TV Unit. Version 4... :(

UPDATE:

As part of the Great Living Room Shuffle and subsequent discovery of needing to move this year, the TV unit ended up being moved and redesigned. Fortunately it's been in the new state for quite a while, which at least means the unit worked while it was where it ended up at the end of this post when originally written.

(Spring 2013)

The TV unit as for quite a while taken up a good area of my lounge and housed plenty of equipment and with the speaker stands as well, it's most of a wall. The problem now is to move it to what is, in all honesty the place it should always have been, it needs to be shorter, so the center third is coming out.

The sub is moving behind the sofa and the HTPC in the bottom left is just coming out of the unit all together as it wasn't getting used.

With the top removed and the two end sections pushed together the top has to be cut down. Sadly, all the cabling i'd carefully done had to be picked apart to put a new shelf in to allow a few extras to be added.

One cut with the power saw, and it's done.

The amp, CD and DVD player all stayed in the same place, although the two players are now on their own shelves with the switch behind the CD player. The other side has the Xbox, Sky receiver and more consoles on the bottom shelf.

Once the cables are in, the unit needs a back on some of it to help make it stable, it's not much but it does a lot to stop it swaying.

The only things thats not changed is the Amp has been replaced with a newer AV receiver and the TV is say on top of a larger center speaker. At least it survived the upgrade and still worked well enough. 

The Big Desk Move - Pt 9: Odds and Ends

By this point the desk has been done for quite some time, (nearly 2 months) but a few things crop up now and again which work quite well and are worth documenting, if only trivially.

My headphones have NEVER had a decent home. I've tried lots of things and never know what to do with them.

So far int he last few years I've tried:

- Hung them by an ear cup off the front of the desk (which just gets hit by the chair and usually leaves a mark on the desk from the cup fabric)

- Under the screen (usually end sin tangled wires with the mouse and keyboard)

- Left them to the side of the mouse/keyboard (now the laptop is there, so no good. Plus it always tangled.)

- Hung them over the screen itself (obscures part of the screen)

 

Nothing works

I found a metal hook i'd made from some 1/2" x 16 ga. aluminium bar before I got the other hooks which now hold up the laptop PSU. This used to be under the desk and was a bit shabby, but with some extra time with the pliers its turned into a reasonable point to hang the headphones from.

For the time being I've just clamped it in place to see how useful they are in this position. If they get tangled like before I may move it again, but until that happens screwing it into the nice TV mount and leaving a hole if I move it later isn't on the cards.

So far it seems to be a lot better than anything I've done before. I'll probably give it a coat of black paint and some varnish too just so it doesn't look glaringly different to everything else which is either Birch or black currently.

LAN In A Box - Pt3

Well it's about time I do an update to the blog, and the biggest project of recent times has still been LAN in a Box. So here's part three!

At the back of the box is a mount for a patch panel. Normally I wouldn't bother with this, but there's always a chance that a cable could get snagged on something, or pulled sharply which *may* however unlikely it could be, damage the port on the switch. As the switch was generously donated to the project I really don't want to damage it as getting a replacement would be incredibly hard (to pay for more than anything). With with the cables always connected the switch also doesn't have much wear on the ports with cables being plugged/unplugged all the time.

The patch panel will just link into the ports and transpose them up to the top to where the cables reels are stored.

With that in place the back gets cut to fit to close off the rear of the panel.

To fix the panel in, recessed nuts on bolts fed from the rear make fixed studs to bolt the panel onto, and it's nicely held in place.

So far so good. The reels fit in the top in front of the panel behind the lip and there's plenty of space for the rest of the bits.

the test weekend was pretty good, although it wasn't fully patched due to a few problems with tools (lost my punch down tool, oops). Will update this again soon with more of the details of LIAB, and perhaps some other things.