Pen tablets and :CueCats

I broke down and bought a pen tablet. I have a very old Wacom 4x5, but wanted something a little bit bigger. I would love to have another Wacom, but at well over $200 on sale, that isn't going to happen any time soon.


I ended up getting a Genius Mousepen 8x6. It isn't a Wacom, but for $50, it's plenty good enough. I spent about ten minutes installing software and setting up — that could have been cut to five minutes if I'd bothered to read the instructions, but so what. It's going to be a handy tool for me and I'm looking forward to doing some real illustration using a pen instead of my beloved Microsoft trackball.

Speaking of the trackball, I wish someone at Microsoft would get a clue and start making these again. You can buy them on eBay, but they usually go for about $100 used, and closer to $200 new. The fit for my crooked mangled hands could not be better.

Today's mail brought me a :CueCat. Remember when these were given away at Radio Shack? The downside then was that the software was essentially spyware and compromised any security you might have thought you had on your computer. These days, they've been hacked and reconfigured to be a basic barcode scanner. I plugged it in, waited about thirty seconds for the driver to load, and scanned a few things into a text editor. It worked perfectly. Why would I want one? Because I have at least a thousand books I can catalog, several hundred CDs and a hundred or so DVDs. By scanning the barcode, I can create a database of my library and not have to type it all in one piece at a time. Woohoo!!