alt Hacker NewsDon't let anyone take away your big box of cables
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once i had a break in a sata cable. it caused occasional random bluescreens... some data would corrupt going from disk -> mem.
i throw away all old cables and components now. screw the little sh*ts. into the bin before they cause me that level of misery again.
We have a local thrift store that sorts and stores the cables very nicely. 95% of the time I can find exactly what I need right away.
That doesn't mean I don't also have my big box of cables, but just offering an alternate strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDRBVaH6Rc is an earworm of a song exactly about this.
Somewhere, deep in a storage tote, a UW SCSI cable I paid 50 bucks for at Fry's shows a glimmer of hope.
Reminds me of this Onion classic: https://theonion.com/jumbled-nest-of-cords-makes-move-to-thi...
I prefer getting rid of old devices that needing to store old cables ad-infinitum.
I always think the worst thing that can happen to a (mild) hoarder like myself is that one of the things I'm hoarding comes in handy. Using one hoarded thing justifies years' worth of more hoarding.
I will say that Vidmar, Lista, and Rousseau make thin drawer cabinets that work well for cables if you have graduated from "big box of cables" to "cabinets full of cables". Also, old map or blueprint drawers work well. Still requires obsessive coiling, but being able to see (semi-random access) all of them in a drawer all at once is a big speed improvement for searches.
The trouble with old cables is after years they can become "tacky" or "melt" softer plastics they come into contact with. So storage is important.
over 30 years of cable collection. rare gems include apple SCSI DB25/CN50/HD50/HD68/HDI-30 cables, apple/NeXT ADB cables, apple localtalk dongles, atari SIO cables, centronics parallel cables, din-8 serial cables, hdi-45, apple adc video cables,DB13W3 video cable, dvi-d video cable, dms-59, firewire 400 and 800 cables, ipod 30-pin cable, ega db9 to vga db15, s-video cables, optical audio toslink cables, component video cables, SCART video cables, micro-dvi/mini-dvi, harddisk IDE/PATA cables, 10base2 BNC cables, miles of rj11, trrs and RCA cables, etc.
All bagged up using ziplock bags and labelled.
Never know when I might need them again...
I have a transparent plastic box of my own, with cables twist-tied and sorted into labeled zip bags.
The box stays, but cables come and go. I cleared out some PS/2 related cables recently, after not owning any hardware with that port for like a decade now.
Test your cables once in a while.
There is a lot of USB cables that look the same but have different capabilities, there is a lot of HDMI or DisplayPort cables that look the same but have different capabilities, there are cables that stop working once you bend them in a particular way.
There are cables that can get sticky and filthy practically on their own (Apple!).
Mind cables whose plugs are bent.
I think the same should apply to perfectly fine screws you take off broken stuff, pieces of metal profiles, nuts etc. But I could never be arsed to sort them proactively. My late father used to keep a Big Jar of Screws and spend time rummage through them when he needed a particular one. I don't know which approach is superior, to be honest.
This is so strange because I have a big box of cables. And I had a dream about it the other day. Which was more like a nightmare.
I think there was some point in the dream where I was going ape shit because the USB type C ones were missing or I couldn't find them and I was blaming [someone].
I'm not like this when awake FYI.
I think I've cleaned up my box of cables twice in the past and, inevitably, _the very next day_ I did so, I needed one of the cables I had gotten rid of. Never again.
As an aside, learn to properly care for cables. There are several YouTube videos on this topic, typically from musicians. Most importantly for small molded cables, avoid sharp bends and stress on the wire near the ends. Just a loose coil is much better. And the “over under” method for long cables avoids getting them twisted up.
You never know when you'll need a FireWire 400 cable or a charger cable for a handspring treo, I guess...
I do group them using one "type" per box too. However I do not use zip-bags, instead I use core of toilet rolls - suitable to add length labeling too.
Box. Amateur. Talk to me when you have a filing cabinet full of cables with bags labelled “SCSI”, “IEE-488 (Commodore)” and “DIN”.
At least my past self was good enough to bag and label.
I organize mine into roughly three boxes by how common they are.
One for every-day cables (like USB C), one for the stranger cables (like USB-B 3), and one for the one-offs (like a Nintendo DS cable).
It's the easiest to actually keep organized and it's easy to find what I need.
The proper Latin term for someone throwing away your big box of cables is cabula rasa.
I see those boxes at estate sales regularly. And on FB marketplace for free or $5. Or sometimes somebody thinks they're sitting on a gold mine of technological history and tries to ask actual money for a box of 20 year old tangles.
Sometimes hoarding stuff pays off. It's usually just hoarding.
Same goes for a box of nails and screws.
I 3D print cable rocks and mount them in my garage and then hang them in groups by type. I also get rid of every cable type I haven't used in 10 years because you can always just buy more of that cable.
I'm a cable hoarder. I have cables for technologies that have been dead, for decades.
I need help.
I have at least one box of old A/V cables and such sitting in my cupboard that I've been thinking I need to sort through and probably throw out.
Things like big, thick composite cables and extra long VGA cables.
Now… maybe not?
Every now and then I look through the cables and take out the ones I no longer have hardware for. We have a cargo-tram every couple of months where you can bring things for disposal that don't go to normal garbage or recycling. Supposedly they recycle the cables but I suspect that means incinerating them (to generate electricity) and collecting the metal after.
USB has been a blessing in this regard. That dramatically reduced the scope of my cable salad.
I wish the power vs data ones were easier to tell apart though
If you have children, at least one of them may become fascinated with retro hardware, and play with all of this stuff, reinstalling OS and connecting old drives. Once they grow past that phase, THEN you can bring everything to the e-Waste center :)
Wife forced me to consolidate my boxes of cables to a single bin. I joke the retail price of the bin is hundreds of dollars
I had to pull out a VGA cable to connect a screen to my server the other day. The motherboard has IPMI so I hadn't used that cable for years, possibly a decade now. I'll never throw it away.
You want to do task X and discover you need cable Y. You go to find cable Y missing, then discover a new one is $55 and 2 days delivery. Never again.
1. it is easy to buy a cable and have it delivered to your home in 24 hours 2. You have to be able to remember -where- the box of cables is 3. box of cables takes up space and clutters your environment
Throw out the box of cables.
On the other hand, it feels great to no longer have a box of old cables...
do yourself a favour and buy some zip mesh bag on amazon (often used for children's toy sorting; they're much more robust than zip-locks) and use them to group your cables. the big box(es) goes from a source of stress to an absolute delight.
One for ac adaptors, one for usb, one for dvi, one for hdmi, one for display port, one for Ethernet, one for audio, one for midi/xlr, one for… let’s see what am I forgetting…
Oh and the extensions, splitters, surge protectors, and remote switches all get their own big box in the garage of course.
At some point I need to go through my USB-A-C cables and figures out which ones are actually USB 3. Which only have power and which are USB2... Thankfully I think I have tester that can do that.
Pencils bags.
Bag the groups of cables by type and then put them in pencils bags and skip the untangling the next time you have to go hunt for one.
I seriously doubt that I'll ever need the 3 floppy-drive cables or 10 IDE cables that I have.
How on earth do you survive with just one big box of cables? I've got mine sorted into plastic storage boxes with labels, so things like 'Firewire' or 'Monitor' or 'SCSI' can get me to a particular box to sort through. I recently needed a SCSI-2 terminator to connect a CD-ROM drive to a 1990s sampler, and my box came up trumps. It's so pleasing when you find stuff like that...
This is how your kids end up with a SCART cable.
That box that you move every time you move house without opening it.
I do have a big box 'o cables, though organization is getting difficult. I need some way to organize them into broad categories (USB, audio, power, ethernet, etc).
I also have a big box of cables and now I no longer feel shame my brothers.
But make sure to let daddy sammy take away your cognition, that's less important.
How about obsolete cables? IDE, RG59 coax, Cat 5, Composite video, etc...
What if you have 7 big boxes of cables…?
I had this terribly rocky relationship with a woman and years later she'd gotten a career in tech and apologized saying she now understood my box of cables. That was about the only apology of hers I ever really believed.
On the other hand, do you really need 50x VGA cables? yes? YES?! ok, as you were! Keep them in the ever growing box.
The idea of grouping by same or at least like is great for de-cluttering.
I use big drawers for "types" and ziplocks for within; i have a network drawer , a media one and a generic one that says "stuff that glues or grabs" (zip ties, tape, etc)