Lee's Weblog

A few years ago I had the opportunity to work with one of the first mini-ITX boards around: a VIA EPIA 800MHz. I was really struck by the size of this thing and it’s capabilities (yes, I know about nano-ITX). I thought they were SO cool, we bought 9 of them at work and made a BEOWULF Cluster…which performed so terrible….but it looked pretty awesome.

Anyways, I ended up buying one for home to play around with and – sadly – never really did anything with it. Because, what would I do with it?! I could make a media center PC, but it wouldn’t handle 1080p… I could make a desktop PC, but I have one thats much faster…I could build one for someone else, but the ITX cases were expensive and I don’t like working on friend’s computers. Thats when I found http://mini-itx.com/. The idea was: put a computer in something that doesn’t look like a computer! So, I did!

I had a wicker basked from…who knows what…that ended up working perfectly! I cut the back out, stuffed in the VIA, ram, a hard drive, and viola!

Beauty shot with all the crap around it. Without the camera Flash, you really can’t tell there is anything in there. It looks noce on a bookshelf, and that was sort of the point: Make a computer that looks like furniture.

The inside got kind of crowded (duh) but everything fit pretty well. I still need to secure the hard drive better and maybe tie-wrap the wires to clean it up. But…I still dont know what I’m doing with this thing! I thought about adding a wireless USB adapter, a bluetooth adapter (for keyboard and mouse..and whatever else) and possibly a solid state hard drive, but for a computer that I dont know what to do with, thats pretty pricey!

I installed Debian Linux and I plan to try to use this as an Standard Definition media center (With XBox Media Center) for my room or the kids room. Otherwise…I invested a lot of effort in this thing for a few pictures, a little bit o’ bragging rights, and a blog post…which makes it ALL worth it!