Dork Haus - Case Mods? Furniture Mods?

When you put a computer inside a piece of furniture, what is that?

Is it a case mod, or are you just making your otherwise useful furniture much more dorky? We have 2 Dork Haus examples. The motivation is that in the Man Cave there are a lot of tools and servers, and the servers have media files on them that we dorks may want to enjoy. The Dork Haus Man Cave is not one of these TV sissy man caves with comfy chairs, carpet and football paraphernalia. We put the "cave" back in "man cave" where it belongs (tools and servers, babe).

Great, but I would rather relax in the den and the bedroom, hence the need for computers in those rooms. Computers are ugly (yes, even your mac... especially where the finish is worn off from you petting it) or if not ugly at least inappropriately styled for most decor. I don't want to make the computer more of an issue (e.g. these case mods). I want the computer, the blinking, the noise (Oh God, the noise!) to go away.

With the release of the new ATOM based motherboards I decided to revisit the idea of making a very small unobtrusive computer. I had tried earlier with a VIA board that turned out to be too anemic to playback video but still got its case hot, scary hot.

The Den of Dork:
The small chest of drawers the upper left of the tv-holder-thing has a computer in it. Unfortunately, the TV had no available inputs on the back, so I had to use the s-video input on the side of the TV. The bottom two drawers have a little INTEL motherboard and fashioned connections for video, power, audio, USB and RJ45 on the back of the cabinet. The "remote control" is a small wireless keyboard which is stored in the drawer above the computer and the top drawer has the TV and DVD-player remotes in it.

She does make a little noise as the motherboard has a fan and the hard drive is a real hard drive (that spins), and so far I haven't made a nice switch, so you have to open the drawer to reach a switch scavenged from an old tower-style PC. This is probably for the best, as you want to leave the drawer cracked when it's on for ventilation. Pictures of the back.

It's running windows XP, which is probably about as much as that processor can handle. One thing that is nice about running Windows it that it works with Netflix "Watch Instantly." Also the networking is brain-dead simple with SAMBA running downstairs on FreeBSD 7.2. I have to say that Rhapsody runs very poorly on this setup; but other players (including WMP) work great and it is more than up to the job of video playback with any codec over the ~800x600 s-video line. The last picture is Internet Explorer at my Google Reader page.

The Master Dork Bedroom:

Observe: an armoire. She is an old and relatively nice armoire, and has been doing a fine job holing up a TV while containing clothes within. This particular item used to be my brother Neal's, and it ended up moving with us to Salt Lake City at the near insistance of my mom. It is about 5 feet tall and it is made mostly of thick boards (not plywood). We like it a lot - thanks mom!

Obviously the computer would need to go in or on the armoire. There is a hatch on the upper right that opens up to reveal a mirror and a generous area to hold your razor or something. I bolted a mother board to the back of that space with 1" standoffs. This board only requires 12VDC for power which simplifies things considerably. Also this set up has no fan and I'm using a solid state hard drive. If the speakers are off, it makes no noise that I can hear.

Julie, the She-Dork, recommend that rather than make lots of little holes and connections I make a single simple hole and pass the cables right through. This was much easier and required much less abusing of the furniture. I made a single rectangular hole about 1"X1.5", and that easily accommodates the 120VAC cord for the power brick, the CAT5e, HDMI, USB and stereo audio cables. One more hole allowed a sweet little power switch on the back of the armoire.