We’re looking for your solutions to help our fellow Gnomie Steven, who writes:

Dear Chris,

First, I would like to say that I am a fan of what you do. I was first informed about your Web site by my brother and now I try to frequent your live chat room as ChaosMageX.

Anyway, I was wondering if you have any creative solutions or unique products that help prevent contaminants such as pet hair from entering the internal electronics and cooling systems of computers.

I, like you, have some lovable pets that I sometimes like to have near me to pet and cuddle while using my computer. Unfortunately, now that winter is starting to come upon us all, the coats of our furry friends are starting to get longer and come off in more places than we want them to, particularly into our computers.

So, as I asked before, could you please list any solutions at all to keeping contaminants, particularly pet hair, out of computer cooling system air intake ports, be they for conventional air cooling systems or the radiators for water cooling systems (forgive me if I’m not using the right terminology here, since I am not as familiar with liquid cooling systems)? I don’t care what the solutions are, but I would like it if they were a do-it-yourself fabrication, rather than an obscure product; but if the product is cheap enough, I may still consider it.

All I know is that I love the companionship that my Selkirk Rex cat gives me, and I’d hate to have to give that up for the winter because of the risk of his long, curly, stray hairs clogging the fans of my laptops. Thank you for any tips that you give and thank you in advance for responding to this email.