he thinks he's so clever

[trochee]

I bought a :CueCat from LibraryThing last week. It arrived today, and I plugged it into my Ubuntu desktop at home.

I happily entered several dozen books with it, but I was mildly annoyed by the crappy-encrypted output (though LT seems to handle it fine).

So I looked it up on the web and found this tutorial to "neutering" your CueCat. I opened it up, took a very sharp knife, and cut pin 5 to that chip.

Now it doesn't do anything at all. No, that's not true: it still validates to the computer as a USB keyboard device, but it doesn't seem to output any text.

Graah.

I've just bought another one (LibraryThing needs the money, so I don't feel bad about it) but I'm annoyed with myself. (If I can fix this, I'll give the new one away to somebody.)

I suppose I could take it in to the lab and see if someone will solder pin 5 back together for me. Also, I should try it on another computer -- ideally another OS. Perhaps I'll ask imtboo if I can try it on her WinXP laptop.

Comments

[esk.livejournal.com]

whoa synchronicity. i JUST ordered a cuecat from librarything today...and was reading that "neutering" tutorial a few hours ago. weird! i really want to try cutting that pin, though...

[trochee.livejournal.com]

hope it works out better for you than for me. It wasn't hard to do, but I seem to have messed it up.

I used a hobby knife to cut the pin; someone else on the LT blog suggested using nail-clippers, and it worked for them. I'm hoping there will be a fix for me but I can't see how I'll get it fixed right now.

[evan.livejournal.com]

Turns out that the "encrypted" output is easily decipherable without cuttng pins. I remember finding the algorithm and writing it in under a dozen lines of Perl back in high school.

[esk.livejournal.com]

yeah, that "decryption" is built into librarything too, so it can read the input directly from an unmodified cuecat. still, i like gettin' clean data from cheap little hardware :)