[HN Gopher] Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard - Using the CueCat with...
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Coding4Fun Hardware Boneyard - Using the CueCat with .NET (2006)
Author : TaurenHunter
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-12-05 02:34 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hanselman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hanselman.com)
| bombcar wrote:
| CueCats were amazing. We had so much fun playing with them and
| scanning barcodes even though we didn't do much useful with it.
|
| I remember a home library program for the Mac that was probably
| inspired by the cuecat. It would add books to your library after
| doing an internet lookup for he information.
| dervjd wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Delicious Library
| (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/11/delicious-library/) -
| that was such a cool piece of Mac software. I think it worked
| with the CueCat, but you could also use your Mac's iSight
| camera as a barcode reader. Even had the satisfying "beep" when
| you scanned a barcode. Scanning a QR code with a smartphone
| camera is super commonplace now, but back in 2004 it felt so
| futuristic.
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| Working RadioSnack in Berkeley, we couldn't give them away.
| ggdm wrote:
| The business model was to literally give them away. Whether
| humans wanted them or not, that's another story. Thank you for
| your input.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _Whether humans wanted them or not, that's another story._
|
| I don't think it's another story, I think it's the whole
| story.
| oceanghost wrote:
| I bought half a dozen of these from Radioshack they were more or
| less giving them away after the fall.
|
| There were lots of library apps that sprung up where you could
| scan your DVDs barcodes, or CDs etc.
|
| I can't remember what hair brained idea I had for it.
| ggdm wrote:
| Bought wasn't correct in that context as they were always free
| to the community and consumer. I agree with hare brained whole
| heartedly.
| oceanghost wrote:
| I admit my memory on the subject is imperfect. :-)
| karaterobot wrote:
| One of the big purchasers of leftover CueCat inventory was
| Librarything. They still sell them (for $5 at the moment) on
| their store, and have built features to use them for cataloging
| and searching your books.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Link: https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat
| zoky wrote:
| Given that they were originally given away for free, this is
| essentially an [?]% return on investment, thus making CueCat
| the most successful startup in history...
| bellboy_tech wrote:
| I'm holding my cuecat in hand with a PS/2 adapter thru a
| PS/2->USB adapter. Still works perfectly using Larry Wall's one-
| line decoder!!!
|
| Amazing ahead of it's time product, by a very very screwed up
| founder.
| twisteriffic wrote:
| > by a very very screwed up founder.
|
| I thought I knew the guys story, but wow is that some powerful
| grifting. Dude sells crystals and... Voter fraud dowsing
| sticks?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Hutton_Pulitzer
| ggdm wrote:
| One founder was a little off to say the least.
| ggdm wrote:
| No. Screwed up by legal. Founders were super cool. Mostly.
| dale_glass wrote:
| What did legal do?
| ggdm wrote:
| Same thing they always do. Write letters. Crappy ones.
| breput wrote:
| A maybe forgotten fact about the whole CueCat saga was that the
| hardware was given away for free, mainly at Radio Shack in the
| USA, with the expectation that the company would be able to
| recoup the costs by...um...I guess collecting user data and
| charging publishers to generate bar codes.
|
| Of course, people quickly reverse engineered the data format, as
| it was just a PS/2 format keyboard device, which caused the
| company to threaten to sue[0] anyone who distributed the
| software. Much fun was had for a few months skirting this until
| nearly everyone, other than a few people like book collectors,
| realized that having a UPC scanner wasn't that useful and the
| CueCats got stuffed into the junk drawers.
|
| Now everyone has a barcode scanner on their phone and it is no
| big deal, but at the time, it was a fun toy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat#Security_breach
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I have a half dozen of them in a drawer somewhere. I never used
| the supplied software. There was a nice Linux driver here:
| http://linas.org/banned/cuecat/oss.lineo.com.cuecat.cuecat_d...
|
| I haven't used any of them for over 10 years. Most smartphones
| now have more capable barcode reader apps.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Ironically now that smartphones are a thing this kind of
| thing I would have thought would be more prevelant, but
| instead of barcodes I am imagining QR Codes
| jstarks wrote:
| You could also just cut a trace on the motherboard and it would
| type out the UPC codes unencoded.
| ggdm wrote:
| Correct. That would remove our DMCA lightweight encryption.
| Well done hacker.
| bitwize wrote:
| Yes, but showing people which trace to cut is a federal
| felony under Section 1201.
| buzer wrote:
| I used it for quite a while to scan physical invoices before
| e-invoices became more common. Finland has a standard for
| encoding the required fields (account number, amount, reference
| code & due date) as a barcode and companies almost always
| included it.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I still have couple of these in a box somewhere. I recall they
| had a ps2 connector.
| ggdm wrote:
| 80% PS2. Rest were USB. A brand new technology.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Pretty impressive to fit USB onto such a necessarily low-cost
| product at the time.
| ggdm wrote:
| Considering Windows 95 didn't have drivers sorted yet,
| especially true! Mainly we did it for Macintosh support.
| phrop wrote:
| Wired Magazine gave away CueCats at one point, I still have an
| unopened on in the box. Along with 100 lbs or so of magazines
| ggdm wrote:
| Co-Founder of the project here here. AMA @ggdm
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| You founded CueCat?
| ggdm wrote:
| Co-founder. As typed above.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| This is your cue
| ggdm wrote:
| That's funny. Cue this.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| What were some of the biggest challenges in the project?
| Technical, manufacturing, marketing?
| ggdm wrote:
| Cost reduction. We needed to make these for under $10 so we
| could give them away as part of our razor blade model. Google
| that-if you know, you know.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| Do you still have one? Did you hack it?
| ggdm wrote:
| Yes. Boxes of them. I hacked it because I previously wrote
| for 2600, Google that. Later I helped write for Make
| Magazine... makezine.com
| tnecniv wrote:
| How do you feel when you scan a QR code today? Vindicated in a
| way that the idea was a useful one, even if the company didn't
| quite pan out as you hoped, or more regretful?
| ggdm wrote:
| QR's are an add-on for marketing or messaging vs our system
| which was already printed on the box! But it's cool to see
| people scanning and the Cat now sits in the Computer History
| Museum... So it is cool to see it in the same section as my
| first computer - the Osborne 01. With Digital Convergence,
| the Cat's parent company, we raised $205M from strategic
| investors and gave 300 dreamers and do'ers jobs and an
| amazing outlook for their future lives even when it went bust
| in 2001 like so many startups with "loose" revenue models
| did. Never have I felt regret from this, plus a lot of OG
| tech founders give us street cred for tying barcodes to the
| Internet before people thought of it. It did teach me what
| types of people that you DON'T want to work with.
|
| The biggest project that my friends and I did after this was
| moving a Boeing 747 over 500 miles through two states from
| the Mojave boneyard to Burning Man. That was a true loving
| team who could do anything. Our business model was smiles per
| hour. YouTube has great videos on that project.
| mickeyp wrote:
| Loved the boxee box. Thanks for that! Do you happen to have the
| radio specs for the remote? I miss it so much, I want to use it
| for my home cinema setup.
| ggdm wrote:
| No, DLink made it for us, and you're smart to want to use
| that remote to this day! Full QWERTY keys on the back and D
| pad on the front was our IP and another first for the
| industry. The box was running an Intel Atom CPU. Some devs
| and people have continued to keep that hardware going too.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Did you actually beat the TiVo Slide remote to market? I'm
| sure you know it, but for those who don't, look it up -
| backlit remote with the usual TiVo buttons on top, but the
| whole top slid (much like the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1) to
| reveal a QWERTY keyboard. Given how slow the non-graphics
| related hardware in TiVo's STB's was, this was much faster
| than trying to peck out one letter at a time on their
| onscreen keyboard.
|
| I was very unhappy when my wife dropped and broke ours, but
| doubly so because they had been discontinued by then.
| ggdm wrote:
| The TiVo slide remote was cool. Check WeakKnees or AVS
| forum for that release date. They will have anit
| announced or archived. Ours was topside/bottom side with
| no moving parts. It was flip-flop modality. The concept
| was "don't look" on the Directional side and type or
| search on the keyboard side.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Is there anything you feel people tend to miss or get wrong
| when telling the story of the CueCat? Or has the record already
| been set pretty much straight? It still comes up
| occasionally... heck, I found one in a cupboard at work last
| week! But I always wonder what gets missed about these things
| in hindsight.
| ggdm wrote:
| The Web 1.0 world was different then. Wired and Forbes (our
| distribution partners) licensed our engine and mailed out
| Cats as a way to take their "lost" content like audio
| interviews and photos, aka too many to print, to live online
| forever. Wired magazine didn't even control their digital
| property at the time. We were the first team to tie all of
| this digital and analog together when the Internet was dialup
| and WiFi didn't exist.
|
| We had a second technology that decoded audio tones on TV
| that we launched with NBC to let your PC "follow along" with
| what was being shown. That pre-dated Shazam by a decade.
|
| Too many things are missed in the story, but the big thing is
| all of the money raised was from strategic partners like
| Coca-Cola ($10M) Y&R ($5M if Ford didn't like the demo, $10M
| if they did) and on and on to $205M.
|
| My favorite Easter egg was we were the first Internet
| platform to look at the location of your scan via IP address
| to give more relevant data FOR you. E.G. for Coke if you
| scanned a can in Texas you'd get Six Flags offers vs Atlanta
| where you would get an offer for SeaWorld. This was a decade
| before Waze or even Google thought about location, through
| their purchase of ad networks or other companies.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| I still have my cuecat! :C
| ggdm wrote:
| My mom is proud of you. She hangs them on her Christmas tree.
| #inventor'smoms
| drewzero1 wrote:
| What a sweet idea. I could see a lot of my (essentially)
| e-waste becoming ornaments, though not many devices are as
| conventionally "beautiful" as the CueCat.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I had one of these and thought it was pretty cool to scan the
| ISBN barcodes on the back of my books and make a catalog of my
| books. That didn't take very long and then I wondered what I
| would use it for and was very confused as a 13 year old what in
| the world the business model could be to keep them afloat,
| because it made no sense to me to give them away or charge so
| little for the device. I was similarly confused by the various
| toolbars you could install that would pay you to browse the web
| (which I hooked up to some mouse jiggling script to keep it
| working while I slept). I did get at least one check for $15 from
| that which seemed magical at the time.
| ggdm wrote:
| It was the razor blade model. It cost us under $10 per unit to
| make and we charged licenses for content creators to make their
| physical world items tie into digital content to interact with
| the brand new web world of 2000. One may also call this a
| chicken or the egg problem. Y2K was amazing.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I had a PS/2 CueCat which IIRC required some hardware
| modification to use unlocked, at least early on. I stuck in it a
| drawer and never bothered with it again. The default
| functionality was useless.
|
| The thing I miss however is things like that old Amazon web
| service that. Icould look up book information for free. For a few
| years there were some really interesting free XML-RPC and SOAP
| web services that were relatively easy to plug into and access
| interesting services. I really miss those services and
| composability for mash-ups.
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't think it required a hack, I don't remember that.
| However they did have a serial number built-in that the
| software would send to the retailer when you scanned things for
| tracking purposes.
|
| I think the hack was to disable that, it might've been as
| simple as cutting a single trace.
|
| (From the fog of my memory)
| breput wrote:
| Yeah, no hack required.
|
| The CueCat just outputted keyboard data via the PS/2
| interface, which was the most common keyboard connection at
| the time, and with the correct 3rd party software it could be
| used to decode any UPC barcode without having to install the
| official spyware software.
| ggdm wrote:
| It was a ROT encoder. Google that. So software "decode" vs
| hardware "hack."
| MBCook wrote:
| Ooooh that's right. I'd forgotten that.
| giantrobot wrote:
| That is likely what I am thinking of, it's been a long time
| and I was not super interested in it at the time. I got mine
| free from Radio Shack with that year's catalog (which was
| filled with CueCat barcodes).
| cf wrote:
| Does anyone remember how LibraryThing does (did?) sell CueCats
| and they are a really handy way to upload your book and music
| collection online
|
| https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat
| jrmg wrote:
| Amongst all the random detritus from 70 years of local industry,
| there's basically always still a seller with a bunch of CueCats
| at every Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market
| (https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/).
| drlava wrote:
| These were great. Our college IDs had a barcode on them for
| cafeteria charge swipes.! I set up a cuecat outside my dorm door
| where one could swipe their ID for access, the IDs swipes would
| be compared against an access list and a match triggered a
| mechanical door opener from a locked door. Lulz all round. This
| was before everyone was walking around with a cellphone camera
| where these barcodes were marginally more secure in 2000 but the
| campus switched from barcodes a few years later.
| ggdm wrote:
| You're my people. Well done! We created Make Magazine and Maker
| Faire to celebrate this good behavior!
| gr33nq wrote:
| I remember begging my parents to take me to a Radio Shack to get
| one of these when I was in second grade. The idea of being able
| to scan various items around the house was such a wild concept to
| me for some reason. Once we finally tracked one down, I scanned
| every book on my shelf into a trial copy of Winnebago Spectrum
| that I had obtained. It was the software suite that my elementary
| school's library ran off of, and I installed it on a Windows 2000
| PC that my dad had passed down to me after upgrading the office
| computer. God knows how many hours I spent playing library with
| my younger sister and aimlessly scanning ISBNs - such simple
| times! Surprisingly I still have that same PS/2 CueCat in my
| drawer, though it hasn't been plugged in for at least fifteen
| years.
|
| I know many of us in this community tend to look back at the
| earlier days of the internet very fondly and feel the nostalgia
| hit strongly, and I think it's because of the innovations (or
| maybe gimmicks?) like these that were novel and groundbreaking in
| many ways. Off the top of my head right now, I can't recall
| anything in recent times as quirky as the CueCat that would have
| evoked a similar excitement and genuine intrigue to a child today
| like I was fortunate to have experienced twenty years ago. But
| then again, I'm sure back then there weren't many seven year olds
| hunting down library database software and messing around with it
| for fun - so maybe my perspective is an outlier...
| kotaKat wrote:
| I ran Mandarin M3 at home as a kid (also matching my local
| school library), so you're not alone ;)
|
| I just checked and oh boy, I could spin it back up...
| https://www.mlasolutions.com/products/m3
| cyansmoker wrote:
| Related, to make the CueCat "speak English:"
| https://nexus.zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious...
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Why do I keep reading about the CueCat multiple times per year?
|
| What makes this primitive gadget so enticing?
| ggdm wrote:
| We were a sign of the future of the web and where we sit today
| with smartphones and what is capable today. It's a time
| capsule.
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(page generated 2023-12-05 23:01 UTC)