Sometimes there are just too many toys and not enough money. And what gadget geek could resist the allure of Mini ITX? For £300, I could put together a super-sexy miniature PC. I’ll start with the elegant E-Note case. Then I’ll add a tiny 17cm by 17cm motherboard. The VIA EPIA ME6000 is fanless, and comes with a 600MHz low heat CPU and every peripheral you might need built in: Video, audio, Ethernet, USB and Firewire. Finally, I’ll add half a gig of RAM. I won’t bother with a hard disk, because I’ll boot it off the network using PXE. A hard disk would add more noise, anyway.
Now what can I use my fantastic new toy for? Well how about I connect it to my TV with the built-in TV-out, and use it as a front-end client for something like Myth TV – a homebrew personal video recorder system. A server in another room with a huge hard disk records TV programs (and also has my CD collection stored on it as Ogg files), and the little cute PC becomes the home entertainment system. I could even have one in every room, each feeding from the central server.
Oh, the possibilities!