BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP

I came to the decision the other day to homogenize the ISBNs in my manga Library to the newer 13 digit ones. Seeing as how about half the list had 10 digit ISBNs and half had 13 digit ISBNs. I switched over to typing in the 13's the other year but left all the old 10 digit entries because it would be too much of a pain to re-type them back in. The solution?, buy a scan gun to read the bar codes. I picked a "Unitech MS 180-UG". Good choice for several reasons: It was cheep, about 40 bucks; USB interface, your computer sees it as a standard keyboard, no funky setup, straight plug & play. The down sides: it uses a diffused LED array with a CCD so the range is only a couple of inches (like I need to scan the book from 10 feet away). They do make ones that can do that but they cost a couple hundred dollars. The other odd thing is how you change the settings in the gun, it does not come with any software, you can download it from the manufacturers web site but I could not get it to work (didn't recognize the gun). any way, stick with the operators manual, it's filled with bar codes for what ever you want to do. If you want to change a setting you just zap that bar code and vahla. Pretty easy once you figure it out. I got the PDF version of it off their site and copy-pasted the bar code commands I needed to another page in order like a cheet sheet. There were two basic things I wanted it to do, Either send the ISBN and then send an ENTER command or send the ISBN and sent a TAB command. I set the bar codes in order for each setting and printed it out on an inkjet, worked great. The commands were like this:
Enter Menu 5 > Change Postamble to... > (Enter) > Exit Menu
Enter Menu 5 > Change Postamble to... > (TAB) > Exit Menu

Then off to the bookshelf I went. I got a 4 foot USB extension cable (it has a 6 foot cable) so that gave me a 10 foot range from the USB port on my computer so I could stand on a step ladder with the gun and scan books on the top shelf to the bottom shelf without having to take them down, scan them, then put them back. I did all the way from A-M today and will probably be finished this weekend without getting carpal tunnel syndrome and eye strain from trying to read ever decreasingly small numbers and pecking them out on the keyboard, I don't type very fast and I have noticed that publishers are gradually decreasing the size of the font for the ISBNs. The books I have that are around 10 years old have about a 10-11 point font, the ones that are about 5 years old are around a 7-8 point font, and the new ones coming out now are around 5.5-6 points in size. You almost need a magnifying glass to read them.

Claymore volume 14
Fruits Basket volume 22
Maid Sama! volume 1
Maid War Chronicle volume 1
Negima! volume 22
Princess Resurrection volume 6
Tetragrammation Labyrinth volume 5
Trinity Blood volume 10