I had forgotten about my old :CueCat. My cousin had given it to me a while back, and luckily, Digital Convergence went out of business by then. All they have up now, is a ghost site, which says:
DigitalConvergence had a colossal dream. [...]
The dream was to connect items in the physical world to the Internet, automatically. In January that dream hit a bump in the road and the servers were taken offline.
They will scan again…
Most people predict that even though Digital Convergence owns the patents to its products, they won’t get back into business.
I learned that Digital Convergence tracked the users of the :CueCat. I even found some instructions on hacking the :CueCat. There are several drivers for using the :CueCat as a regular barcode scanner. I tried a few, but none of them seemed to really make me feel like keeping the :CueCat. I think I might sell mine on eBay.
I remember, around when I was in fourth grade, I used to see a bunch of infomercials promoting the :CueCat and saying how it would be the technology of the future. The commercials talked showed stuff like kids doing their homework online and people ordering stuff catalogs with the wave of their Cat (no pun intended). They were being given out for free at places like Radio Shack and magazines were giving them to their subscribers. I asked my parents to take me to Radio Shack, but they’d say it would be a waste of time. Luckily, I never got a :CueCat back then.
Update: Joel on Software has a nice article about the flaws in the :CueCat.
Update #2: I think I’m gonna use the instructions on hacking the :CueCat’s “guts” to make it output just the barcode and not the special Digital Convergence encoded stuff.
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