and SELECT directives. Not a big deal when amortized over the lifetime of the program.