

CueCat - alex_c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

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jazzychad
I still have mine right here. It's sitting next to my monitor. Unfortunately
it doesn't seem to scan correctly anymore, but I wrote a few windows apps back
in the day to catalog my CD collection and even one that talked to iTunes that
would play a particular album when I scanned it. I really wish I could find a
working one.

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seregine
I got a working one about a year ago from here as a curiosity:

<http://www.librarything.com/cuecat>

Wish I knew about them in college - would've made my temp job organizing a
small department library much easier.

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seasoup
I got one of the free cue cats back when they mailed them to all wired
participants. I remember that seemed like an incredibly expensive thing to do,
I set up the product and scanned a few things but quickly became bored with
it. It seems like there are so may other better ways to do something
similar...

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lurkinggrue
I got a bunch for Radio Shack and got bored with them quickly.

I think that was around the time the i-Opener came out the $99 Internet
appliance that people noticed had a hard drive header and accessible bios:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener>

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timr
CueCat is now just Wikipedia lore? I feel old. Those things were a favorite
hack target for a couple of years in college....

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alex_c
Not sure if it was distributed outside the US, I would guess not... so it's
(mostly) new to me. The kinds of things we miss out on, up here in Canada ;)

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ars
One of my clients is making an app (non-public) where everything is done by
handing out cards with barcodes, which are then scanned in.

We were very close to buying a couple thousand cuecats for it. I don't
remember why we didn't, I think because they were not reliable (sliding the
wand, vs. point and click for the gun types).

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celticjames
That would make a good iPhone app.

