You know that cat’s litterbox can become potentially dangerous to your health with its deadly fumes, especially for pregnant women.  Now, here’s a cool way to make a self-ventilating cat litterbox so you don’t have to worry about all that invisible bad-for-your-health fumes.

I recently saw a post on Apartment Therapy showing a homemade “Cat Jet” ventilation solution (http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/at-email/tools-for-pet-living-the-cat-jet-and-the-roomba-email-from-9108-062199) using a bathroom fan to vent the noxious fumes of a litter box from the inside of the house to the outside. As a home automation geek I immediately was inspired to take it up a notch by combining similar hardware to a series of timers.

Behold: Alan’s Automated Cat Jet! Total Cost? $80.

Consisting of one bathroom fan, one bathroom vent kit, one Smarthome Appliance module, and my home automation system, Alan’s Automated Cat Jet shows once again that with technology, anything is possible.

via bb gadgets

Okay, here’s something fun for the memorial weekend.  Goto your browser and type a character such as “A” or “B” or any other ASCII characters.

(Did you know that most characters default to Google search while “e” defaults to EOnline.com?)

If you find any other cool websites that come on on the new Firefox 3 (yes, you should be using this browser), leave a comment.

Happy Memorial Weekend, we will be back on Tuesday to get going again on tech posts. (I hear bunch of parties going on at my apartment as I write this now.  It’s the first weeks of school at SFSU)

Recently, I have been actually looking for a table to buy a table for a small spot that needs one.  With this DIY, I will be able to make a new small table with some of my old magazines I’d throw away eventually anyways.

I like the concept, of re-using magazines for DIY furnitue design.  The most amazing part is that it requires very little hardware.

If there’s anything we have too many of in our apartment, it’s magazines and plants. So we solved the problem by re-purposing six magazines (and that’s all you need–no glue or scissors required!) into this plant stand. It took about ten minutes. Here’s how…

via re-nest

Here’s a great DIY on how to make Ping Pong Lights!  Actually, the “idea” or the “concept” is very creative.

At some point last semester I realized that ping pong balls make great diffusers and look really cool when they are glowing. Next we concluded that a hundred glowing ping pong balls would look even cooler. It was at about this point I decided that my apartment was in dire need of some ping pong ball lights.

via instructables

(Your computer will be faster and more reliable using Windows XP vs. Vista)

After testing out Windows Vista on one of my 6 PCs laying around my apartment, I finally decided it was time to scrap Vista for Windows XP.

Well, it turns out my HP a6040n desktop I bought off the shelf at Fry’s sucked at downgrading to XP. Why?

You go to HP’s driver downloads and they don’t even have XP drivers. I think HP has to at least put the specs of all the parts on their site. I had to open up the case and track down the motherboard, and then found a generic Intel ethernet driver just to get the internet working.

What a hassle. I love HP computers but this was probably the worst experience. (Well, I could’ve called their tech support but I am too lazy.)

Another problem I encountered? Basically I got one of those blue screen of death because the harddrive is set to “RAID” on BIOS setup and Windows XP cannot detect that unless you got a driver for it.

So all I did was set the settings back to “IDE” on BIOS setup and the blue screen of death disappeared. Wala!
(Trust me, you really don’t need RAID unless you are thinking about running bunch of servers.)

I also did some research and found you can also completely re-format your harddrive using DBAN. Although it took me some 6 hours to DBAN my HP harddrive, it was worth it. DBAN is great if your harddrive seems to be protected or whatever. Just nuke it and go along.
I also made sure to re-partition with room for Ubuntu, which I will be installing next on this experimental PC.

I used to run all Linux computers with VMware running windows on it. It did pretty good and my computer never gave me a blue screen of death. All I had to do was reboot the Virtual Machine but I might be headed down that path again soon.

Now I feel so good, it feels like I really flushed that “hard stool” that was sitting in my gut for 6 months.

Good bye Vista!

Next up we will be covering a step-by-step transition on how to install Ubuntu and use VMware to experience a new way to access the internet. Of couse, if you get bored of our tutorials, you can always go buy a Mac, we like Macs too. (they are unix based, which is pretty much a fancy Linux machine really)

You should also check out the Vista-XP parody ad we made couple months earlier.

Yey, it’s been rainin’ crazy here in San Fran. I saw 2 car accidents right in front of my apartment. But here’s a great way to make use of your umbrella and turn it into a “fun” device.

This unique, funnel shaped umbrella harnesses the flow of rainwater down into its handle, a water pistol. The user can fire at will, maintaining a constant flow of water as long as rain continues to fall.

via HackNMod

Lol…here’s a DIY that will help you get away from the computer. Well, after this post, I am going to the beach baby! (great thing the Pacific Ocean is only 5 minutes away from my apartment) When we come back from the beach walking my girlfriend’s brother’s dog (that we have been dog-sitting for couple days), I will post some videos of the Pacific Ocean so don’t get jealous. :p Peace OUT!

Plan specific activities away from your computer
If you don’t plan specific activities for whilst you’re away from the computer, then you are much more likely to fall into the trap of aimless surfing or playing Solitaire when you have spare time to kill or just need a break from the work.

via Lifehacker

If you want to hide your wires and cables, but at the same the same to you may wish it a small bit of New England charm to your place.

If that is so then look no further than this picket fence idea that skirts around the bottom of the wall and at the same time hides all of those nasty looking cables. This may not work in a really modern apartment, but in a nice older type property which has a bit of character, then this could be right for you and your home.

You really need to have base boards or as we call them skirting boards once the picket fence panel is place onto the base board this will create a space which is ideal for all types of cable and wire. This is just an idea at the moment, but it quite possibly could go into production.

Source [Oh Gizmo]

Get yourself a couple of sheets of this word search wallpaper and you or your guests will never be bored again.

Naturally you would need to put this on a wall in a room where you spend a lot of time, possibly sitting down facing a wall and it’s a room that every home and work places has, if you know what I mean!

I would love to see this in practice, just to see some of the words that people could find. In which case I also hope that the wallpaper can be wiped clean.

Source [Apartment Therapy]