From August 2000 until early 2002 a company called Digital Convergence was giving away for free an optical bar code scanner called the CueCat that can scan a variety of bar codes including the 12-digit Universal Product Code (UPC) found on the back of CED caddies. The free scanner could be picked up at virtually any RadioShack store in the United States. Although Digital Convergence has gone bankrupt, the company gave away in excess of 10 million of these scanners, so they'll be turning up in thrift stores and eBay auctions for years to come. The motivation behind this free giveaway was for people to use these scanners to swipe ordinary product UPC's as well as special bar codes called cues that appeared in the Radio Shack catalog and other print publications like Wired and Forbes. The scanner operates off your computer PS/2 keyboard or USB port (depending on the specific scanner version), so this swiping action caused the CRQ software included with the unit to launch your web browser and go to the specific web page for the bar code that was swiped. The company also had a product called the convergence cable to do a similar thing for your TV. When a :C icon appeared on the TV screen, an audio code was sent from the TV's audio-out port to the audio-in port on the computer causing your web browser to load a particular web page.
With Digital Convergence being bankrupt and their web site dead, the CRQ software no longer works, it simply returns the rather cryptic message "Your computer is not online with the Internet. Please check your Internet connection" whenever a bar code is scanned. This message could more accurately be stated "The web site www.crq.com cannot be located. Either your Internet connection is inactive or the web site is down. The CueCat software requires access to this web site so demographic data on your scanning habits can be gathered." But for the purpose of scanning UPC's on CED's and other products, it doesn't matter whether the CRQ software works or not, as third-party software products and hacked scanners are readily available that have no dependence on the software originally included with the CueCat reader.

The CED Title Excel Macro has been available at CED Magic since 1997, but until now most users have had to manually type in the UPC's due to the expense of getting a scanner for what may be a one time use. The high quality Welch Allyn scanner shown in the photo on the macro page cost about $500 in 1996. A cheap CueCat can be used with the macro to generate a list of CED titles from the scanned bar codes, but there is a catch- the CueCat outputs the bar code in an encrypted form that the macro doesn't understand. Each individual CueCat has a unique serial number as part of the encrypted output, so the existing Excel macro would require extensive modification to take the encryption scheme into account. The best method is to strip the output of everything but the encrypted bar code, then decrypt the bar code and send it to the Excel macro. This is actually pretty simple to do, as the CueCat has attracted the attention of hackers, who have spent the necessary time writing software to do just that. In addition, there are hardware hacks to turn the scanner itself into a simple bar code scanner by cutting traces on the circuit board. Many of the CueCats being sold on eBay are already modified to function this way.

http://www.cedmagic.com/cuecat/cuecat.html

It just looks like a big rat. I bought it a yard sale for two bucks. It isn't like a mouse at all.

I had a laugh about that the other day when my sister had the manual for it in with computer games. At the time it seemed so amazing but it became a huge flop because it was just a gimmicky to track consumers without any benefit to the users.

BTW you got screwed because RS gave those away! :D

I have one somewhere. It was pretty convenient to use to scan my book, CD and movie collection for awhile to add to online databases and cataloging sites. It is not as necessary for me these days though.