Eric A. Hall

This is a dumping ground for some of my personal projects. Most of these links go to photo albums.

Homemade Rack Cabinet: I've got a bunch of test equipment in my office, and have long been wanting a lightweight mobile rack to let me move it around as needed. One day I ran across a broken down Sun storage cabinet that was being discarded, and grabbed it for use as the basis of my own custom setup. First I stripped it down and threw away everything except the uprights, then added pine and ash for structural support, and finally added some rollers and steel pipe. The open design makes it easy to access the equipment, the cabinet itself is light enough for one person to move around without difficulty (when it's not full of equipment anyway), and it's plenty strong.

Micro-Server: My parents needed a server for their home network but didn't have room for a big tower, and none of the SOHO NAS units seemed like a good fit for their needs, so I built a little Windows Server 2003 box from uATX and laptop parts. It worked alright, but the drives weren't very fast and the motherboard wasn't very reliable, so I eventually replaced it with a real full-sized server. This server was also subject of an article I wrote about miniature storage arrays for Information Week.

Micro-Rack: Another project for my dad was a rack for his collection of SOHO network devices, using in-baskets from Staples and an Allsop monitor stand. This still works great.

RescueCD: I needed a rescue and recovery disc that was usable for Windows and Linux, and could also be used to update hardware and perform basic recovery tasks like system backup and restore. After looking at what was available, I eventually decided to cobble together a multi-boot "Rescue CD" from a variety of tools. Here are some screenshots of the DOS components, which was the subject of another InformationWeek article.

Home Theater: Back in the late 1990s I pieced together a PC-based home theater. The setup used a Philips Pronto universal remote to send infrared signals to to a keyboard receiver on the PC, executing macros that would do things like start and stop programs, skip forward in a DVD, and so forth. Here are some screenshots that show how the Pronto was setup.

My old Jeep Cherokee and Cadillac DeVille In my spare time I enjoy working on my cars. My main ride is a 1985 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, which I have managed to keep in nearly-new condition and hope to keep running for another 20 years. I am also doing a complete teardown and rebuild of a 1991 Jeep Cherokee that was given to me, which I am turning into a woodland beater for work and play.