geekhack
geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: SCTony on Sun, 06 September 2009, 14:04:59
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Anyone recognize this?
I thought maybe it was an OCR scanner of some sort. It turns out to be a barcode scanner that was given away by RadioShack[FAIL] in the 90's . You would scan in a barcode and be automatically taken to whichever website was encoded in that barcode. It seems there were privacy issues with its use. Cost me a dollar to satisfy my curiosity.
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Follow this (http://geekhack.org/showpost.php?p=115110&postcount=11)!
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Anyone recognize this?
I thought maybe it was an OCR scanner of some sort. It turns out to be a barcode scanner that was given away by RadioShack[FAIL] in the 90's . You would scan in a barcode and be automatically taken to whichever website was encoded in that barcode. It seems there were privacy issues with its use. Cost me a dollar to satisfy my curiosity.
At first glance I thought You had a USB connected Ann Summers special.
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Lol thanks for the link.
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Heh, reminds me of Joel Spolsky's essay on these things, it was appropriately titled Wasting Money on Cats (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html).
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hey i know the cue cat! I once looked for a solution to organizing my massive collection of books by entering their title/author info by scanning their bar codes. Some programs out there do this - like delicious library for macs and there's a pc equivalent whose name i forget, media-something. At the time I considered buying a cue cat!
its actually pretty neat, you just scan the barcode on your book and all the info about it is retrieved from library of congress or amazon. Even an image of the front cover. :)
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hey i know the cue cat! I once looked for a solution to organizing my massive collection of books by entering their title/author info by scanning their bar codes. Some programs out there do this - like delicious library for macs and there's a pc equivalent whose name i forget, media-something. At the time I considered buying a cue cat!
its actually pretty neat, you just scan the barcode on your book and all the info about it is retrieved from library of congress or amazon. Even an image of the front cover. :)
Wow, the Cue Cat actually had practical uses?
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I have couple of those laying around somewhere. Never really had the time to play with them back when I got them from raidoshak. If I remember correctly they are a keyboard wedge scanner. I may have to find where I put them.
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You beat me to it, Ray. LOL
I still have a few Cue Cats, new in the bag.
Someday I will get around to doing something useful with them.
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Apparently, you can get Cue Cats for $8.88 Buy it now...and they're USB
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You mean people are paying $8-$9 bucks for those things. Man I got mine for free. If I was going to pay money for a scanner I would get a good one. You can get Symbol bar code scanners on ebay for $10 bucks and they are a much better scanner.
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You mean people are paying $8-$9 bucks for those things. Man I got mine for free. If I was going to pay money for a scanner I would get a good one. You can get Symbol bar code scanners on ebay for $10 bucks and they are a much better scanner.
But they aren't amusingly in the shape of a cat.
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lol steampunk is cool
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The funny thing is the concept was way ahead of its time. There's a movement now to encode information in QR codes in different places (billboards, packages, magazines) that can be decoded to web links using camera equipped cellphones.
Just another instance of the concept being ahead of the technology.
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I just got my CueCat today...and I can now enter websites my barcode :D
Apparently the one I got doesn't have the serial number or encryption, so it would seem a lot safer than the older ones. And it's USB...
It's not the best barcode scanner, I'm sure, but what other barcode scanner can you get for less than $10 shipped?