The litter box had electronic controls, hooked into the plumbing, and required no effort from the owner besides pushing a button (if the box wasn’t pre-programmed for automatic cleaning) and occasional replacement of the plastic semi-permanent litter and cleaning solution bottle. Except for a lot of noise, the box was a miracle of modern engineering, and it had won several awards for design.

I owned one of these boxes myself, and when it came time to replace the cleaning solution, I couldn’t find it in stores. I went to litterfree.com to reorder, however, the site’s ordering system and customer service links didn’t work. I wondered then whether the buggy site took the company down, and if the company execs ever knew why they didn’t get any orders over the Internet. I still don’t know. Now if you go to the site you’ll get the message, “Sorry this site is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.”

This issue would be history except for the fact that I recently sold my Litterfree box to one of my readers. A couple of months after I wrote the article, my cats decided that they didn’t care for the box, mostly because of the noise and their distaste for my makeshift cleaning solution. I dismantled and cleaned the box and stuck it in a closet until I decided what to do with it.

In November I got an e-mail from a reader in Reno (hi Jill), wanting to know if I ever found out anything more about this company. It seems Jill has been using a Litterfree box successfully for quite some time but was concerned about what she was going to do when her box wore out. I offered to sell her a gently used one at a steep discount if she would pay the postage (that contraption is big and heavy!)

She agreed, so I mailed the box then billed her via e-mail. She put the payment and postage money into my PayPal account and received the box by standard mail in about a week. What a trip! This magazine may be better than eBay! By the way, is anyone in the market for gently used birdcages or Nokia cell phones?

An item in my house that is not for sale is my new satellite TV box that features Tivo. We haven’t had it long enough to determine whether Tivo is a blessing or a curse (in terms of time usage) but thus far, we’ve had a lot of fun with it. I can talk about Tivo only in the broadest terms because I’m just the consumer. My husband is the TV / Stereo hacker in our house, which means that I’m lucky to be able to turn on the TV set and make it work without pressing five or six buttons on four different remotes, holding my breath and praying a lot. One would think that the last thing I would want is another piece of technology to complicate my relationship with my TV set. However my husband knows my weak spots. All he has to do is mention “Star Trek.” In 1978 we paid a cool grand for a videocassette recorder and $25 for our first videotape. I agreed to the purchase because I pictured myself recording Star Trek reruns and watching them at 5 AM before the kids were up. This time I agreed to Tivo so that I can enjoy dinner with the kids and grandkids on Friday nights and not worry that I’m missing “Enterprise.”

We have had Tivo for a couple of weeks now, and I have discovered other beauties in this little box. Now instead of channel surfing, we go through Tivo’s list of programs and movies, selecting the ones we want and telling it to record them. The little set top box (which doubles as our satellite receiver) goes on and off at odd hours doing its duty. When we have time to sit down and watch TV (which usually amounts to Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) we can go through the list of recorded programs, determine how much time we can waste, and select something to watch from the list of recorded programs. We have found that we like Tivo better than renting DVDs because we can record anything that appears on TV, not just movies, and because we can record everything that sounds interesting. We don’t have to keep track of rental fees and we don’t have to return tapes or DVDs. And we don’t get a down feeling when we rent or buy a DVD and realize we hate it. On Sunday, for instance, we started watching “One Christmas” and after 20 minutes realized we didn’t have a clue to what was going on, and didn’t care. We deleted the movie and went on to watch “Love, Actually”, which we saved because we enjoyed it so much. Sometime this weekend I hope to see my first episode of “Desperate Housewives.”

Today (December 7) in the Wall Street Journal a piece about Tivo hinted at other conveniences. If I learn about a program I want to record and am not at home, I can set my Tivo from any Internet-enabled PC by going to tivo.com.

A feature we did not care for was one that set Tivo to record its own recommended programs. The shows it originally recorded were duds, and we had to do some work to delete those programs. Luckily, Tivo places an icon next to the entries it recommended, so it was easy enough to get rid of them and to turn off the “recommend programs” feature. We did like the “thumbs up, thumbs down” feature that allows us to rate the programs we watch. By indicating what we like or dislike, Tivo can learn our tastes and perhaps in the future select programs that we might actually want to watch.