Asklemmy

43908 readers

1308 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

239

What’s the worst piece of technology you’ve ever owned? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

360 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (4 children)

The Cuecat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Came at a time when there weren't barcodes everywhere and QR codes didn't exist yet. Companies had to publish Cuecat specific barcodes, it was much easier to just type in the URL by the time you figured out you could use it at all.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The man who holds the patent legally changed his name after it failed so he wouldn't be associated with it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Went down the rabbit hole on this guy a bit. He went on to participate in the CyberNinjas audit of Arizona's ballots after the 2020 election. He claimed to have technology that could detect whether ballots had been folded in the mail, and claimed to detect bamboo in "fraudulent Chinese ballots".

He was such a kook, the other kooks rejected him.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can cut one leg off an IC on the board and it becomes a regular barcode reader.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

It also looks vaguely like a dildo, which is cool.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I completely forgot these existed until you just mentioned it!

I think I still have one somewhere in a box of "I might need this" along with a parallel port ZIP drive and a bunch of FireWire cables.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Ha, I had one and it's what first came to mind too. Pretty useless.