This has got to be the dumbest…I have visions of dimes and paper clips worming their way through to fall onto the motherboard. :rolleyes:
The CueCat is in the running, both because it was horribly mishandled and because it solved a problem nobody had and, to this day, nobody has. Here is a contemporary take on the utter inanity surrounding this piece of junk.
I have an Acer minitower case that came equipped with a storage drawer like that right next to the drive bays. The perfect place to keep a pair of ear buds, a USB cable, and a bluetooth dongle for synching my cell phone.
That same case has the hard drive rails mounted facing the side of the case instead of the front. Makes it wicked easy to mount/dismount drives.
Bitchin’ ideas, not stupid at all.
You want a stupid accessory? Try this one.
I came in here specifically expecting to see this thing. It may not have been in the OP, but at least I’m not disappointed that it was in the first reply. It definitely has my vote as the stupidest PC accessory.
As for the OP, I think it’s a good idea, and the problem you mention of anything slipping through can easily be solved by ensuring that the thing is fully enclosed. It’s clear that that the top is enclosed, and I don’t see why the bottom and back wouldn’t be. If that’s the case, while I wouldn’t bother with it, if you have things like ear buds, cd wipes, floppies, etc. it would be a convenient place to store them, especially since most of us probably have more 5.25" bays than we know what to do with. I think I have four slots on my PC at home, and I’m using one for a DVD-R/CD-R combo. How could the majority of users out there posisbly use up all those bays?
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/85b6/
Someone must be buying these but they don’t do anything for me.
That’s priceless. I’d never heard of it.
I really think that Wired magazine must have the largest percentage of gee-whiz-this-stuff-is-awesome retards of any organization associated with the modern tech sector. Their breathless, uncritical excitement about anything new and untested is lame; i’m not surprised they were involved with something as crap as this.
Up until this moment, my vote was going with the Cue Cat.
I have one of these. A few years ago I purchased a program called ReaderWare which allows me to catalog my books, CDs, and DVDs by scanning the barcode on them. It automatically does an online search using the scanned barcode to obtain info on the item in question. They included a free :CueCat with the CD for me to use as a barcode reader. Much faster than typing in the UPN code.
Two DVD drives to copy G-d knows what, a floppy and a zip drive. Hey, I didn’t configure them, I just work on them. 
What about a lovely coffee holder.
No. Seriously. Someone sold one. That looks like a CD-ROM drive.
Don’t we have enough trouble already with the people making the stupid mistake to add people making honest mistakes?
Hehe…someone sent me a CueCat in my White Elephant last year. I opened the box and screamed, “Oh, my god! They sent me a CueCat!” and supervenusfreak looked at me like I was speaking Swahili…
OK, to be fair to the CueCat, it is possible to make it useful. And the drama surrounding the privacy issues, “declawing” it, and the corporate reaction to the “declawing” was damn tasty for a while. (In brief: Each CueCat has a PIN in hardware it sent along with each barcode to Digital Convergence’s website. It was very easy to disable this, “declawing” the Cat, by modifying the hardware. When information on “declawing” was posted online, Digital Convergence went apeshit and the information spread far and wide. Barbara Streisand could sympathize.)
Nevertheless, it was stupid largely because of the demented business model Digital Convergence was trying to jumpstart. The CueCat is what happens when old-school print media marketers see themselves slowly falling into irrelevance.
Hey! I have one of those! I use it to scan ISBNs into Readerware. It works fine.
On preview: I see I’m not the only person who got a CueCat with their Readerware.
Until I saw this post, I figured that the stupidest accessory was going to the #1 item from this list. Though the others on that list are worthy runners up.
(USB heated gloves?)
A local computer shop has a PC with a car-type cigarette lighter in a drive bay.
Considering what most people are looking at with their computers most of the time, that USB vibrator seems pretty useful, actually.
I’ve seen lots of gadgets advertised like humping dogs and warmers. The worst product to date has to be the cue cat for the reason listed and I find it an ugly eye sore. Stick to a wand people, not an amorphous cat blob.
I still remember people that put cd’s in their 5 1/2" floppy drives. Retailers please don’t encourage people to buy things that will damage the computer, when they have an oops moment.
I bought a small halogen lamp to help warm up my mouse and desktop in the morning (building and grounds took away my space heater because it kept triping breakers).
I know one guy that wears finger less gloves in the morning.
I surprised there isn’t a computer mouse that looks like a real mouse. The little ears could be the buttons.
Or a cat for that matter.
Oh, never mind here ya go…
http://www.bloganything.net/558/computer-mouse-that-looks-like-real-mice
I am really looking forward to retirement.