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Comment by 6502nerdface | Hacker News Reader

I remember back when Slashdot was cool (i.e., 2002), there was a post [0] about a guy who built [1] a cat-door with attached camera and software that could detect whether the cat was carrying something in its mouth, and only allow the cat to enter the house if not.

[0] http://slashdot.org/story/24258

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175311/http://quantumpic...

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Let's not forget another back-in-the-old-days Slashdot favorite, the Bender Defender! The guy that built a cat motion detector in Linux and used it to trigger a blender and strobe lights!

http://www.plasma2002.com/blenderdefender/

What makes this even better is that they didn't give it a way to deal with false positives - like friends visiting and getting a glass of water.

"It's a feature not a bug."

It's probably easier to find something smelly the cat hates (Like a vapour rub), and place that where you don't want the cat to go.

I understand that this is taboo, but I am utterly baffled as to why I lost karma for this.

Creating a system to traumatise a cat is objectively more harmful than making areas you don't want a cat to go repulsive to the cat.

I've seen the latter method work beautifully with nervous cats, kittens, older cats, etc. Whereas I would have reservations about using the former method with those types of cats because it serves to be startling and traumatic to a cat.

I didn't downvote, but it's probably because you were splitting hairs on what is more of a Rube Golberg solution to an obviously simple problem. Not many people are taking it that as a serious cat training solution.

Flo Control! Yes! The daily picture archives on the site were great. I especially liked the ones where other neighborhood animals (a skunk and a raccoon, if memory serves) tried to get in and were denied admittance.

Long live CmdrTaco. Avid slashdot reader since '98.

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