Re: Geek Warning, was Re: plant auction pre-board notes

[DonaldR <gsmd_bari@yahoo.com>]

Hey,
Maybe Rick could put a big barcode on all the members badges, so when
we attend a meeting, the board could keep a statistical record of who
and how many members are actually there each month.  A routine could
also generate a random code to spit out automatically the FOTM winners
for the week!  Sorry, I have free time during lunch ;-)

--- Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, DonaldR wrote:
> 
> > I don't have a laptop but would like to volunteer again to man a
> > computer.  What kind of bar code readers will we get.  I remember
> some
> > of the old "Mousey" looking ones didn't always work easily?
> > -Don Rudee
> 
> Oh boy are you in for a treat Don.  I have been scouring EBay and
> becoming
> a regular barcode FREAK in the last couple months, and now have a
> small
> arsenal consisting of four "gun-style" laser scanners and two
> CCD-based
> scanners.  Most of these plug into the keyboard port on the laptop
> (like
> the crappy cuecats did).  Some laptops had problems with these
> "keyboard
> wedge" devices and required an actual keyboard to be plugged in as
> well.  
> So voila!  I found a deal on small numeric keypads, four for about
> $10, so
> problem solved.  Some computers don't have keyboard ports anymore, so
> I
> found some cheap USB keyboard adapters.
> 
> The other two scanners plug into the serial port (RS-232), but I've 
> written a tiny utility that turns them into keystrokes, so in reality
> 
> those two have less bulky hardware to deal with.
> 
> Oh, another cool thing I added was that the labels now include a 
> "checksum" character which reduces the odds of mistyping a label
> number 
> should a scanner not be working.  So in last year's system, you could
> type 
> "G1023" to get generic item 1023 entered.  But if you typed "G1024"
> by 
> mistake it took it just fine.  Now there's an extra letter at the end
> 
> that's different for each item, so it might be "G1023B" but if you
> entered 
> "G1024B" it will say that it's an invalid number.  
> 
> Anyway, my hopes here are that we'll solve the remaining little bit
> of
> mis-entered information.  At a minimum, I'm sure more little kids
> will 
> want to run the computers so they can use the laser guns to scan 
> everything.
> 
>   - Erik
> 
> -- 
> Erik Olson
> erik at thekrib dot com
> 
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