Functional Furniture

This year will be an eventful one for me. I graduate in December, so a lot of changes are coming up fast. The first is a non-school apartment for this semesters lodging. This apartment is the first in which I have space, resources, and the inspiration to really make it my own. I will be living with my girlfriend (English Major Eats) and another computer scientist friend, so the space planning has been a balance of nerdy features, and a woman’s touch. This has been exceedingly difficult. If the other computer scientist and I had our way, the entire apartment would be plastered in motherboards, configured in to the world’s most terrifying hadoop cluster/wall paper. However, the least nerdy of our trio has requested a bit of style, and since she’s so cute, we will oblige.

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So how does this warrant a tech blog post? I can fell your frustration and antici…

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pation. I present to you, THE END TABLE.

It may look like an ordinary beat up end table I purchased from Goodwill, because it totally is. But you have to look at its POTENTIAL. If you are having trouble picturing what this could be, let me help you paint a picture. We have a projector which we will be using in the apartment. It is going to live on a ceiling mount, shining at a large screen on the opposite  wall. Up the wall behind the projector will be the wires for each source to the projector. We have an Xbox360, a blu-ray player, a PS3(hacked), and would like some way to project a browser, code, or anything else achievable through a PC. What if all those things could live in the same place? What if the end table WAS  the PC?

 

I call her WOODBUNTU

Now you are seeing my vision. I started with some leftover PC parts, a beat up end table, and a trip to Microcenter and Home depot, and ended with THIS:

The ratty old end table was sanded, polished, and refinished, then cut, slashed, and hacked all to hell to make room for a motherboard, PSU, graphics card, SSD, and BIG ASS FAN. The 200mm Blue LED fan was the first addition, since it required cutting a very large hole. The motherboard is mounted on standoffs drilled in to the floor, and the PSU is secured to the back via 2 screws. Some serious cable management is needed, but all in all, I am happy with my functional end table.

After mounting all the hardware inside, I used a quick install USB to load the 120GB SSD with Kubuntu, and immediately install the netflix-desktop app and XBMC (with PleXBMC). These apps will let us stream media content from any computer on the local network, in addition to a variety of internet video sources directly to the projector FROM OUR END TABLE.

The goal of this project was to hide our geekiness inside something unassuming (much like the average adventure in to public places). I would say we succeeded, because unless you like to inspect furniture for tiny red power buttons, you are unlikely to suspect this table on which you are setting your beer is the powerhouse HTPC it truly is.

So as I contemplate 100 other cool things to do to this endtable before moving it in to our apartment, I will be setting my beer on my computer case, but always with a coaster.

As always, raise a glass and code on.