You know the part of every bad cartoon movie where the villain rubs his or her hands together and says in a sinister villain-y voice "I have a grand plan!" Yeah, read the title in that voice, please... thanks in advance.

/nervous chuckle

So here's what you CAN'T see from the photo. I kinda intended to put this in the first log but I got to rambling because it was late and I was sleepy and I should have been in bed and wasn't so uhm oops.

The components actually will probably shift around a little bit, because things like the heatsink and ports, hubs, etc, will have cutouts made in the wooden case you can see in the photo for them. The power supply stuff will be in the silver can on the left -- actually a MainStays brand "utensil holder" (international: "cutlery basket" or something like that) from Walmart! -- probably a pair of power bricks. I have a 5v 6a brick and a 12v 3.33a brick. Probably they'll both go in... along with some glowy lights I have from Dollar Tree, what we in the US call "fairy lights" (international: not holiday/Christmas lights, these are the very thin strings of tiny enamel wires with surface-mount LEDs glommed on with hot-snot glue every so often... sorry, IDK what you call those over there). I also have some special paper to stuff in there, and the cutlery holder will get painted satin black. There will be some kind of steampunky tubing in between the holder and the wood box but I've not worked that part out yet.

Also, the wood box needs to be a lot deeper. I'm going to do that a cheap but kinda crappy way. Walmart here sells a 97¢ package of paint-stirring sticks... three sticks to a package! I'm going to buy four packages, along with some tiny wood screws (brass ones if I can get em). I have TWO ROLLS of woodgrain contact paper (basically paper 'wood veneer' like you see on the furniture you get at discount stores) and I'm going to use part of one here. Two paint sticks, cut to length, stack to provide depth, and one on the inside couples them together with bolts. Woodgrain contact paper for looks on the cheap.

The front bezel will be a picture frame that I bought, that I'll mask to hide the guts of the system since the LCD is smaller than the frame. The front panel thing will look a bit like a tombstone, flat on the bottom and round at the top, with two USB ports in it. The original point of the second LED hole was for an HDD activity light (back when platter drives were a thing) but the system board doesn't have that... it does, however, have a two-pin bicolor power LED (orange/green), the kind where if you reverse the polarity you get a different color. I'm going to wire it so that the 'green' side lights up the power button (a light-up doorbell button to which I've rigged a warm-white 3mm LED) but the 'orange' side lights up the red LED in the secondary spot.

I also have really nice, cool fan grills for the two 40mm fans, but I need to order more because I can only find one of them RN. Yay. I'm gonna go dig in a couple boxes first, just to be sure.

Yeah, I *know* I promised a different project log today. I'll do that later. Maybe. Maybe it'll be tomorrow. I don't get to Walmart till Wednesday.

My pal Jody says -- "Take it easy!" Whatever.