Pro-Ketch MouseTrap Review

Several years ago I had a mouse in my apartment. Being sadly catless, I found myself being awoken every night by skitterings and chewings. Every night, mulling over different mouse trap concepts in my head.

You see, the mousetrap is a sort of DIY right of passage into inventorhood. It pits the wits of man against those of mouse. Mano a mouseo.

After awaking one night to find the little bastard dragging one of my candles away, I started building. What I ended up with was a contraption built of cardboard boxes, fishing wights, levers and brass tubing. It was hardly Alcatraz, but it was effective enough as long as I got to it quickly after it was sprung.

Catching the little guy came with quite a feeling of accomplishment (and relief). I can’t stand poisons. My neighbors once put out some poison only to have the rat die in my wall. It stunk for months. Poisons come with a horrible death and I worry about the risk of the mouse staggering off only to be eaten by a pet.

The other day we started hearing a scrabbling and squeaking coming from the attic. It’s all full of insulation, so tossing the cats up there wasn’t going to be effective. My previous cobbled together solution wasn’t going to hold up long enough to do the job, and I really didn’t know what manner of animal I was dealing with, so I went shopping.

I started under the assumption that I had a roof rat. Unfortunately, the only rat traps I could find were either big electrocuting steel jawed death machines, glue traps, or really poorly made havahart-style traps, but there was a really great mouse trap at Harbor Freight.

The Pro-Ketch(pictured above) is a bit bigger than an old timey video cassette and has two cleverly designed entrances. It’s designed to be put along a wall to appeal to the natural tendency for rodents to run along the edges. It supposedly doesn’t need bait, and is made of steel with a clear plastic window in the top. The entrances have a steel ramp that see-saws on a central hinge. Laying over the bottom of this ramp sits another smaller one, hinged at the base. When the rodent is climbing the ramp, it is standing on the secondary ramp, but when it steps off, it is already past the central pivot of the first ramp and things start to tip, lifting the second ramp to block the exit. Going the rest of the way into the trap causes the smaller ramp to push the main ramp back into the original position, thus priming the trap to catch any addition rodents that are attracted by the first.

I only have tro complaints about the Pro-Ketch trap. First of all, while it comes in a few configurations for location, it really only comes for one size of rodent: small. Second, it doesn’t have a latching mechanism. There isn’t much to stop a mouse from just pushing open the whole lid.

After mostly unsuccessful attempts for a couple nights with various bait, I baited the trap with sunflower butter, putting a thin row of it up each ramp, and a bigger glob in the inside of the trap. I also added a rubber band to ensure it stayed closed. This did the trick almost immediately. Within a couple hours I had caught my mouse and could hear her trying to chew her way out of the metal box. It turns out she was just a cute little house mouse making a lot of racket.

And what became of our unwanted guest? We went for a little walk a few blocks away, where she will now likely be frequenting the home of a particularly irritating neighbor.

There is another nearly identical version of this trap (available with very quick shipping via amazon), the Tin Cat by Victor. Or you could build your own.

Advertising With Houseflies

Advertising with flies has to be simultaneously one of the ingenious and disturbing marketing tactics in history. Watch the above video of the Frankfurt book fair to see unsuspecting people’s minds blown as a house fly buzzes by trailing a tiny red advertising banner like one of those planes at the beach. I don’t know how effective it would be once the novelty wore off, but in this instance, there were bookworms aplenty stalking flies with their fancy digital cameras, hoping to get a picture. If you have the kind of business where any publicity is good publicity (check your spam box), then this may be your next gimmick.

Before you run off to rile up PETA, the flies were supposedly not harmed, and were only attached by a small amount of wax which fell off in time. You might think I’m kidding about PETA, but they already went after Barack Obama earlier this year for swatting a fly that landed on his arm. I’m not a fan of cruelty to insects, but a swatted fly is hardly cause for a national incident.

I wonder if this adverfliesing was inspired by the recent Bill Gates talk where he released a swarm of mosquitoes on the crowd at the beginning of his speech about the death toll of malaria.

(via Geekologie)

Jedi Animals

The empire of cute animal sites continues to grow. Sometimes the domain name says it all. AnimalsWithLightSabers.com is a site that needed only be thought up to be a success.

The content is user driven, so if you have some animal pictures or a desire to brush up on your Photoshop skills with a fun little project, check it out and make a submission. I did.

Related Posts:

Upside Down Dogs

Inspiration Fail

Some ideas come in a sudden flash, as all of the pieces come together in your mind. This is great unless it happens at three in the morning waking up from a drunken stupor, as illustrated below:

Winkers Jeans. For those who would really like their butt to be the first thing people notice about them, and the last. This almost seemed like it had potential, but no, it’s just weird, and not in that good way.

Glowing toilet paper. Funny, but why not make something that isn’t a consumable glow, like the holder? It just seems like a good way to end up with people asking you why your butt is glowing.  (via Geekologie)

A scooter attached to your dog. There are so many accidents waiting to happen here I shudder to think of them all. (via Gizmodo)

Ahh, the never ending battle between people trying to price gouge captive consumers on their beer, and crafty(ish) guzzlers trying to find sneaky ways of smuggling in cheap beer. There have been some interesting attempts over the years, this is not one of them. You fill the seat with beer and then you can sit on it while you drink it, resulting in a cold butt and warm beer, followed by a warm butt on a hard seat. What happens when some lard ass sits on one of these and explodes beer all over the nearby populace? (Via CrunchGear)

This is a live-feed App for the IPhone called E-Mail and Walk. It turns your backgrond into a live view from the camera. This will be great to keep people from falling down manholes while texting. I think it will more often be used while driving. (Via TheRawFeed)

Biomutualisms

I’m not sure the term is going to catch on, being a bit too attached to the biological, but Robert Full uses the term biomutualism to describe the way multiple disciplines working on related projects can create design inspiration greater than the sum of its parts. He explains it by way of an example in his own studies on gecko adhesives, and how his cooperation with other disciplines is resulting in breakthroughs in materials sciences, biology, and robotics.

There is some great footage here of new discoveries relating to tails and how animals use them for everything from self-righting to guided flight. A must watch for anyone designing robots.

Whyfore?

There are times when inspiration comes, not from the craziest new gadget, but from something as simple as looking into the mind of a cat and having a good laugh. Kernal assists me in this fashion daily.

The feline in the video above makes me wonder if Schrödinger came up with his morbid and disturbing cat analogy after noticing that cats see the state of objects very differently than we do. They don’t see them as constant when not observed directly. After having seen what is in a box, if you move the box a foot, they will wonder anew, what might now be in the box?

In the below video, we have a cat absolutely consumed by the question of where the water goes when it flushes the toilet. The focus of their curiosity is legendary. What strikes me is how the owners always seem to feel the need to interrupt. The cat always has the same reaction. It looks at them like, “What are you laughing at? Do You mind? I’m trying to do this thing…”

Quorum Sensing and Swarmbot Design

 

In this Ted Talk video, Bonnie Bassler speaks about the inter and intra species communications between bacteria and how central they are to life and death on a greater scale. Bacteria were the designers of cellular communication, organization, and cooperation that are used throughout life on the planet. After unimaginable generations of evolution, they have achieved some very effective methods; methods which could be applied to anything from communication and cooperation between tiny swarms of robots, to replicationg and self regulating software routines, traffic regulation, automated disaster response….

She is focusing on Quorum sensing, which essentially refers to chemical hormones, both general and species specific, released by the bacteria in order to give them information about things like their population density and diversity. She has been working on synthetic false signals that will either inhibit or assist in quorum sensing in order to create a new class of antibiotic and probiotic treatments.

Robot Penguins: Festo does it again

 

Pengiuns sure do seem to be getting a lot of play in recent years. Festo has now targeted them for their latest aquatic and lighter than air robotics. They seem to be doing two versions of these, just like they did with their Robotic Jelly Fish. in their latest promotional video, they show off aquatic penguin robots which use sonar to navigate and communicate, some Mylar, lighter than air penguins reminiscent of that awesome Fin-Fish by LaChLuVe last year, and several other projects involving biomimicry and affordable rapid prototyping.

Update: Here is a video showcasing the air penguins

Update: And more footage of the robotic sea penguins:

Update: PDF file for the bionic aqua penguins with detailed specs, capabilities, and photos.

Don’t Piss Off Crows (mutually beneficial synanthropy)

I’ve always had a great admiration for crows. While other animals retreat from society, or scuttle around at night, crows embrace it and take an interest in finding ways to make the system work for them. I’ve witnessed them just down the street from my home using cars to crack walnuts. Most of the ways they have adapted society to their needs weren’t taught to them by people, they figured it out and taught their friends. 

Joshua Klein has shown himself to be smarter than the average crow, and if this works, the average person, by taking things one step further. He designed a vending machine for crows. They put in a coin, it spits out a peanut. He calls it mutually beneficial synanthropy. In the video (another great TED Talk) Klein explains how the system trains the crows. I don’t think this will be necessary. Once the first few learn how to use it, the whole continent will know in short order. Sure, it starts with picking up loose change they find lying around, but pretty soon you have murders of crows mugging people in dark alleys for their change so they can get their peanut fix. 

The crazy thing about crows is they are smart enough not only to figure out how this works, but also to teach their friends. They are natural pack rats and are attracted to coins anyway. There are a lot of crows in the world, and a lot of loose change. Klein professes an interest in advancing the project to teach crows how to pick up trash or other beneficial tasks, but I’m still back at the vending machine concept. The idea really is brilliant. I wonder what else we could teach them to do?

Yessss….everything will go according to plan…*cackle*

AtomPunk Evolution

This is an awesome German Saturn commercial full of AtomPunk Dinosaurs. What a fun project this must have been.

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