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shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?

3D Megadoodoo posted:

You scan the bar code on the bill with it, so you don't have to type in anything? The anroid application for my bank can use the phone camera for this but it literally never works because the bar code is too wide.

Do you actually still use the original cuecat from 2000 for that? Cuz I'm super impressed if it still works.

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Beve Stuscemi
Jun 6, 2001




I’m pretty sure the original cue at was just a PS/2 keyboard. the scanner converted the barcode into keystrokes and sent it out over PS/2.

so cuecats will continue to work for as long as windows supports PS/2 keyboards.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

shoeberto posted:

Do you actually still use the original cuecat from 2000 for that? Cuz I'm super impressed if it still works.

Are there reproductions? It's the one I inherited from my dad (who used it for the same thing) in 2010. How does a USB bar-code reader break down anyway?

At least I think it's USB, have to peek behind the computre when I get home. But yeah it's seen as a keyboard by the computer. Toyed around with scanning my record collection in but a lot of my records don't have bar codes, and also I don't know how to JSON and couldn't be arsed to really learn.

3D Megadoodoo fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Oct 10, 2021

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

https://www.mavin.com/cuecat/

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Are there reproductions? It's the one I inherited from my dad (who used it for the same thing) in 2010. How does a USB bar-code reader break down anyway?

I'm sure the machinery works fine! It's just not often that I think of random novelty peripherals still having connectors that work with modern motherboards 20+ years on, much less with drivers that still work with the OS. It's fairly impressive.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

shoeberto posted:

I'm sure the machinery works fine! It's just not often that I think of random novelty peripherals still having connectors that work with modern motherboards 20+ years on, much less with drivers that still work with the OS. It's fairly impressive.

My experience is the opposite; older weird stuff tends to work, newer common stuff doesn't. Also my newest computer isn't exactly new.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

I’m pretty sure the original cue at was just a PS/2 keyboard. the scanner converted the barcode into keystrokes and sent it out over PS/2.

so cuecats will continue to work for as long as windows supports PS/2 keyboards.

Amusingly, back around 2004-ish my university had a card reader you would swipe your ID card with. Obviously, the results would be done over some special device driver and the contents of the card would be obfu- lol jk no it was just a PS2 output device and the magnetic encoding on the card consisted of your student ID.

`Nemesis
Dec 30, 2000

railroad graffiti

Volmarias posted:

Amusingly, back around 2004-ish my university had a card reader you would swipe your ID card with. Obviously, the results would be done over some special device driver and the contents of the card would be obfu- lol jk no it was just a PS2 output device and the magnetic encoding on the card consisted of your student ID.

I occasionally see an ATM inside a secured lobby that wants you to swipe your card to unlock. From experience, almost anything with a mag stripe will open that door, such as reward cards or whatever. I wouldn't trust using a real bank card in those readers.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

All the card readers I've ever used at work have been USB keyboards, or have gone through a box that converts them to USB keyboards (from the computer's viewpoint that is).

If I swipey bank card I get something but I don't remember what.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Volmarias posted:

Amusingly, back around 2004-ish my university had a card reader you would swipe your ID card with. Obviously, the results would be done over some special device driver and the contents of the card would be obfu- lol jk no it was just a PS2 output device and the magnetic encoding on the card consisted of your student ID.

i mean that's all that credit card magnetic stripes are too.

i got a usb card reader a number of years ago to try to put together some sort of student card access control system for the power tools, and our student cards are the same thing. just the person's name and ID number and some checksums.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



the internet suicide machine, still going strong after all these years.

eschaton
Mar 7, 2007

Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

3D Megadoodoo posted:

All the card readers I've ever used at work have been USB keyboards, or have gone through a box that converts them to USB keyboards (from the computer's viewpoint that is).

If I swipey bank card I get something but I don't remember what.

this is because they used to be AT keyboards, and previously XT keyboards, and RS-232 devices using terminal aux-device passthrough protocols before that

so the new has to be sufficiently compatible with the old for software to work with the new with only minimal effort; basically the big switch was between RS-232 and XT keyboard, the latter mostly enabled by the Cambrian explosion of new software for PC that didn’t need any sort of compatibility with the past

I helped design and implement a system used for catalog photography management, everything would get a barcode and you could just scan poo poo with a USB wand to look it up, add it to the register for an image or shoot, etc. and all I had to do was grab any text between a control-B and control-E no matter how it was entered, easy to do by watching the app event queue ahead of any windows

made testing real easy too, everything in the software involved navigating to “the thing with ID (barcode)” and then doing stuff to it, including specifying another “the thing with ID (barcode)” as input

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

aol cds

Cat Hassler
Feb 7, 2006

Slippery Tilde
Microsoft Kin

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

WilWheaton posted:

Remember those free dialup ISP's that'd try to pay for the connection by showing you ads?

But you could just close their agent anyway



Agile Vector posted:

ctrl-alt-del-ing right on connection like a pro :c00lbert:. i could get another few kbs more than aol that way. i still remember ~6.3kb/s as the average with a lot of finagling


This was called Tritium

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
i managed to find some unlimited dial up isp as a kid that my mom had to pay with a checking account and i’d need to manually type in connection strings every time i logged on

iirc it was called “your voice village”

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?

mediaphage posted:

i managed to find some unlimited dial up isp as a kid that my mom had to pay with a checking account and i’d need to manually type in connection strings every time i logged on

iirc it was called “your voice village”

lol, that brings back memories of typing in the dial-up credentials every single time. I was like 8 or 9 and got very good at doing it very fast.

Our regional dialup ISP was called bright.net. Remember regional ISPs? What a time.

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



i prolly posted it before but when i had dial-up our ISP (iinet) gave you a free unix shell account on their server with like 15MB of home quota

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?
And apparently they're still in business lol. Offering DSL even!

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

no, the old BitTorrent client, the literal first release from the creator of BitTorrent could only download one torrent at a time. so if you wanted two, you had to open another instance and set the second instance off downloading your other torrent.

that’s my foggy memory of it anyway. torrent clients that could download multiple torrents in one client didn’t come till later and were a pretty big deal

Beve Stuscemi
Jun 6, 2001




Man that brings back memories

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

shoeberto posted:

lol, that brings back memories of typing in the dial-up credentials every single time. I was like 8 or 9 and got very good at doing it very fast.

Our regional dialup ISP was called bright.net. Remember regional ISPs? What a time.

yeah mine was ULTRANET

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?
The first time I learned about Aspergers was from reading an interview with the dude that created BitTorrent, forget his name now. Wonder what he's up to these days.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

shoeberto posted:

The first time I learned about Aspergers was from reading an interview with the dude that created BitTorrent, forget his name now. Wonder what he's up to these days.

still very much in the business of filling up your storage with poo poo

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD
Jul 7, 2012

shoeberto posted:

The first time I learned about Aspergers was from reading an interview with the dude that created BitTorrent, forget his name now. Wonder what he's up to these days.
yup same here

polyester concept
Mar 29, 2017


memories downloading south park episodes for my 32" CRT television hooked up to my PC via s-video in 2004.

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
if i could get one of those 1080 HD CRT tvs for watching videos on i probably would, would be great out in the shop

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?

polyester concept posted:

memories downloading south park episodes for my 32" CRT television hooked up to my PC via s-video in 2004.

I think it might have been summer of '04 when my parents finally decided to buy AC, and we just upgraded to broadband, and I discovered torrents, and we had a laptop with s-video out, and it was cool as gently caress. Probably the best summer of my life. Just riding bikes and hanging out with my friends during the day, playing video games, and then chilling out watching random-rear end anime on a big TV, and not sweating my rear end off the whole time.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Playing Warcraft 2 against my buddy with a direct modem connection. Having to put his actual phone number and the modem init string (AT&F1) into the game

Mr.Radar
Nov 5, 2005

You guys aren't going to believe this, but that guy is our games teacher.
HP's The Machine with ~memristors~

Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


Sagebrush posted:

Playing Warcraft 2 against my buddy with a direct modem connection. Having to put his actual phone number and the modem init string (AT&F1) into the game

Your soundcard works perfectly.

Zlodo
Nov 25, 2006
playing a japanese version of fantasy star online on the Dreamcast, which involved using my Amiga as router to change the IP packets TTL on the fly because the Dreamcast sent them with a TTL that was too low to make it to the japanese servers from france

I did this by patching the amiga tcp stack (Miami) directly in memory with an assembly program

a friend had an even worse setup where he directly linked the Dreamcast modem to a us robotics PC modem with a RJ12 cable and made the PC modem listen to incoming connection (i had the Dreamcast ethernet thing myself). The PC was running Linux and we did the TTL patching thing by directly hacking the kernel source, checking for a hard coded address to see if the packet was coming from his dreamcast

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

Zlodo posted:

playing a japanese version of fantasy star online on the Dreamcast, which involved using my Amiga as router to change the IP packets TTL on the fly because the Dreamcast sent them with a TTL that was too low to make it to the japanese servers from france

I did this by patching the amiga tcp stack (Miami) directly in memory with an assembly program

a friend had an even worse setup where he directly linked the Dreamcast modem to a us robotics PC modem with a RJ12 cable and made the PC modem listen to incoming connection (i had the Dreamcast ethernet thing myself). The PC was running Linux and we did the TTL patching thing by directly hacking the kernel source, checking for a hard coded address to see if the packet was coming from his dreamcast

ok this is real cool nerd poo poo

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

mediaphage posted:

if i could get one of those 1080 HD CRT tvs for watching videos on i probably would, would be great out in the shop

i don't think any consumer crts actually had the dot pitch to fully resolve a 1080 signal. those "super fine pitch" sony models from the mid-00s came the closest with ~1400 horizontal lines, but that's it

crts have been out of the mainstream for long enough now that people forget just how huge and heavy they were, not to mention that larger ones in particular had a lot of image problems: convergence, geometry, overscan, etc... plus, anything you find now would be 15+ years old and basically on borrowed time. oh, and when that 200lb+ hunk of glass does die, the number of places that actually take crts for disposal is approaching zero, so the only way to get rid of it is to have a friend help you toss it into some random dumpster in the middle of the night

surprisingly, smaller crts actually seem to be worth more than the large ones as retro gamers can still play things authentically and don't have to worry about someone getting seriously injured or dying if you need to move it

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

The_Franz posted:

i don't think any consumer crts actually had the dot pitch to fully resolve a 1080 signal. those "super fine pitch" sony models from the mid-00s came the closest with ~1400 horizontal lines, but that's it

crts have been out of the mainstream for long enough now that people forget just how huge and heavy they were, not to mention that larger ones in particular had a lot of image problems: convergence, geometry, overscan, etc... plus, anything you find now would be 15+ years old and basically on borrowed time. oh, and when that 200lb+ hunk of glass does die, the number of places that actually take crts for disposal is approaching zero, so the only way to get rid of it is to have a friend help you toss it into some random dumpster in the middle of the night

surprisingly, smaller crts actually seem to be worth more than the large ones as retro gamers can still play things authentically and don't have to worry about someone getting seriously injured or dying if you need to move it

specifically the last gen were widescreen 1080i, which is what i meant.

i haven’t forgotten all the downsides, i just think they were still good at watching video on and playing some games. i enjoyed them.

here at least while you have to dispose of it yourself, it’s free to drop off at the ewaste recyclers.

polyester concept
Mar 29, 2017

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

ok this is real cool nerd poo poo

yeah wtf nobody actually knows how to do that poo poo

polyester concept
Mar 29, 2017

also when i was a kid (probably not now, hearing loss) I could hear the whine from any CRT when it was turned on. If the TV was on mute and I was in the other room, I could tell you if it was switched on or not. seemed like a cool superpower at the time but it was probably not very uncommon.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

Zlodo posted:

playing a japanese version of fantasy star online on the Dreamcast, which involved using my Amiga as router to change the IP packets TTL on the fly because the Dreamcast sent them with a TTL that was too low to make it to the japanese servers from france

I did this by patching the amiga tcp stack (Miami) directly in memory with an assembly program


Nice. I remember a dark age in broadband where ISPs figured out they could sniff packet TTL coming out of your connection, if it was 63 you were using their (obviously lovely) router, if it was 62 you were using it as a bridge and using your own router which they got real mad at. Solution was to pop some iptables rules into your router to +1 the TTL

Agile Vector
May 21, 2007

scrum bored



polyester concept posted:

also when i was a kid (probably not now, hearing loss) I could hear the whine from any CRT when it was turned on. If the TV was on mute and I was in the other room, I could tell you if it was switched on or not. seemed like a cool superpower at the time but it was probably not very uncommon.

same here. it wanes with age, and loud noises, so it can stick around for a while!

last time i was near a crt has been so long i probably wouldn't have noticed when my hearing range shifted down. i didn't go too lots of concerts when i was younger, but that changed a few year back before covid stopped live shows

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Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
oh that reminds me of the fad where kids were using a text notification ringtone that was just a 16khz sine wave that teachers couldn't hear lmao

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