I have an obsession about holding onto stuff. In short I hate throwing things away! I have gotten better with the years but occasionally I hold onto things that make no sense. Now it has finally paid off!



I guess it must have been in the year 2000 I got a CueCat while shopping for something at RadioShack. A CueCat is a cat shaped bar code scanner made by a company called DigitalConvergence Corporation, which no longer exists. Its intention was to have users scan bar codes of products and bar codes in catalogs and lead the users to a web page about the product. It also had some tracking which could give you targetet ads based on which products you had been scanning. Wikipedia has some more information about the CueCat.

The CueCat




I never actually tried the CueCat while the servers were up since I thought the idea was a bit silly. I however decided to hold onto it if it ever become worth anything (I guess I realized right away that this was going to be one of those failure projects). I doubt that it ever will be worth anything since there are numerous CueCats out in the wild but yesterday I did find a purpose for it.



I recently purchased an excellent book cataloging software called Book Collector. They have now added a scanner support but their own scanner is ridiculously expensive (approx 100 Euros). So I dug up some drivers, hooked my CueCat up, and believe it or not it was working.



The woman in me has to admit that it would be almost as fast to simply type in the ISBN numbers and search for the books that way. The mediumgeek in me, however, cannot help finding this extremely cool! The best of course is that now I have a proof that holding onto weird stuff can sometimes be worth it:-).



If you happen to have a CueCat lying around and want to catalog your books with Book Collector then download the drivers here. These work on Windows XP for me (and said to work on Windows 2000 and ME).