Re-Purposing That Stupid CueCat Optical Reader

Back in the early days of the Internet boom, a nasty little company created a piece of hardware and software called the CueCat. If you were a Wired or Forbes subscriber, or if you were a frequent RadioShack shopper, you may still have one of these little kitties laying around your home or office. I did.

I had read some years ago that the little scanner had been reverse engineered allowing it's use on a personal computer as a free barcode reader. If you are lucky enough to still have yours, all you need is bit of freely available software that decrypts the information read from the scanner and outputs it to any text entry area on the machine. More on why you might want that in a second.

Just a little background on the CueCat's origins. Wired magazine, to which I have subscribed since its beginnings, partnered with this nasty little spyware company, Digital Convergence, that had the grand idea to market magazine advertisers' products by connecting the print ads to the company's website via a barcode and the little scanner. There was even some hair-brained idea to use audio signals embedded in television commercials captured by a PC with a microphone running this companies spyware. This was somehow consider a "service" Wired readers and others would desire. I guess they figured we were too lazy to type the URL of a company's site into a browser if we were interested in a product. I assume Digital Convergence pitched it to advertisers as being able to draw customers to special websites with targeted marketing materials and special deals on products. You know, the usual marketer lies and deceit. The thing is, if that were all that happened when you scanned a barcode, the plan would have been relatively innocuous - hair-brained, but still innocuous. But there was a catch. In order to use the CueCat, you had to register with Digital Convergence and a unique hardware ID was associated with your CueCat scanner. The software running on your system gathered information about what you scanned and associated that information with you through the hardware ID. This information was then pedaled to advertisers as "business intelligence," or whatever the pond scum marketers called it back then. I remember the uproar over the privacy issues (which were conveniently mentioned only in the fine print of some click-through EULA). In addition, the scanner driver and tracking software was a poorly written resource hog that caused stability problems for those fool enough to install it - something that added insult to injury to the ever-so-stabled Windows 95 - the operating system of the day.

Digital Convergence, happily, is no more, though in their last gasps they sent cease and desist nastygrams to the folks who maintained sites helping people make something useful out of their dust collecting CueCats. As bitheads are wont to do, they saw this free little optical scanner as a potentially useful tool when freed from the Digital Convergence software. Thus was born CatNip - a very tiny little piece of code that decrypts the content from the scanner and outputs it to pretty much any application that accepts text input. (The link above to download catnip comes from a neat little site that also includes instructions and screen shots of CatNip in action: Using the CueCat Optical Reader to Catalog CED Titles.)

"So what?" you ask. There are several very nice pieces of software out there to help people with large collections of "stuff" keep track of their "stuff." My personal favorite is a fantastic suite of tools for cataloging books, movies, music, games, mp3s, and comic books by a company called CollectorZ.com. This database software allows you to scan UPC or ISBN barcodes with an optical scanner instead of using text entry for record creation. Once the barcode is scanned the software hits Amazon, the Library of Congress, and other online databases and extracts information including nice images of covers from the online sources and imports them into the local database creating a new record. It's totally automated and completely painless. Enter the CueCat. With CatNip running on your system, your dusty old CueCat, once an office oddity perhaps drawing comments from cubicle visitors, becomes your very own feline data entry slave. If you aren't lucky enough to have one from your ancient days as a geek in the mid-1990s, you are in luck: Ebay to the rescue. You can get one dirt cheap.

Having to replace a few books this go-round with Hurricane Katrina has made me realize that if I had lost everything, my book collection would have been one of the things I would really mourn and would find it hard to replace, simply because I would not remember which books I own. In addition, I now have insurance documentation and some idea of the value of the collection in order to carry sufficient coverage to replace it should another big one come our way. An added feature of the Pro version of the CollectorZ software is loan tracking - a surefire way of keeping your sticky fingered friends from "adopting" your books because you have a memory like a sieve, ditto for your movies and CDs.