Intro
As my site got a bit silent with me being busy moving into my new house, I decided I really had to put a new article online. I decided to post my efforts to build all my media-needs into one single stack which ends up looking good and inconspuous in my new living room. It's not that technical, but I hope you all enjoy it.
In my old student digs, because I didn't really had much room, it used to be quite messy: I could clean up, but as soon as I decided to start a new project the only room I had would soon be filled with electrical components, PCBs, tools and whatnot. Now that I have a complete house for myself, I decided to dedicate a single room to my tinkering with technical stuff, containing the random chaos my creativity seens to flourish on into a single room, so the rest of the house can look like an actual civilized person lives there.
Having a messy room had its perks, though: if draping an motherboard plus psu over a stack of books was what's required to watch a movie or listen to music, no sweat. In my new living room, however, it would look a bit out of place. That meant I had to obtain an actual case for both my MP3-PC and my HTPC! Ofcourse, I could've gone the easy way and buy me a nice case, but hey, where's the fun in that?
So for a case, instead of picking an existing one, I decided to recycle this
old beastie:
It's a Yamaha CC-5 midi-set consisting of a double cassette deck, a CD-player slash analog tuner
combo and an amplifier. My parents have had this thing for quite a few years,
and while a few parts broke over the years, I've been always able to fix it back
up for them. Recently, however, the CD player broke due to the wear and tear of
the years. My parents used the CD player quite extensively, and with it broke,
they decided on replacing the set. I decided the amp and speakers still were
usable, so I took the broken unit off their hands.
I wanted to put not one, but two PCs in the case: the first is my HTPC, a powerful system which can play HD-content for my beamer and the second one is a simple but low-power PC to play MP3s as background music. I could settle on just one PC, but I have to pay the power bill myself now and a HTPC even in idle mode is a waste of power, in my opinion.
Remark: The story isn't completely in chronological order; I've shuffled it around a bit to improve readability.
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