This Guy Needs a Girlfriend 

From the Mini-ITX.com Projects Page:

Projects - ERN005PC

Yes... this is a computer. If you click on the above link you will get a pretty detailed project summary with pictures from the entire creation process. I have no idea what this guy uses this computer for, and frankly, I'd be afraid to ask.

Actually, I've been threatening to build an Mini-ITX box for quite a while. With that said, I would definitely not choose to make one in the shape of a woman, but if you go to Mini-ITX, you can see a whole host of projects people have done from Humidors, to 1930's style mantel clocks, to retrofitting an old 8-Bit Nintendo.

I'd really like to make one into a full fledged media machine, holding all my mp3's, any videos that I have, and have my own DVR. Why haven't I? Well its sort of a double edged sword for me. The reason I want to build one in the first place is because the majority of commercially available DVR's and Media Set Top boxes have a whole host of restrictions placed on them. You can copy MP3's to them, but don't even think of trying to access them as a share from your PC. You can burn music from it onto CD... but only our special CD's because we assume you pirated your music.

The problem is that I don't want to have to write the software on my own (I have a life you know)... but I want the software that I do run to not have the above restrictions, and still be insanely user friendly (I'm a usability freak ok).

Of course the other problem is that I already have several computers. I have a laptop, two desktops and all sorts of other computer-like devices like an XBox. So every time I think of adding one more, I'm reminded of some computer geek friends of mine from college who shared an apartment. They built a Beowulf cluster with something like 2 dozen computers, each hooked up to a UPS. Cool huh? Well yeah, until they wanted to make toast. Then they'd blow a fuse, all the UPS's would start beeping and they couldn't eat. Who wants to have to turn off a computer just to make some toast in the morning?