Years and years ago, Radio Shack launched their CueCat scanner technology. I won't go into the history of this terrible business plan, but needless to say the idea took off like a lead balloon. You can get the brief history of the failed device on
wikipedia. Sometime later, probably around 2002 or 2003 I purchased a PS/2 model of the fabled barcode scanner, a scanner that I still have. I never really used it though.
Recently I purchased a
USB model of the CueCat. I had no idea USB models were ever available, but I found plenty of online sources selling them. I bought mine from
mavin.com. I just got it in the mail this afternoon and was able to "declaw" the cuecat in about a minute.
The process of declawing is simple enough and, in short, it allows the cuecat to output
only the barcode information in plain text (versus an obfuscated and "proprietary" format). After declawing I can now use the cat to scan any barcode. I hope to use it for cataloging any books I own, as well as selling used textbooks online after each semester.
Grendel sez: Neat, but otherwise useless, I've learned that Google will take UPC numbers and link to various UPC databases to tell you about the item you just scanned. Interesting.
update: 10/30 - Apparently the patent for :Cuecat was still outstanding
until recently.
Richard Stallman gives an interesting look at why the One Laptop Per Child project has "died". I don't think there's much happening with this project that had so much promise just 1 year ago. If you'll notice, I haven't given it much attention since this time last year because of the changes in administration and the "sell out" to major corporations for financial gain.
Special thanks to g4m8i7 for making me aware of a cool deal Dreamhost has going on. Dreamhost is migrating their servers to newer, more efficient, "greener" servers - I dunno, they said it, not me. In the migration they need volunteers to migrate over to the new servers. Of course they are aware there may be small glitches in the transfer, but I can't foresee them being anything major. Because I took the bait and decided to switch, they're giving me free unlimited* bandwidth and storage for life!
I had no idea. Well, I guess I had never looked. I found Freelance-projects and elance this morning, after being told by friends. They're connection points for posting freelance software jobs and finding freelance programmers to do it. It's definately an international thing (quite a few are from asia) so the pricing can become very competitive.