Winston.Milli.ng

I recently pre-purchased a Pinebook Pro; An ARM based, 14" laptop being sold by Pine64 (Pine Microsystems, Inc.) for the low price of $199 USD. This is the second such device released in this form factor by Pine64 who originally became known for their single-board computers which compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi. The first laptop they produced was the Pinebook which came out in 2017 for only $89 USD in its original form and $99 USD in its current, upgraded form. The original Pinebooks were more of a tinkerer’s laptop and never meant to be a daily driver, but the upgraded specs of this incarnation put it squarely in the ring with mainstream chromebooks and the ilk.

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I neglect my personal websites sometimes, but I don’t think that is a problem unique to myself. If this visit is your first time back here in a while, you may have come from WRMilling.com, W4C.BE, or WinstonMilling.dev (all of which now redirect to different portions of this site). Running specific domains for differing purposes and audiences is not a bad thing, but I don’t think my limited online presence necessitates it. Therefore, my previous resume site, blog, and professional landing page are now all one in Winston.Milli.ng.

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I have a few projects coming up that I hope to start blogging about, but to kick the series off I am going to document an older build (~5 years old). I have always wanted a “proper” home theater with a decent projector, nice screen, and immersive sound. That has, of course, taken a back seat to so many other priorities but I at least I have a screen to show for it.

The Design

I went for something I thought was straight forward: a wood frame and cloth screen. What I ended up with was something that was probably over-engineered/overkill for my use case but something I am happy with either way. It started with a couple drawings in my project notebook with an emphasis on preventing any sagging in the screen over time. The screen had to be supported from the sides due to a double-wide window being located behind the screen.

I decided on a 128" screen early on, mostly because the projector I was looking at supported the size and it looked like it would fill the wall well. All in, it probably cost around $250 to build, including all the extra hardware bits I could probably do without.

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I was recently inspired by a reddit post where they used LEGO on the back of a Surface Pro 3 to help organize their peripherals while on the go. Since my primary machine is now a laptop and I am near a LEGO store I figured I would give it a shot. I used a green baseplate and whatever flat brick material I could find and created this monster:

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