Hasta La Gadget!

Desks can get messy, and if you are hooking up a laptop to a host of desktop peripherals, it can get messier still. One answer is a clutter-reducing basket slung beneath the desk. Another much more dangerous solution was created by Matt Lumpkin, a man so cavalier that he drove screws into the back of his monitor.

This rather elegant hack takes a standard, wire-mesh office file holder and fixes it to the back of the monitor. You then drop in the notebook, hook up the cables and – if you don’t look too closely around the back – you have converted your MacBook into an iMac. Matt actually avoided any real danger of piercing his screen with a screw by picking a monitor which already had mounting holes for a VESA stand.

As you can see, the rats nest of cables is still there, but at least it is out of sight. Better still, Matt reports that the MacBook actually runs cooler than it did when on the desktop — the wire mesh means that air can run freely over every surface, comfortably convecting away the heat.

MacBook/iMac Rack Hack [Instructables via Life Hacker]