Digital Convergence Corporation is hardly a household name, and there’s a good reason for that. However, it raised about $185 million in investments around the year 2000 from companies such as Coca-Cola, Radio Shack, GE, E. W. Scripps, and the media giant Belo Corporation. So what did all these companies want, and why didn’t it catch on? If you are old enough, you might remember the :CueCat, but you probably thought it was Radio Shack’s disaster. They were simply investors.

The Big Idea

The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that, usually, plugged into a PC’s keyboard port (in those days, that was normally a PS/2 port). A special cable, often called a wedge, was like a Y-cable, allowing you to use your keyboard and the scanner on the same port. The scanner looked like a cat, of course.

However, the :CueCat was not just a generic barcode scanner. It was made to only scan “cues” which were to appear in catalogs, newspapers, and other publications. The idea was that you’d see something in an ad or a catalog, rush to your computer to scan the barcode, and be transported to the retailer’s website to learn more and complete the purchase.

The software could also listen using your sound card for special audio codes that would play on radio or TV commercials and then automatically pop up the associated webpage. So, a piece of software that was reading your keyboard, listening to your room audio at all times, and could inject keystrokes into your computer. What could go wrong?

Of Interest

You might think this was some tiny startup that died with a whimper, but Radio Shack, Forbes, Wired, and several major newspapers were onboard. The :CueCat cost about $6.50 to produce, but most people never bought one. Radio Shack, Forbes, and Wired were giving them away.

The problem is, even free was too high a price for most people. To use the device, you had to register and complete a long survey full of invasive questions. Then the software showed you an ad bar. Digital Convergence had your demographic info, your surfing habits, and knew what you were scanning.

Even then, the scanner solved a non-problem. If you saw something in a Radio Shack catalog, for example, it was probably not so hard to go to their website and search for it by title or stock number. Especially if you were sitting in front of your computer. If you weren’t… well, then, the :CueCat didn’t help you in that case, anyway.

The Next Big Thing?

It is easy to look back on this and think, “What a bad idea?” But Digital Convergence and its investors were in a full-blown media blitz. The video below shows a contemporary demo of the technology.

If you still aren’t sold, look at how happy the woman in the Radio Shack commercial is that she didn’t have to manually search the web for her next phone purchase.

A clip from the Radio Shack 2002 catalog (from RadioShackCatalogs.com)

Problem solved, right? Want to buy that new ham radio? Scan the code, and you don’t have to type “Alinco” into a search box! Even the table of contents in the 2002 RadioShack catalog was festooned with barcodes.

The RadioShack catalog might have been an exception, though. A 2001 issue of Forbes magazine showed sparing use of the barcodes and no obvious ones linking to big advertisers. You would think the advertisers would have been a prime target, even if you had to make deals to get them onboard.

Hackers

Naturally, hacks immediately appeared. Drives from [Pierre-Philippe Coupard] and [Michael Rothwell] allowed you to use the :CueCat without the invasive software or registration. You could even scan normal barcodes like UPC codes. Radio Shack and others wound up simply giving away $6.50 barcode scanners.

While people were already prickly about the amount of information gathered and the tracking, hackers found a report file on a public server that revealed personal info about 140,000 users — a huge number for the year 2000.

With hackers attacking both the hardware and the company’s website, Digital Convergence had to act. They changed their license, claiming that you didn’t own the scanner and forbidding reverse engineering. There were no real lawsuits, but there were threats and, as you might imagine, that just made things worse.

The Decline

By 2001, there were a very few USB-native :CueCats distributed. But the bad publicity and the lack of usefulness took its toll. By mid-year, most of the 225 employees at Digital Convergence had been let go. Later in the year, the investors decided to stop using the tech entirely.

By 2005, you could buy the now-surplus devices for $0.30 each, as long as you agreed to take 500,000 or more of them. You can still find them on the used market if you look. Open source software is still around that can make them do useful things, but honestly, unless you’re hacking it into a custom hardware setup, your phone is a better barcode scanner.

Hardware

You can still find some of the contemporary teardowns of the :CueCat online. There were, apparently, several revisions of the hardware, but at least one version had a cheap CPU, a serial EEPROM, an 8 KB static RAM, and a handful of small parts. For a free device, the insides looked pretty good.

:CueCat without cover by [Shaddack]

Removing the ID from the device was as easy as removing the EEPROM, although people were less equipped to remove SMD chips in those days. You could also just lift a single pin, which was slightly easier. At least one enterprising hacker added a DIP switch to experiment with the pin settings.

Aftermath

Of course, now we have QR codes. But these are somewhat more private, work with the ubiquitous cell phone, and even then haven’t caught on in the way Digital Convergence had planned.

Was it a good idea? That’s debatable. But giant privacy grabs usually go poorly. Granted, in 2000, that might not have been as obvious as it is today. But it still doesn’t keep companies from finding it out all over again.

Featured image: The :CueCat. Photo by [Jerry Whiting]

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When World of Warcraft was launched in 2004, it became somewhat of a juggernaut in the MMORPG space. Millions of players continue to login every month. [Kelsi Davis] is one such player, but she doesn’t always log in with the regular client anymore. That’s because she put together WoWee—an open-source alternative of her very own.

WoWee is an acronym—World of Warcraft Engine Experiment. Coded in native C++, it’s a homebrewed client that uses a custom OpenGL renderer to display the game world. [Kelsi] notes that it’s strictly an “educational/research” project, built without using any official Blizzard assets, data or code. Instead, it grabs some client data from a legally-obtained install to operate and loads certain assets this way.

It’s currently compatible with the vanilla game as well as The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. It should be highlighted how much work this project has already involved—with [Kelsi] needing to recreate various functional minutae in the game, from character creation screens to weather systems and skyboxes. There’s still a lot to do, as well, like adding 3D audio support and making it more interoperable with the quest system.

It’s rare that any MMO gets an open-source client, even less so while the original game is still being actively supported by the developers. Still, we do see some creative hacks in this space.

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It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanjay] took that personally, or at least thought “Challenge accepted” because he immediately hooked an old Commodore floppy drive to his somewhat-less-old smartphone.

The argument started over UNIX file directories, in a post about Redox OS on smartphones— which was a [Paul Sanja] hack as well. [Paul] had everything he needed to pick up the gauntlet, and evidently did so promptly. The drive is a classic Commodore 1541, which means you’ll want to watch the demo video at 2x speed or better. (If you thought loading times felt slow in the old days, they’re positively glacial by modern standards.) The old floppy drive is plugged into a Google Pixel 3 running Postmarket OS. Sure, you could do this on Android, but a fully open Linux system is obviously the hacker’s choice. As a bonus, it makes the whole endeavor almost trivial.

Between the seven-year-old phone and the forty-year-old disk drive is an Arduino Pro Micro, configured with the XUM1541 firmware by [OpenBCM] to act as a translator. On the phone, the VICE emulator pretends to be a C64, and successfully loads Impossible Mission from an original disk. Arguably, the phone doesn’t “sport” the disk drive–if anything, it’s the other way around, given the size difference–but we think [Paul Sanja] has proven the point regardless. Bravo, [Paul].

Thanks to [Joseph Eoff], who accidentally issued the challenge and submitted the tip. If you’ve vexed someone into hacking (or been so vexed yourself), don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

We wish more people would try hacking their way through disagreements. It really, really beats a flame war.

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A Meshtastic node has been one of the toys of the moment over the last year, and since they are popular with radio amateurs there’s a chance you’ll already live within range of at least one. They can typically run from a lithium-ion or li-po battery, so it’s probable that like us you’ve toyed with the idea of running one from a solar panel. It’s something we have in common with [saveitforparts], whose experiments with a range of different solar panels form the subject of a recent video.

He has three different models: one based around a commercial solar charger, another using an off-the-shelf panel, and a final one using the panel from a solar garden light. As expected the garden light panel can’t keep an ESP32 with a radio going all day, but the other two manage even in the relatively northern climes of Alaska.

As a final stunt he puts one of the nodes out on a rocky piece of the southern Alaskan coastline, for any passing hacker to find. It’s fairly obviously in a remote place, but it seems passing cruise ships will be within its range. We just know someone will take up his challenge and find it.

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