Robots
Kitty Cat Hitches Ride on Back of a Roomba
Posted by Elaine Chow at 12:50 PM on November 19, 2008
If there's anything that makes me squeal like a little girl on a pixie stick high, it's watching videos of pets playing with gadgets. This little kitty uses the family Roomba as its own amusement park ride, presumably vacuuming up the mess it sheds everyday on the side. I'm not sure how they managed to get it so close to something so noisy--my own cat freaks out every time the doorbell rings. [Neatorama]

Do you have a cat who loves to jump on your kitchen counter and eat your plant? If so, you have a couple of solutions. You could do something mild, like putting double-sided tape on the counters to deter it. Or, if you're more adventurous, you could set up a motion detector that's set to turn on a strobe light and a blender when your cat makes the jump, scaring the crap out of it until it learns its lesson. Guess which one we have videos of after the jump?
Apparently, your cat enjoys it when a soft, vibrating material is rubbed against it. That's why this vibrating pet glove exists. When your cat feels lonely and just needs a tender touch, slip on the vibrating pet glove and give it the massage it so desires. It even wipes clean with a damp cloth if your cat is wet or dirty. It uses 3 AAA batteries, and it totally doesn't look like a vibrator, so you can just leave it sitting out and not worry about your mum popping over to visit and making your feel uncomfortable. I mean it, uh, doesn't look like a regular pet brush. [
Most of the time, riding a motorcycle makes you look awesome. The exception to this rule? Riding around on the CAT 1 Über-bike, a motorcycle designed by Lee J. Rowland that has you riding around on the back of a gigantic fiberglass jaguar. I'm sure it's an amazing bike, what with its 1200cc Buell 97 S3 Thunderbolt engine and custom air intakes and exhaust system, but come on: you'd look like a total jackass on this thing. And for $US567,000 (!!), I'd better look like James f'ing Dean when I hit the road. [
You might call it overkill, but one modder decided to do a little work to his stock litter box. He equipped it with a ventilation system that's triggered by a motion detector. Five minutes after the cat uses the facilities, the fan kicks on for fifteen minutes (as prompted by the Mac Mini home automation system that the litter box is connected to). The result? Less cat smell, but his guests still talk about his strange cat obsession on the way home from the party. [
I'm no curator, but these two air-dry clay cat sculptures, merged by mere fluorescent tubing and wired up to glow like the heavens, make me want to start a museum entirely filled with sci-fi animals locked in deadly combat.
Luckily, my cat was always too dumb to make the connection between the faucet and fresh water, so she's made do thus far with just sipping from her water dish. But I've heard that once kitties taste from the tap, they never want to go back. For running water addicted cats, MAKE contributor tsruzik has constructed a pretty ingenious automatic cat faucet using an IR sensor and some tubing.