A permutation of our *cough* computing resources put the diminutive Lenovo Ideacentre Q150 flat on a desktop, where it was at risk of falling off due to the weight of the cables. It came with a VESA monitor mount bracket designed under the assumption that monitor manufacturers would provide an unused VESA socket and a completely separate desk stand mount, which turned out to be incorrect for all of the monitors in my collection. The IBM (pre Lenovo) monitor it was now driving, however, had exposed screws on its VESA mount, so I adapted a quartet of hulking standoffs to hold the Q150 far enough away to clear the desk stand.
One end had 4-40 tapped holes that I drilled out to clear the VESA mount’s M4x0.7 screws; I sawed the heads off four M4 screws and epoxied them in place. The other end had 8-32 studs that I cut down to fit inside the Q150’s dished mounting bracket:
Working around the mount, one standoff at a time, avoided having to lay the monitor flat on the desk:
A bit of jiggling put the bracket on the standoffs, held in place by the 8-32 nuts:
And then the Q150 snapped into place:
It’s captured by a thumbscrew in the bottom left corner (visible in the previous photo), so it can’t fall out.
Took longer to take the pix and write this up than to finish the project… probably because there wasn’t a trace of CNC in sight.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Took longer to take the pix and write this up than to finish the project… probably because there wasn’t a trace of CNC in sight.
Or computer updates [wince]… I’m on dialup (alternatives are satellite or Verizon cell-modem) and the budget says $14.00/month is better than speed, so if I need big chunks of data, I wait for a library day and use theirs on Julie’s laptop. OK except for Windows updates. I’ll probably shift my P4 XP box back to Linux (used it for consulting/programming when it was new), though I’ look for something more current than RedHat and kernel 2.4.xx again.
How are the (more-or-less) current distributions with USB hardware? I have some projects in the neverending queue (including the MIDI interface that talked to macLeakyCap)…
Nowadays, Ubuntu gets pretty regular updates, too, so you’re looking at the same problem. I don’t know of a way to fetch all the updates for a given system to another one (particularly a Windows box at a library), though, and I suspect the library isn’t keen on burning CDs or DVDs with bulk data…
I don’t have any programming experience with USB hardware, but from a plug-and-use perspective, everything seems to work the way you’d expect. That wasn’t true a few years ago, which means plenty has changed under the hood.
I suspect the library isn’t keen on burning CDs or DVDs with bulk data
That’s the only easy part. Download to a flash drive on the laptop. If I can do a bulk update, I’m OK. Some packages do this well, though Adobe Flash is just miserable. (1M preloader to get, then you run it and the preloader is overwritten. If the load fails, such as by a several second dropout, you have to start over. The experienced and paranoid make copies of the preloader bit. The problem is avoiding the dropouts–tough to avoid in a library with only one wireless broadband link.)
plenty has changed under the hood Time to research. I’ve found driver snippets to run the mac-compatible MIDI interface on USB and the wiring is simple.