One of the first things I wanted to explore in my mission to cut myself off from compulsive connectivity was to find the options for turning my smart phone into a dumb phone. The main aim was to make my phone as uninteresting as possible. One of the main tips thrown around for this is to turn your phone greyscale. Luckily on the iPhone that is quite simple, and you can also setup a toggle button....
Towards the end of 2023, a growing unease prompted me to seriously evaluate my device and app usage. I found myself habitually reaching for my phone, ostensibly to “just check”. Recognizing that I wasn’t alone in this sentiment, I delved into the realm of digital minimalism and connected with various communities centered around this philosophy. The main issue that surfaced was my persistent need to stay connected— whether through Discord, iMessage, Reddit, or email....
At this stage in the build I was about ready to find a way to house my PS5 in my rack, and do some general decor. If you haven’t checked out Part 1 and part 2 yet, check them out first! One of the main reasons for moving things into a rack in the first place was to clear all my tech - or as much as possible. Housing the PS5 would clear a fair bit of room from the surfaces in my den, they are not small things....
When I started the project to move all my computers into a single rack to save some space, and to look cool, I knew I wanted some kind of monitor in it. There were a bunch of options for big and ugly KVM panels that pull out, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. In the AV world there are often small screen monitors in racks for keeping an eye on the broadcast outputs, but they are often quite expensive, and the monitor qualities also aren’t great unless you spend a lot....
Server Chassis Shopping, say that three times fast. If you haven’t alreay seen Part 1 of this series you might be interested in catching up on that first. In that post I go over picking the rack I did, and now it’s time to look at decanting my existing machines into chassis that will fit that server rack. Moving my gaming PC into a server chassis The main issue with this was always going to be height, there was a chance I could fit the machine into a 3U chassis, but after a fair bit of poking it looked like my best bet was going to be a 4U chassis of some variety....