Thanks in advance to the kind soul that put together the Windoze driver for this thing.
I had originally thought to use it for library work, but another wrinkle that I have discovered is that the scanner has limits on the length of codes it will accept. We use 3 of 9 13-digit codes on our materials and many other libraries do as well. The cat won't scan anything over 10 digits, I believe- haven't fiddled with the cut-off point, but know it won't take the 13 digit codes.
If your local public or school library bar codes their items and the cat can read it, why not give the thing to them (along with the URL to the Windoze driver so they can get some use out of the thing.)
Now RatShack or some other outlet should look into making this thing unscrambled, put a better case on it and undercut the low end of the bar-code scanner market. Plenty of small businesses and non-profits would hop onto it for 10$ or 15$ instead of the 140$ for a full-blown scanner, and of course the development work has already been done and paid for by the dumb folks backing DC. The one I have has taken a decent bit of abuse ('cause my 2 year old thinks its really cute-oh another idea- cut the tail off and let a kid play with it.) and still reads ok.
My.07 (inflation) worth...
Good afternoon-
I realize that this forum is *NIX-centric, which is fine even tho outside my experience. Still-
I've been lurking several places since I heard about the cat in the hopes that there might be some activity towards writing a resident decoding app for Win 9.X/NT for this thing, so that you could use it to scan in data for any application, but haven't seen anything as yet.
My whole MO is monetary in nature- I work in a library and we are, as are all nonprofits, library or service orgs, strapped for cash. Any time that we can get a deal on hardware means better services we can provide. So when I heard "free barcode reader", I was immediately thinking about getting some, tossing the junk that came with them and using them for inventory, check out etc. Beats spending 90-140$ for a regular reader, and less stress- who cares if some kid trashes the thing-pick up another one.
IMO, DC can't say a thing about it- I've seen no licensing agreement- besides what's to stop my mother from getting one, "deciding she doesn't like it" and giving it to me? Whoops, lost the software that came with it!
At any rate, I imagine that there are probably more than a few cheap/poor folks out there like me that want to take advantage of a freebie to make our lives a bit easier. Happens all the time-look at all the stuff showered on doctor's offices by the drug reps- they'd like the doc to prescribe the drug, but they have no legal leg to stand on that "by accepting this (free meal, pile of post-it notes, pens, whatever) you agree to only prescribe our product"- you get the idea.
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Thanks in advance to the kind soul that put together the Windoze driver for this thing. I had originally thought to use it for library work, but another wrinkle that I have discovered is that the scanner has limits on the length of codes it will accept. We use 3 of 9 13-digit codes on our materials and many other libraries do as well. The cat won't scan anything over 10 digits, I believe- haven't fiddled with the cut-off point, but know it won't take the 13 digit codes. If your local public or school library bar codes their items and the cat can read it, why not give the thing to them (along with the URL to the Windoze driver so they can get some use out of the thing.) Now RatShack or some other outlet should look into making this thing unscrambled, put a better case on it and undercut the low end of the bar-code scanner market. Plenty of small businesses and non-profits would hop onto it for 10$ or 15$ instead of the 140$ for a full-blown scanner, and of course the development work has already been done and paid for by the dumb folks backing DC. The one I have has taken a decent bit of abuse ('cause my 2 year old thinks its really cute-oh another idea- cut the tail off and let a kid play with it.) and still reads ok. My .07 (inflation) worth...
Good afternoon- I realize that this forum is *NIX-centric, which is fine even tho outside my experience. Still- I've been lurking several places since I heard about the cat in the hopes that there might be some activity towards writing a resident decoding app for Win 9.X/NT for this thing, so that you could use it to scan in data for any application, but haven't seen anything as yet. My whole MO is monetary in nature- I work in a library and we are, as are all nonprofits, library or service orgs, strapped for cash. Any time that we can get a deal on hardware means better services we can provide. So when I heard "free barcode reader", I was immediately thinking about getting some, tossing the junk that came with them and using them for inventory, check out etc. Beats spending 90-140$ for a regular reader, and less stress- who cares if some kid trashes the thing-pick up another one. IMO, DC can't say a thing about it- I've seen no licensing agreement- besides what's to stop my mother from getting one, "deciding she doesn't like it" and giving it to me? Whoops, lost the software that came with it! At any rate, I imagine that there are probably more than a few cheap/poor folks out there like me that want to take advantage of a freebie to make our lives a bit easier. Happens all the time-look at all the stuff showered on doctor's offices by the drug reps- they'd like the doc to prescribe the drug, but they have no legal leg to stand on that "by accepting this (free meal, pile of post-it notes, pens, whatever) you agree to only prescribe our product"- you get the idea.