Here’s how you can calculate Pi by throwing frozen hot dogs.
Two of my cow-orkers and I went to give blood today. Everything went quite well, the blood center was pretty bare, not a lot of people braving the icy roads to get out and donate today. Good news for us other donors I guess, but maybe not so good for injured people. I was about 2 weeks late getting to the donation center, I’ve been getting over a cold and you have to wait for your symptoms to be gone before you can donate.
We got a CueCat barcode scanner yesterday. It’s a simple, cheap (under $20) device you can find in a few places online that lets you scan many different types of barcodes. We’re using it to catalog our book and dvd collections. I scanned about 150 books last night in a very short amount of time. If you combine that with software such as ReaderWare, you can have your entire collection catalogued in an evening. I’m thinking about LibraryThing, though, too. They don’t do music or dvds, but they have a very nice book interface (I like it a lot more than ReaderWare, anyway).
I “declawed” our CueCat (it’s the USB version) and it scans perfectly now, no encryption. All you do is plug it in now and scan, then the barcode shows up in your application just like you typed it. I didn’t even install any drivers for it—it just worked. I highly recommend one if you have stuff to catalog. You have to buy them on eBay or at some other place that has a supply of them, the company that originally made them went out of business (see the WikiPedia CueCat article for details).
So to sum it up, if you want a cheap barcode scanner, get a Cuecat. Declaw it. If you want to catalog books, use LibraryThing. If you want to catalog your media collections, I think something like ReaderWare is more your style.
Well we got a couple more inches of snow last night, but only about two here in Post Falls. The nice thing about it being so cold is the snow is very light and powdery.