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Most useless

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Deozaan:
1) Maybe.

2) Pretty much anything from my nephews and nieces, or as I like to call them, my "monkeys." (From the phrase "a monkey's uncle.") It's really nice that they like me enough to want to give me something they hold dear to them, but those things are usually pretty useless. Old toys or things I have no interest in.

Also pretty much anything my grandma has gotten me for Christmas the past several years. Expensive looking Cookie Jars, Snow Villages, etc. They're not exactly useless items themselves, but I never use them and thus far have no intent on doing so. In fact I think they're still boxed up somewhere at my parents' house, since I never bring them home with me after the holidays. Once again, I appreciate the sentiment, but in my opinion the items are a waste of her money and a waste of my (or my parents, as the case may be) space.

3) Two things I can think of, actually:

3.A) I bought a 15-in-1 media card reader and it never worked properly. At least not for SD cards, which are the only things I've tried.

3.B) I also got a retractable USB extension cable, but anything I plug in through it isn't recognized.

I think the real question is: Why do I still have them in my computer parts box?

Target:
I acquired 3 brand new (still wrapped!!) 250M ZIP disks some years ago.  They sat in my junk box until a recent move (and a ruthless cull of the junk), even though I've never owned a zip drive (or even knew anyone who did...)

Target

oldfart:
1. Yes
2. When I was six or seven, my uncle and aunt had four kids the same age range as our family so they decided to do a gift exchange and each would buy for the other's children.  Dad found some remote control cars.  This was in the fifties so they weren't radio controlled, they had a five foot cable running from the control to the car but I thought they were the neatest things I'd ever seen.  Evidently my dad liked them too because he decided we should test them before gifting them.  We played with them for a week or more before putting them back into their packaging and wrapping them up.
I just knew that dad would have told Uncle Cliff what we had for them and I was sure that good ole Uncle Cliff would take care of me in a similar manner.  You can imagine my utter disgust when we opened gifts Christmas Eve and they had gotten us matching sweatshirts with our names on the back.  I was mortified.  Clothes!  Never in my adult life have I ever given a child clothes for a gift. 
3. This wasn't a gift but a freebie from, I believe, Wired Magazine.  About ten years ago they came out with a device called a "Cat".  You plugged it into your computer and if you passed it over an ad in the magazine or a bar code it was supposed to take you to the web site for the company that produced the product you had scanned.  They hyped the device for several months before it died a well deserved death.  I still have mine, still in the never opened  package it came in.  Anyone interested in purchasing an interesting piece of Americana?  ;)

suleika:
Those "cats" are still useful actually: see LibraryThing.  I have one.

2. Ornaments and coffe-table books.

3. A fancy mouse mat pad from a museum shop - neither ball nor optical mice could cope with it.

Jimdoria:
Oh, the :Cue Cat! Yeah, I've got two of them. There's a cool hardware hack where you wire together two holes on the circuit board and the thing turns into a regular barcode reader. I did this quite recently when I had a project that required barcode scanning. Worked like a charm.

Digital Convergence's death certainly was well deserved. They were a scummy company. Was it really ten years ago? Yipe!

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