I’ve kept you waiting, haven’t I? I’m sorry; I really didn’t mean to do that, you know. That’s the thing about stories thought, isn’t it? They never really end. Of course, you can point any part and say “it’s finished”, but it wouldn’t really be the end of the story. It seems like I kept you all waiting for the last piece of a puzzle you all wanted.

A short story I started writing 2 years ago and left unfinished resulted in more e-mail than I could have imagined. I felt like the Grinch who stole Christmas. I do hope you’ll forgive me.

Now, where was I? Oh yes. I’d just repainted some parts, cleaned up the rest, and put those little screws on the drive bezels. Well, I had a lot of plans for those little screws. I had a computer shell, stripped bare of parts. All the complex wiring and lighting is gone, waiting for new hardware, hardware it got in abundance. A new motherboard, CPU and RAM were thrown in along with the old hard drives, graphics and sound cards.

Now it was time to work on the case lighting. I decided to substitute the tube-lights, which buzzed and faded, with LEDs. Then I could also get rid of the little transformer and hide the source of the light. Little orange LEDs were the solution; I took a bunch of those and made them into ribbons.¹ This didn’t really work out as I hoped: they were a little messy.

I also modded up the the side panel. I always felt that the diorama thing could use more stuff, so I added exactly that: more stuff. Then I started putting everything back together. The front door was re-attached with a piano-hinge and riveted into place. Things were really shaping up.

Of course, that meant there was a lot of wiring to do. The way I’d done the wiring on the TIP-3000 was to make the wires into a feature, instead of hiding them. In order to do this I’d used about twice as much as I needed to, and it made it difficult to work with. It’s surprising just how much cable I had, and how easily I was able to tuck it all away into corners.

Finally, the side panel went back into place and the mod was done. The little screws that inspired me to change the mod were fantastic. I like them so much, I think I’ll be making them a major focus in my next big mod. The lights didn’t turn out as I wanted; they were too dull, not producing enough light to illuminate the hardware though the perspex. Overall however, I was pretty happy with the results.

The computer served me well for two years, before I retired her this week, two years later. Out of respect, the TIP-3000 was also retired. She’d been through hell. Three years of housing powerful hardware in dust-ridden environments and my own sloppy craftsmanship. My new computer lies in a cheap cooler-master chassis, power oozing out of the seams like light under a door. This hardware was meant for bigger and better cases.

For the TIP-3000 however, this is the end of its story. Or is it? The calm, empty shell sits near to me now. Parts of it I’ll recycle, and parts of it will be binned, but the idea, the photographs… stories never end, and something like the TIP-3000 has already outlived the hardware that filled it. Who knows how long its story will go on for?

As for what I’ll do next? That’s a story for another day. Merry Christmas everyone.