We live in a two-bedroom flat on the second floor.

We have three large storage cupboards, known as The Airing Cupboard (albeit just a cupboard with air in it), The Shed and Under The Stairs.

I know.

We’re a riot.

Anyway. We still have a Metric Shit-ton™ of our boxes and moving stuff in there from our old place. Just never got round to unpacking all the books &c. that move with you.

There’s an espresso machine in there.

Additionally, having been looking in there amongst the Metric Shit-ton™ of stuff (for a cable), I stub my toe on Laura’s old PC tower. And possibly an idea. Although mostly the tower.

This gives me an idea. And some pain.

The pain goes away. The idea sticks.

All of which goes to explain why, on a perfectly useable day off, I am sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, neck wrenched upwards to see my TV while fiddling with DVI cables and 3.5mm cables and power cables and keyboard cables and mouse cables and another Metric Shit-ton™ of cables.

I’m doing it for Boxee. The reason being is that we have an awful lot of TV shows and movie which have been Obtained From Legal Sources sitting on networked hard drives around the command and control centre that is the office.

It’s not going to be doing a large job. Primarily, its job is the following series of steps repeated over and over:

1. Pull media from hard drives all over the home network and/or the big bad Internet.
2. Throw it on to my HDTV.
3. Operate a couple of dumb servers like SSH, FTP and VNC.

Rinse and repeat.

I have always wanted a home server, but never known what to do with one, realistically. Any computer I’ve ever had for that has always been in use as a production machine by a human and I’m not keen on sacrificing all its CPU to be able to do Fancy Stuff.

So this seems like a nice compromise. It’ll run quiet (hopefully), have an aggressive power-saving policy and might (eventually) work with my fancy remote control, but in the meantime, my smartphone is more than enough to control it.

I’ll report back.