Got home this evening and decided to tackle the knocking noise in the automatic litter box that’s in my bedroom. It’s a pretty remarkable device as litter boxes go. I can see the lot of you rolling your eyes at me, but it’s true. Basically, this is a large round bowl with a conveyor belt sticking into one side of it at an angle. A small electric motor spins the entire bowl about once every hour, and the poop and solidified chunks of pee are carried up the ramp and dropped into a plastic bag. No muss, no fuss. Really. See for yourself:
So the problem has been with the small motor that rotates the bowl. It’s a tiny little thing about the diameter of a fifty-cent piece; and, for whatever reason, it has developed a very slight knocking. Unfortunately, that slight knocking is passed from the motor and amplified through a series of four gears (the last one being the bowl itself) and has become rather loud.
After spending 30 minutes ripping the entire setup apart, I managed to get to the motor, which was caked with litter dust (no surprise there), but otherwise seemed to be completely clean. I’d been hoping that a good cleaning would be all it needed, but after blowing it off and putting some magic oil on the gear, I was unable to stop the knocking completely. It’s a bit better, but still annoying.
So I moved on to Plan B, which consists of putting the stupid thing on a timer so that it only comes on for 1 out of every 8 hours.
After solving that problem – at least at much as I’m going to solve it without buying a new motor – I turned my attention to my old laptop, which continues to irritate me because I’m easy to irritate and because it isn’t perfect. So far I’ve tried to install about 5 different flavors of Linux on it (with limited success); but, since Linux can’t play Netflix, I really need for it to be running Windows.
It’s a fairly old laptop. I think I bought it in around 2004. For some reason, its wireless hardware is not recognized by Windows 7. Though I’ve managed to install Win7 on it twice, I have not yet been able to get the wireless up. To anyone smirking and feeling all superior, YES, I’ve looked for drivers all over the place. It’s not the software, it’s the hardware. Eventually, I may pull the wifi stuff out of a busted HP that’s sitting on my desk and see if it’ll work with the Dell.
At any rate, Win7 isn’t going to work. So tonight I put Windows Vista (Ultimate) on it. Everything seems to work fine, but it may be a bit too much for the processor. When I tried watching Netflix at full-screen, the video was choppy. This may have been because AVG (anti-virus) was hogging all of the cpu cycles or it may not have been. Whatever. Tomorrow night, I’ll put WinXP on it and see if it’s happy with that.
Stupid Netflix. If they’d just come up with a player for Linux, I wouldn’t have to deal with all this crap.
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| Took this at Chattanooga last season and have no place to use it. Might as well throw it in here. |
TWD