Gavin’s Digital Diner

Several years ago – during the Dot-Com crazy years, there was a company called DigitalConvergence. They were going to “revolutionize” marketing by linking barcodes in magazine advertising with online web sites. To participate in this revolution you had to have a barcode scanner (called a Cue Cat), be sitting near your PC, see something that interested you in a magazine, and then scan the associated barcode with the Cue Cat … Voila, you’d be taken to the appropriate web site. Here’s a link to a Forbes article on the beast.

Stupid, just stupid; the idea fails the simplicity test, in my opinion. Fact is, it’s just easier – assuming you wanted to – to type in the URL. Anyway, their stupidity (and subsequent bankruptcy) is your gain. Because of it, you can enter the amazing world of barcodes for real cheap.

I think DigitalConvergence shipped millions of these useless hunks of plastic. I received six or seven of them myself, for free, in the mail. They look like kind of like a cat-shaped mouse. We hung them over a cubical wall, and there they sat. Here’s a picture:

One day it – when I was thinking of selling off some of my science fiction collection on EBay and dreading the thought of entering all that data — it occurred to me that if I had a barcode scanner, my life would be easier. EBay lets you use ISBN numbers, and most of my books had barcodes with the ISBN number somewhere on the cover. All I needed was a scanner.

(I also collect wine, and the software I use to manage that collection uses barcodes too, if you have a scanner. Amazing, there is software that tells me when to drink. Ain’t life grand.)

Anyway, while we did have several barcode wands at work, they ran about $500 each. We use them for library books and a custom built folder tracking system. But, for that price, I’d be better off just burning my books for heat in the winter and just drinking the wine at random.

Enter the Cue Cat. It is, after all, a barcode scanner, and I had 6 of them.. But, while it was a scanner, it was also designed so you couldn’t use it for just scanning barcodes. It had been designed to output the data in an encrypted form, and to tag it with an identifying serial number. (Of course, DigitalConvergence wanted to track who was looking at what. After all there was money to be made, right?) Anyway, a quick jump to Google, and I found how to fix the cat – it’s easy depending on what Cat you have. Here’s a link to the process:

http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm

If you have one lying around, and it’s happens to be one of the models that this process describes, it’s very easy to do. I did it in less than 10 minutes, with a piece of twist-tie. I now had a barcode scanner. I use it for managing my library, selling items on Ebay, managing my wine collection and CD collection.

If you’re not that brave, don’t have a Cat or the right Cat, or can’t find a twist tie, screwdriver, or whatever, you can also buy them – already modified – for about $10 on EBay. And for $10 you get the USB model that actually goes to sleep when it’s not used. (With mine, the eyes have been glowing for months now. That tends to be a little disconcerting when I wander around my house at night.)

Aside from drinking wine and selling books, there are truly useful tasks you can do as well. Most every PC I’ve seen in recent years comes with a barcode serial number, for example. Hence, inventory becomes much easier. Trust me, it’s a lot easier to scan a barcode than try to both see and accurately record a serial number of the bottom of some PC.

Barcode readers, by the way, Cue Cat or commercial, work just like you’d typed it on the keyboard. If you’re in Word, it will simply read the barcode and output the corresponding numbers on your screen, at the cursor. If you’re in a database field, for example, swiping the reader across a barcode will insert it into the current field. They are very handy and a great time saver, once you put them to work.

Gavin Clabaugh - June 2006

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