Patrick and Jeff Geerling build a mini-rack with Ubiquiti and a Minisforum homelab at Micro Center's Columbus reopening

This weekend, the newly renovated flagship Micro Center store in Columbus, Ohio, is holding its grand reopening, and two well-known tech personalities are on site to make it a memorable event. Patrick and Jeff Geerling are participating in live streams, greeting visitors, and working on two hands-on projects that they plan to showcase during the broadcast.

The first project is a mini-rack built around the Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber UCG-Fiber, a device Patrick reviewed last year. Jeff Geerling came up with the idea for this build, and Patrick has already seen a working prototype before the event. The two will assemble and demonstrate the rack live, combining their expertise in networking and hardware.

The second, more ambitious project is the Minisforum N5 Max, a compact PC that the duo intends to set up as an all-in-one home lab. Patrick described the concept as "really neat" and expressed optimism that the livestream would be engaging and informative for viewers interested in compact server solutions.

Patrick admitted that this is his first time participating in a store reopening event of this scale. He also shared a personal anecdote: he lived about 15 minutes away from this Micro Center location when he was younger. As a fun aside, he recalled that last summer, after filming the NVIDIA HGX B200 Lambda AI cluster at the Cologix data center with Supermicro, he took his colleague Sam to eat in an Amish buggy. Unfortunately, he and Jeff did not manage to visit the Der Dutchman restaurant this time.

According to Patrick, the event has already drawn a large crowd, with a line forming around the back of the building. He noted that the turnout suggests the reopening is a big deal for the local tech community. Among the attendees, he spotted Jayztwocents, another popular tech YouTuber, who had just walked in. The store itself has been updated with design principles from newer Micro Center locations, making it a spacious and modern retail space.