The Infamous Drelf

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So, I wanted a solution to putting my laptop somewhere when I’m using the big-and-grotty 19″ LCD*. It’s good enough for while I’m recording podcasts, and it’s nice to have the extra real-estate of a 1440×900 display, but it’s also streaky and not very impressive colour rendition. Anyhow. I wanted somewhere for the laptop to live, so I can use the desk space for my many papers when I find the inspiration (tomorrow) for working on my course.

Kind of a shelf-come drawer. And thus the drelf was born.

The drelf is basically a plinth on runners with a slot cut in it to hold the cables (so they don’t escape and run amok):

I have made a shrawer, or possibly a drelf. Yay for me.

It’s made from the same wood as the desk (I had a few offcuts), and for the sake of nicety also has a little channel cut just behind the front of the metal strip, so that you can pull the drelf out by a ‘handle’.

I then mounted kitchen drawer runners on the side of the hunk of wood, and this was then mounted on L-brackets under the desk:

Drelf details

I need to trim the ends off those screws, by the way. I expect that should happen some time around 2015.

The cables were fed through that slot in the first shot (it’s larger at the top than the bottom, so the cables can pass through easily, but the connectors on the ends of the cables won’t pass through). I popped some stick on rubber feet on the top surface of the desk to make the laptop sit above the hunk of metal reinforcing from the wood’s days as scaffold plank. And that’s basically it. The laptop’s supply is a knock-off apple magsafe adaptor that lives permanently attached to the drawer (since the original one’s died, and given my luck getting things repaired or replaced recently I’m not optimistic for apple replacing it).

And this is what it looks like in action:

The Drelf in action

Fear the drelf

I’m very pleased with it :)

* I’m trying to decide if I want to whinge about the LCD. There were no faults mentioned on the advert on ebay, and the photo hit the crappyness of the screen. On the other hand, it was only 30 quid. Feh. Unfortunately, I’ve left it a while now, so should probably just suck it up.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.