This will likely only be relevant to a tiny number of people, but I’m too excited to keep this bottled up!
I discovered recently that IKEA’s BILLY bookshelf units are deep enough to hold my Baby AT and Micro ATX motherboard builds! Here’s a tiny view into one such shelf, showing the Melbourne i486 alongside my QDI 486:
This is awesome for a host of reasons:
If I place each motherboard on a corkboard or mouse pad, I can easily slide the board out to take to the desk to work on
I don’t need to remove any of the expansion cards to put it in a box; they’re all set up and ready to go. This is especially useful for boards and/or cards with marginal or worn connectors
There’s still enough space on each shelf for drives and cables
The BILLY bookcase has glass doors, so the boards won’t be bumped or get dusty
Because they don’t take up that much vertical space, I could theoretically have half a dozen of these things
I mentioned on a recent BSD Now podcast with Tom Jones that I was increasingly frustrated at how much space “in progress” projects take up. He suggested getting some tubs or boxes to store such projects in temporarily, which I’ve started to do in earnest. This is the next step from that, specifically when it comes to old builds.
But here’s where the lightbulb went into overdrive. Wait, I’m mixing my metaphors again. If these boards have PicoPSU power supplies installed in their ISA slots, then… couldn’t they be used on these shelves as well? Have I just inadvertently built a “server rack”, but for old desktop boards?
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