Hot tip - buy a box of small / medium zip lock bags and bag them all up. Duplicates in the same bag are ok (10cm / USB-C) etc.
For the last 10 years my "techno box" has been a box of bags - the cables don't get tangled and small bits (adaptors / notes) get to live with the cables. Its one of the rare few home environment hacks I actually have!
Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc.
Grouping them is key to deduplicating.
It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them.
I also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them.
I don't group exactly, nor do I want to de-duplicate, but I've organised my boxes on the shelf and sorted and labelled them recently, in what seems the most logical way at the time; I have "networking", "USB", "power", "A/V", "PC" and some as of yet unlabelled ones with random stuff I can't place in the others.
There is some unfortunate crossover regarding where things belong because some USB are for power, some are for A/V etc, others or data...
What I realised, when going through these boxes was two things; it would cost a fortune to replace all of the cables in them, I wouldn't be surprised if replacement cost ran into the low thousands of £££ (should they be on my home insurance?!) and secondly; I'm no longer indecisive about what to do with a frayed or otherwise non-ideal cable, it goes straight in the bin; I used to retain the "nicer" ones and solder new connectors if the microUSB had worn out, or the cable was damaged near the end, that got much harder with USB-C unless I'm going for a simple +/-/D+/D-, so I just don't bother.
As for how often they're used; the USB box comes out almost daily, sometimes several times a day, if I'm charging things in my home office, or connecting something that isn't permanently plugged at my desk, I put the cables back away when I'm done. Power comes out every few weeks, and "networking" only when I need to reorganise things in the network cabinet/server rack.
For USB, the "final form" would be to create a labelling system so I can tell at a glance what each one supports, because as it stands I have to pull out my little LED cable tester thing and see how many light up to know if it'll do DP or high power charging etc.
This bags or bins or whatever your preferred organization method is. Don't just have "cables" group them. This is how I discovered "yeah, I don't need all these DVI/VGA cables and I can do with only 10 extra HDMI cables".
I'll second "grouping" with "capability sorting". Get a cable tester and sort your cables by Charge/USB speeds. Even with my default "grouping" of things like "USB-C -> C", "USB-A -> C", etc I still was buying new cables for projects/uses since I wanted to make sure I got exactly the speed/power requirements right. Now all my cables are sorted by capability and that led to more purging and less purchasing since I can go to my cable bins and grab exactly what I need.
Somewhat recently, on a wild night out on the town, I ended up buying a USB-C <> USB-C cable tester[0]. Using it, I managed to find a few amazing cables amongst my collection. Gave away the others with context. I want something like this for every type of cable.
Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?
I have a cheaper version, it does basically all one needs by telling you how many conductors the cable has, if it's only got 4 lights lit up it's a simple USB2, more power LEDs is a higher power charging cable, more data pairs, higher data throughput/USB3, nearly all of the lights (usually bar 1 of the CCX) it's full DP/Thunderbot, data, charging, A/V etc.
Sometimes it even shows USB-C connectors that are only wired for one orientation!
For USB, if it can carry 65W+ of power to my laptop as well as the Keyboard/Mouse inputs, 4K/60Hz display and audio back to the monitor as well as KB/Mouse and perhaps some external storage or network adapter, that's a pretty amazing cable.
I also have preferences between my cables by the quality and aesthetic, I prefer some over others because they look or feel nicer even if in testing they contain the same conductors, but that's just ... me.
I currently have 3 such cables connected to my work laptop each sending 4K/60Hz video to each of my 3 x 4k monitors, audio to my soundbar and one of them is powering the laptop at 90W and sending my keyboard, mouse and webcam inputs back.
I suggest finding something else, electrical tape starts coming off after a few years, leaving behind sticky residue that's impossible to remove without some kind of solvent. Same goes for masking tape.
Remember CD spindles? Those are were a quarter of my cables live now. They can be stacked! There's also a few boxes and one tech bag. Also, the 15m (50ft) HDMI cable doesn't fit anywhere so it got it's own space.
another benefit of the hair tie method is when you go to use the cable, you can take as much length as you need from either end, then bunch/coil 'n wrap the rest with the hair tie. You have given me a lot to think about though, I'm always looking for ways to improve my cable storage techniques
It works best with short-ish cables; several meters or less is nice and quick and is simple to keep neat.
Longer cables can also work but it kind of takes more space to get it done. Like, a 30-meter extension cord or similar is completely do-able, but it's useful to be able to walk around while it is happening. If the cable is both very long and very heavy, then it's a great workout for all kinds of muscle groups that may have been forgotten about. :)
But again, it's quick for the lengths we usually use in PC and home AV spaces. Or at least becomes quick with enough repetition: My hands seem to know how to do it on their own without me really looking or even thinking about it, and that frees my other resources up enough that I can visually plan my next (unrelated) move while the first is still in motion.
Multiple cables of about the same length can be wrapped together like this. A stereo pair of RCA interconnects, or the same 3 cables that always get used with a laptop, can stay grouped together and never become separated in storage.
It also works on laptop cables with a power brick in the middle.
And it's nice to the cables. Inherently avoiding axial twists is key here and the process also tends to help remove minor twists that showed up while the cable was in-use. It does produce periodic bends, and those bends always happen at the same places, and that repeated deformation does promote stress fractures at very predictable places.
But cables generally survive thousands of iterations of this over the span of decades, and decades is good enough. :)
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Stage hands, meanwhile: There's reasons they hate the double-double technique, above. Their cables can be very long, there can be literal tons of them, and speed is a very important factor.
So they use a very specific coiling technique called over-under that seems impossible to describe with written language alone. It does put axial twist into the cable but those twists alternate and average to 0 instead of accumulating or multiplying (like elbow-wrapping can do[1]).
Over-under always requires the coil and cable ends to be tied up together before storage. That's often accomplished with an appropriate length of stout string or even rope that is permanently tied to one end (nothing to lose), but velcro can work too.
It's a solid technique. When done right, it allows fast deployment: Untie it, hang onto one end, and the rest can be literally thrown across a stage or whatever. Since the twist averages to 0, it tends to unwind neatly as it flies and lay flat when it lands.
And, of course: It stows well. Cables wrapped over-under can be tossed into a bag or a trunk or hung on hooks or whatever; they don't tangle.
It's probably overkill for the big box of mostly-short cables at home, but it's also worth understanding for the longer stuff we also use.
[1]: Elbow-wrapping and other very common methods that aren't unwrapped exactly oppositely of how they were wrapped up to begin with, or provide some other mechanism to manage twist: Those are great ways to put permanent axial twists into a cable. It is the entire reason why the long extension cords hanging in so many home garages and work environments alike (and especially on commercial vacuum cleaners[2]) wind up looking like coil springs or curly pasta even after being stretched out flat-ish in an open space. They didn't start off that way; they were forced to be that way through handling. Friends don't let friends elbow-wrap cables.
[2]: And that's also why residential vacuum cleaners usually have a large number of ridges running down the length of their power cords.
The usual storage method has the user winding the cable around hooks on the side of the machine, and the usual deployment method involves rotating one of those hooks and liberating the entire coil of cable at once. This tends to promote axial twist.
But! The ridges enhance rotational friction. So as the ridged cable slides through the user's hand as they wind it back up onto the side of the machine after use, the ridges help those twists to be pushed down the line to the far end where the plug is. And since that end is loose at that time, it's free to rotate and alleviate twist. This happens automatically as the user winds up the cable and is a pretty good design trick. :) (I have no idea why commercial machines use smooth cable.)
I use twine for the same reason. Dirt cheap. Lasts forever. Doesn't leave residue on your cables. The downside is I end up cutting the twine when I need to use the cable but a couple inches of twine in insignificant.
I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.
Bike shops have yards of that stuff in the late winter/early spring. At least Trek shops do, dunno about others. Trek uses it to tie stuff onto the frame in the box to keep it all from rattling around.
Ha! I use CD spindles for… wait for it… CDs! Just opened the second drawer of my desk and counted four spindles of blank CDs and DVDs that I haven't used in years.
(I also hoard blank CD/DVD jewel cases. Who says technology ruins lives?)
That sounds hard. Is a USB-A-to-C cable in the A group or C group or neither? What about the inverse? What about cables that only do data but can't transmit enough power? What about cables that are slow but high power? What about thick cables like USB4 that barely bend or fit in the bag? What about male-to-female vs. male-to-male? What about brand-specific cables that have their own abilities (say, high-powered but not PD)? The list goes on and on...
I think I hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable, and at this point most of them are USB-C, so they'd all mostly end up in the same bag if that's the criterion.
It's not for everybody (what ever is, rite?) and since you "hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable" then congrats, you're winning at life and don't need anything like this.
The sounds hard
Doesn't feel hard to me. I have a bag for USB A, a bag for USB C, and a bag for USB A<->C.
My USB-C charging cables are all 3' or longer, so they're visually distinct from the crappy little cables that come for free inside the package for various budget-priced gizmos.
My Thunderbolt/USB4 cables are labeled as such, and I am very confused that you are talking about Thunderbolt/USB4 cables so stiff that they cannot bend to fit into a container or bag.... I mean, mine are stiff but not that stiff. Plus these are expensive cables. Not sure I have any spares. Those are bought for purpose.
I think I disagree. I just (re-)discovered a couple of my cables don't have data lines a few hours ago, prompted by the earlier discussion. My initial instinct was also to throw them away like you said. But then I realized they're actually quite useful for any case where you want to prevent data transmission, whether due to security or other reasons.
agree. i have no issue with charging only cables, they’re often lighter and more flexible, but i do require the 56k ohm resistor to wrangle misbehaving devices that could start a fire.
Definitely not winning at life with this lol, it's actually frustrating because the cables are so similar. One has a higher speed, one has a higher power, one is shorter, one is longer, one is more flexible, one has a display showing when it's connected, etc... and in many cases it's hard to tell which at a glance so it's always a pain trying to figure out if I'm using a cable unnecessarily somewhere and unnecessarily buying another one because of that.
Charging is an interesting case, I actually deliberately use crappy cables for that too, depending on the charging time I need!
Re: stiffness: I mean I guess it depends, how big is your bag. I'm thinking like a freezer bag not a grocery bag. I could bend them to fit but then I'd probably mess them up.
When I look up thick thunderbolt 4 cables I see a bend radius of 2 inches at most. And my very thick 15 foot 4K displayport/HDMI cables came packed in a box with a 3 inch bend radius. You can manage a 3 inch bend radius with a quart bag, let alone the 1 gallon or 2 gallon bags that I'd expect to act as reasonable cable storage.
My solution is a big drawer block with lots of spots for different cables. USB c cables with video go in the video cable drawer, high power goes in the power drawer, etc. Can't mistake USB c with HDMI (and mini HDMI can burn in hell). And only buy USB C cables that state their capabilities on the housing, if they don't I'll permanently attach them to a place where they can be most useful.
Like everyone, it seems, in this thread, I have not one big box of cables but several. But my classification system is mostly around age: old USB cables (mini, micro) vs recent USB cables (USB C), old screen cables (VGA) vs recent ones (HDMI), etc.
This doesn't work for everything: audio cables do not evolve much, nor do remote cables for DSLRs; but in general it's reasonably effective.
I did the same thing, albeit with some printed labels in the same corner on each, so that it's easy to flip through them when they're stacked together. Has saved me dozens of minutes over the years!
Yeah, this is pretty much what I was going to write. I group my cables into boxes for USB, power, network, audio/video, and power supplies. The boxes are a finite size, and when no more cables will fit into the box, I go through and do some deduplication.
Yep. I went through my big box of cables, deduped a lot of things, got rid of a bunch of stuff I'd never need, etc.
Of course, I DID need one of them just a month or two later! But it was still a good exercise.
Now I have a whole drawer in a workbench devoted to cables sorted by type. What's surprising is how I NEVER have spare USB-C cables and ALWAYS have spare lightning cables. I mean, it SHOULDN'T be surprising, since more and more devices I own are now USB-C, but it's interesting that I expect my stock to always provide, and it never does -- for that cable type.
The frequency with which I have to buy new USB-C cables of varying lengths really illustrates the migration I've undergone. "Surely I have one I can just snag for the other car..." and I'm always proven wrong.
I just sorted through like 15 years of accumulated cables. I kept any that I knew I'd need for projects or things I knew I had a use for. Everything else got slimmed down to a maximum of two of each type and general length and only if they were good quality. Type C and Cat6 were the only cables I kept several of. I threw out so many USB micro and Cat5 cables.
On a side note: grouping cables based on the connector form factor is evil when you include USB-C.
Which of the cables are for PD? How much power? Can they do USB? If yes, at which of the dozen speeds? Is it a Thunderbolt cable? Which TB version? Is it certifiable or just blatantly unstable when running 40Gbit/s? Or is it some proprietary alt mode cable? And which ones are just spec breaking fire hazards if you tried PD with 240W through them? Do the cables have markings to tell you the capabilities? Are they even correct? Were they put on as a lie to upsell cheap USB 2.1 cables?
Bonus points if there are cables with some sort of “adapter” dangling in front (quotes because these are not a thing in USB). Double all your points if there is an USB-C to USB-C extension cord in the box.
It is certainly a box of mysteries.
I do not mean to invalidate your organizational scheme, but every time I am reminded of USB I have an irrational desire to rant about the flaws of USB-C.
Yes grouping is the important part. The next important part is labeling.
For example, I have a variety of USB C to USB C cables but they each have their own capabilities. Some support high transfer speeds, so I keep them around for connecting SSDs, while others are just USB 2 speeds so they are strictly for charging.
Another case is I have a very specific USB C to USB C cable that looks incredibly generic, but it is for connecting a screen tablet to a laptop because the manufacturer decided to make the port recessed, so only their cable fits. If this cable wasn't labeled as for a specific device, I would have donated it years ago.
It is some effort, for those who don't like to tinker with tech I can understand why they just shove them all into a box in the back of their closet. But I find that culling my cables at least makes me aware of what I have and don't have.
One other suggestion I have is just buying a longer cable than you think you need because eventually you'll have the need for it anyway. I have so many 3.5mm aux cables because I kept changing my desk set up and needing to buy longer and longer cables. If I had just bought the longest cable I could have at the time I would have saved myself some headache.
Another tip is adapters. Sometimes it's easier to just have cables of one type and a bunch of adapters for when you need them rather than having a ton of different cables for each possible scenario. I used to have a mix of RCA and 3.5mm cables but never had the right combination of what I needed at the time. Eventually I caved in and just bought a ton of adapters so I could standardize all the cables and use adapters as needed. Same with USB C cables.
+1000 did _exactly_ this right down to the ziploc. Also a bag for audio, HDMI, old apple cables, and "random" cables. These days, I store the ziplocs in a pelican-type case and that goes in a stack with cases for power cords, camera gear, SBC gear,etc - and the stacks all go on furniture dollies, so I can roll them out.
Yep. It's easy to get into the mode of tossing everything into a big box and then you can't find anything anyway. After a tire, I tossed a lot but I find I still need to organize a lot of things down to a manageable remainder where I can actually find things I'm likely use.
I do this. All my FireWire 400-to-800, 400-to-400, 400-to-dinky little Sony 400, etc. cables were all in one box, the FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter was in the box with my Thunderbolt cables and adapters, and I still didn't find the FireWire 800-to-800 cable I needed to use Target Disk Mode on a friend's Mac a few months ago until a few weeks later when I was cleaning out my storage unit and found an unused FW800 cable in a box I guess I was saving on the off chance that I needed to return a 15-year-old LaCie RAID enclosure that was shucked about a decade ago off for warranty repairs.
> Ziptie once coiled, attach label for what format / length.
Please god, no more zip ties. Use double sided Velcro strap. You can buy it in a roll and cut to length. Reuse it all you want. Join multiple shorter lengths to make a longer one. Just please don't make me cut another god damn zip tie off a bundled cord. I deal with enough zip tie bondage fetishists at work.
double-sided velcro holds less well and is more likely to stick to things. Just toss a pair of diags in your box if you are worried about getting the zip ties off.
There is a problem with the over-under method use for long cables. If you then grab the wrong end through the centre hole you end up with a cable with a bunch of overhand knots in, which I find much more tedious to deal with than just using normal looping of cables and making sure to add the twist each time.
Back many years when I was touring with bands, at the end of the night you'd see all the lighting crew walking around the stage coiling the long cables, with one end trailing after them, to make sure the twists were correct. That was much more useful than generic over-under for all cables.
over-under has its place, but I don't use it everywhere.
I do group them using one "type" per box too (either "audio cables" or "usb not-C", "usb C" etc. However I do not use zip-bags, instead I use core of toilet rolls - suitable to add length labeling too.
Also, if you have a heat-sealer, individually bagging the cables before grouping them avoids having cables mate and turn into a Gordian knot. A heat-sealer allows you to make bags that are just the right size for your cable, vs. generic ziplocs.
I grouped mine a few months ago. Since then, several times, I've been able to find a cable and use it right away. Before that the prospect of digging through the massive tangle often led me to (lazy!) order new cables.
I'll pay the price to sound like your average redditor but... thanks, Internet stranger, for this advice. I will follow it from now on - especially for the "prevent tangles" part.
> USB B cables are also notoriously sensitive and the slightest damage can result in malfunctions. Went through this recently with a PreSonus AudioBox.
Do you mean micro-USB-B? Full size (and mini) USB-B cables (comparatively) built like tanks.
Even though it's annoying, I understand the design tradeoff. You definitely would rather your (replaceable) cable get damaged than the port it's plugged into.
I have this issue with cables between my Pi 4B and my slightly old 3D printer.
USB-A to micro-B cables, and the connection is tetchy beyond belief about which ones it will accept and which it won't, either with or without the theoretically-unnecessary-for-this-printer power wire blocker. I can see no rhyme or reason to it but now I have a cable that has a dot painted on it...
Do not do this. All plastic baggies, storage tubs, and grocery bags, are going to build up with static electricity. While it may seem totally fine to drop inert cables into a plastic bag, eventually you'll come up against a USB stick, or an SSD or SDRAM, or something, and that ESD damage will not be a pleasant customer experience.
I picked up some resealable, aluminized bags and they've lasted for years. I also purchased fistfuls of silica gel packets, and I toss one into each bag when I seal it up.
I'm not sure if organizing "by cable type" would make sense to me, when there are adapters and dongles involved. Some of these baggies have been labeled by the central device, e.g. "All ThinkPad accessories are in here".
You can just cut these to the desired length and wrap them around your cables, for routing or bundling. They are, of course, reusable. I cut little notches in them so that they stay locked to each cable. You could get them in rainbow colors, but I like the white rolls so that I can write on them with a Sharpie.
Hmm, interesting. I've never had a static charge issue, but then again, maybe I will someday. I'll definitely look into that next time I mess around with my storage. Thank you.
This is rough when you have lots of weird one offs. Strange trrs->rj45 for programming a radio you still use but haven't reprogrammed in 10 years; does that go in "generic serial stuff" or "things you want to keep but haven't used in a long time" (right next to the 13w3 -> 5 wire component cable for the sparc in the other corner)
Yeah, "grouping" is largely the way to go for the generic parts, and keeping parts together when they really do need to go together is another.
I used to just have a generic big tub with all the generic cables and wires. Some were nicely wrapped up, others often got themselves into a giant tangled mess. I could never find anything. I got a bunch of small/medium sized plastic bins with lids for all the generic stuff. An old labeler quickly made them "USB cables", "A/V Cables", "DC Power Adapters", "AC Power Cables", "Coax Cables"...now it takes me two seconds to find any particular random cable.
Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives.
I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends.
Modular PSU cables never go in the big box. They go back in the PSU box if I'm being smart. Then I know which PSU they came from and can throw them out in ten years along with the PSU itself.
(I'm rarely smart and have a second big box of modular PSU cables that I maybe ought to get rid of.)
They're standardized on the device side, but not the PSU side. So always check pinout before you make the very reasonable assumption that if it fits it works
A PSU cable tester is valuable for this. They're much cheaper than a replacement PSU, and you can plug in cables wherever they fit on a PSU, and test whether the output is correct for the CPU/PCI/motherboard/SATA connector you want to plug it into. The PSU and cable might be a black box, but the output is always testable.
The motherboard cables do all kinds of different scary crossovers so never separate them, though you'll probably never have an "extra" motherboard cable in the first place.
None of the other cables bridge pins on the PSU side, they "just" scramble the pins they're attached to at the other end.
That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU.
It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.
It wasn't actually very expensive in money, because I was still able to RMA the pair of fried drives, but it did cost me $30 in shipping, a month of waiting, a lost delivery via UPS, and tons of time dealing with customer support for both UPS and Seagate to actually get a second set of replacement drives.
On the bright side, the actual replacements that eventually got to me were both 2TB bigger than the originals. They didn't tell me about this, so I'm not sure if they silently upgraded me to apologize for the wait, it was an accident, or they happened to be out of stock and just grabbed the next size up.
I too have been burned by the BBOC, although not as badly as this:
I picked out a random short ethernet cable that looked nice (it was flat) to connect my wifi AP to my router.
It took me about a month to realize my 100mbit internet connection had dropped down to about ~85-90mbit, but more importantly, transferring files between a wifi client and the wired network was also only ~90mbit.
Turned out the cable was so bad that it only connected at 100mbit...
I have now gone the other way and I actually curate the BBOC:
All cables I get for 'free' with random appliances now go straight to the bin (unless they are specialised) and I only keep cables I specifically bought and know they adhere to a standard.
I hope you never have to work with serial D9 cables. The variation of pinouts for legacy equipment is massive! Pretty sure every theoretical variation became some standard.
I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.
I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately.
My dad worked at Lockheed and in the 80s they joked they used JIC (just in case) manufacturing. They had so many parts without a clear reason as to why they created so many.
> I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
What you've got to do is become more forgetful.
Ask not what a 17v power supply can do for your friends. Ask if you'll remember it and find it when that moment comes.
I have decided to not keep many cables. USB thingies, DVIs, VGAs, audio... you can get it from Amazon in pinch with same day delivery and I don't have that much space to spare.
But you can pry my Palm data cables from my cold, dead hands.
I agree with you 100%. except for some legacy stuff that would be pretty hard to find I toss everything else out. If I really need it I can just buy a new one.....turns out I never need to buy a new one....yeah maybe once every 10 years....
In 2021 I cut the end off a USB cable to expose the power leads which I scotch taped to the power meter on my bike to charge it. I kept that cable. In 2024 I used it to add USB disconnects to the light strip I attached to the bottom of my son's crib, allowing me to keep the light strip intact when we lowered the base from the baby height to the toddler height. A week later we got rid of the strip because we really didn't need the light like that any more. Still, no regrets. This was my version of using every part of the buffalo.
While I like to improvise I'd never want to use a cut-off cable anywhere near a toddler. Whatever the savings or practical benefits, they just can't outweigh the risk of the toddler doing something that causes a shock, fire, ... Maybe for the best that you removed that light strip.
waiting for the next piece of this story, where your toddler turns 13 and gets their first mp3 player, which doesn't ship with a charger and guess who still has 18 inches of cable left?
1: use transparent boxes like an 11l IKEA Samla so you can easily see what you have.
2: fold each cable in half or a few times more and apply the granny knot[1], this will prevent your cables becoming an entangles mess. There are superior(tm) ways to fold cables, but doing the granny knot for household cables seems the way to go. Doing festivals with retro gaming computers I’ve done this thousands of times and it’s fast, saves space, gives quick and reliable access and prevents damage by pulling on cables from clutter etc
3: use multiple boxes for different categories: audio, game computers, standard power cables, pc cables (sata, usb), power bricks and so on to have some sort of a system, any system will work
4: don’t keep an inventory list: let the anarchy that is you, your memory and family, add and take away cables ad hoc. You will forget what is in the box and that is fine.
5: don’t forget the box exists and look in the box :)
I have also accepted I need duplicates of stuff for convenience.
I have one box that has all that I need when we go away for the weekend/week (by car, not plane). All the chargers since the family now has a lot of phones, headsets, kindles, cameras etc. 2 HDMI cables, audio splitters, speakers, extension leads etc that I nearly always need when away for a while.
And then my commute bag has a small essentials bag for the now rarer times I work elsewhere.
All with duplicates of what I already have at home. That I before instead used to unpack and reuse at home, then find and repack all the time, and forget some. Not a problem anymore. My tech packing is literally picking up a box and put it in the boot of the car. Done.
I decided years ago to limit myself to just one box of cables... So then I ended up having to keep finding a bigger and bigger box to switch them to.
One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
If anyone has a suggestion on that or can tell me about the pop up local cable donation swap initiative I haven't heard of them that would be welcome.
Someone should make a noncommercial website that allows people to post their collection. I bet there's enough people out there willing to share their cables for free just for the delight of having one of their cables being useful to someone for some reason
Some thrift stores will take them, if you have a good one nearby (I’ve been lucky here, but they’re rare). You can also put a note on your local freebie groups and someone might bite. In some cities you can leave them bagged outside your house with a note and they’ll be gone in hours. On some tech forum classifieds, people would give away cables and junk fans for the cost of the postage.
I keep a lot of wires around because my interests and work require that, and I find great pleasure in being able to connect anything at a whim. Right now they're all pretty tidy, sorted by role into not-giant boxes on a shelf. I don't have too much any particular type, and every one I do have works with currently-used technology.
It wasn't always that way, though -- I used to collect and keep all of the cables. It was quite a burden.
10 years ago or so, I went through them all and sorted them. I got rid of hundreds of pounds of cables.
Those that went away were all broadly useless to modern society, or duplicates, or both.
I did think about taking some to a thrift store but, I mean: I see the same used wires on the shelves there sometimes for months or years: People don't want them. And I wasn't about to landfill them.
So I decided to recycle them by selling them as scrap.
In my case, with the scrap yard near me: They offered me a much better price without connectors on the wires than with them. So I cut all the ends off, bagged up all those bits of insulated copper wire, and sold them by the pound. It took a fair bit of time to prep all that stuff for scrap, but meh: I made a rather decent hourly wage doing it and felt like I was working towards the right goal.
Since this transaction gave them value, I can be reasonably certain that they got made into something instead of just being dumped into a hole in the ground.
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If direct re-use is very important: You can sell them on eBay, I guess. There's buyers there. But then you're doing all of the things that selling cheap stuff on eBay requires and that sounds like an awful way to spend time.
Otherwise, the prospects are bad. Even at hamfest fleamarkets in Ohio, people don't usually bring in collections of old miscellaneous cables. A special programming cable for a Yaesu radio? Sure! 50 feet of LMR-400 coax? Why not.
Yet-another USB A-to-B printer cable? No, nobody wants that (we already have our own burdensome stash), and even if they do then nobody wants to scan through all of the old computer power cords and audio cables to find that printer cable any more than you want to sort it all out for for display and perusal.
If the money isn't important and the main goal is to avoid the landfill, then: Just put them on Craigslist or FB marketplace (or whatever regional variation works where you are) for free, in bulk. Someone will pick them up. Whether they think they're finding a pile of scrap to get some tax-free beer money from or some kind of hidden treasure doesn't really matter.
Or, in the right neighborhood: Put them in a pile on the curb so that people can see them. They'll simply disappear.
Funny this came up hn today. this week I did some organization of my cable boxes. I use banker boxes on a steel shelving unit. I put the cables and parts inappropriate boxes and labeled them and feel that my corner of the universe is a little bit better organized than before.
Mine is similar but I split audio and video since I have a lot of audio-specific stuff. "Video" only has the various monitor cable standards going back 20-odd years.
I think I've got the same three boxes. HDMI cables and adapters fall into the Venn diagram overlap of the last two IMO. You could also make a strong argument for USB also falling into "PC Accessories". But there's nothing quite as satisfying as having the _exactly right_ cable or adapter on hand to solve a problem. Makes it all worth it!
We have the same. Do you know why the ‘every audio connector known to man’ box contain every audio connector known to man but yet never a stereo 1/8” headphone-jack to headphone-jack cable?
don't know any audio engineers? If your bboc is simply a mishmash of things you've accumulated over the years, and not intelligently designed, it won't, but don't make the mistake of extrapolating from your own experience and thinking it applies to everybody.
My boxes been sorted by "what does the cable carry", one power cables, one data, one video, one patch cables, then some are split out, like sound production related cables, one with balanced 1/4", one unbalanced, one MIDI... I think in total 8 moving boxes by now.
My categories are identical to yours. Home Depot had a sale on these stackable dewalt boxes that are much more cost effective for semi-junk stuff than Milwaukee pack outs.
For real, I have like 200 kilos of cables. I could very likely reduce that down to something less severe, but that involves sorting and inventorying 200 kilos of cables.
Whoever does need it, I give you permission to throw out all your old cables, power adapters, and routers. Yes, on the off chance you do decide you need a Palm III dock, Linksys WRT54G, or Sony PSP charger that means you'd have to buy one on Ebay, but you can cross that $10 bridge if it actually happens.
For me it's not the cost that bugs me when I don't have a part, but rather the disruption to my flow. If I can't get a project done all at once I'm much less likely to ever get it done.
No, this method does not work. I tried, got rid of all those stuff because why would I need it ever again. And of course a month later I needed that one stupid thing right there and then. And I remember throwing away... Not again, I keep at least one cable of each in a separate box to find immediately, the rest is stored, it is not asking for any money.
Yeah, what happens to me is I need a thing, go to Amazon to order it, see that I already bought it 4 years ago, spend 30 minutes trying to find it, then let out a big sigh and order it again.
And whoever needs something else, I give you permission to ignore this fool and keep your box(es) of cables. I don't regret a single thing about my ~8 boxes of cables.
Give them away to a thrift shop instead. Then you've helped somebody else who will find that cable in the thrift shop. So they can put it on ebay and sell it back to you when you need it two months later.
Yeah its hard enough when you need a Mini USB cable. When you need the proprietary RS232 cable for an old piece of hardware, at short notice, that stings.
I put my cables in bags then in a box. I can't tell you how helpful the bags are. It only took me like an hour to sort the first time. But it's already saved me hours only a year later. Those 5 minutes of searching add up. Just fight the laziness and don't let entropy increase. It's *far* easier to stay organized than it is to organize
Also helps to cut down on your number of cables once you see you have 5 USB-B cables when at most you need 1. I ziplock bagged all of my cables and cut them down to one of each type. These days I throw out the included cable with devices immediately rather than throwing it in with all the others. Thankfully a lot of new devices don't include cables now so the wastage is cut down.
Only one big box? The poor people. I have at least five big boxes and I'm regularly being accused of being a hoarder. Except of course when someone needs a cable ;)
I think what nerds need to understand is that normal people hate accessories. Superheroes need no IV lines, they lose power when they are added and regain it when they are removed. They think throwing away cables and accessories make machines healthier.
So, the way it needs to be communicated is that they are necessary evil that help machines be happy. And also to allow special purpose tools and cables to be stored inside the machine if possible, so they don't psychologically present as excess decorations and/or gifts.
I have cabinets for cables (all tie-strapped), arranged in separate compartments:
- USB cables with at least one USB-C end
- All other USB cables
- Network cables
- Audio and video related (RCA, HDMI, SCART, phono, XLR, displayport, BNC, S/PDIF, etc)
- Power cables
- Power adapters
- Batteries and battery chargers
- Flash sticks, type adapters, diagnostic tools
- Spare keyboards and mice
Not a week goes by where I'm not grabbing something from that cabinet. A couple of months ago I actually needed a SCART cable for the first time in forever for some old hardware.
We moved a few months ago and it was so satisfying seeing the inventory of cables I had been saving for years getting used up. The cable-watermark in the box actually started noticably lowering. Nobody gave me the loud praise I deserved but it sure was satisfying saying "yeah I have the cable for it, here you go" with a distinct feeling of superiority.
Clear Hefty Slider bags are perfect for this! I have my cable boxes (Hefty Hi-Rise) filled with these bags, USB -A to USB-C, USB -C to USB-C (then sub-bagged with 65w, 100w, 240w) and so on.
Point is, use clear bags so you can see inside, and Hefty makes the slider version. I get the gallon and half gallon bags for this, and then the quart size as well. This is the Marie Kondo technique and it's amazing for keeping all these cables which are always coming in handy!
I keep the duplicates, because you never know which color and length is going to be the perfect fit for the current need!
In my big box of cables I have, among other things, a double-ended USB-A cable. I understand that this is absolutely not standards compliant, and I have absolutely no idea of where I got it from. I have never used it. But it is a thing that exists.
Getting rid of almost 10 different proprietary charging cables for pre-smart phones and some old laptops felt great though :P
You and the other responders are probably familiar with it, but you made me look up this decent StackExchange answer again, coming from a search for "the forbidden usb cable" :)
I had one of those to charge a bicycle headlight. I gave it away with the bicycle, but in the span of time I had it, one visiting guest borrowed it to recharge a portable generic USB battery pack. So there you go, two product categories known to use that sort of cable!
I installed some HP slide-out rackmount keyboard/monitor units that used these as the host connection. This was back in the days when PS/2 was still around so they usually weren't used.
mine had 2 male USB ends on one side and 1 on the other. It was to power a laptop hard disk drive from USB if one port couldn't provide enough power. Feels illegal. I bought it off eBay with a money order in like 2003.
I'm terrified of not being able to find old USB cables.
My D2A converter I use to route TV audio to a small amplifier died. It was cheap, but decent. I wanted another cheap one. I had trouble finding any. Finally, I snagged a pair on Amazon/eBay, but it used ancient USB connections. Luckily, I had old USB cables, so I'm good. But what will I do if the USB cable stops working?
There was also the Micro-A which I found on some dev boards. I think the Arduino Due (Arm Cortex M3 chip) used one for the USB host port as well as an Atmel Arm uc board.
Also that weird, really small USB connector that was found on some early digital cameras. I think Kodak was a big user of it. Sorta looked like a narrower and taller version of the Mini-B. Maybe the Mini-AB but that doesn't look like it. I have one in my box at home.
Since school started this year, I bought both my kids TI-84 plus CE calculators. Both were being sold cheap because “no charging cable” (uses a mini-B) while I had a dozen in a box.
I wish that happened a lot less as I have entirely too many old cables.
For evidence that Bluesky is a long-term living facility operating as a social media platform...look no further than how their users employ the word "skeet" to refer to "post".
i bought a few loads of nice quality plastic boxes, with plastic lids (its got small handles that "clasp" around the lid, so they're almost air tight)
then i sorted my cables and printed out a normal piece of paper, with the text like "networking", or "PC cables" or whatever and placed that in the side of the boxes
then i can stack them in the basement and easily know which box i need, when i need a cable
its been super handy.
ive used the same trick, for same boxes, for our other storage boxes too. Wifes hobby items, christmas decorations, old consoles, or whatever
makes it super organized. (you need transparent boxes if you wanna just throw in a label print on the inside. i can place one on top of the items and i can see it from above, or either side of the box)
all there. And after this post, I'll keep them even longer.
Often people don't realize there is only "downwards-compatibility", meaning later technologies can "tunnel" an "older" signal (such as DisplayPort being able to Tunnel DVI/HDMI) when using passive adapters, while the other way it's not possible.
My cable box is my retirement fund. Copper prices are rising, and scrap-metal dealers pay pretty well for it.
But jokes aside: last year I also sorted some out and took 10 kilos of household cables to the local scrap-metal dealer here in Germany and got €30 for them. Better than throwing them away.
I have a rack of boxes of cables in my home, its not that out of the ordinary since I'm in the industry and am the network admin for my entire block in my housing community.
The other day I was fabberglased I could not find an HDMI to HDMI cable! HDMI > DVI yes, to VGA yes, to display port yes, to mini-HDMI yes. it was so shameful, for me having to go to amazon/best buy to purchase an HDMI cable is the lowest of the low.
I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.
The delight of having one of those cables be useful is immeasurable. It doesn't even have to be for your own good. In fact, I bet if we made a site where everyone can catalog their collections and automatically match them up with neighbors that have that cable, people would be more than happy to share cables for free.
I recently purged my cable box. I had 8 HDMI cables... 8. What do I need 8 HDMI cables for?
I tossed them in the garbage with a ton of other use less cables. I kept one HDMI cable (not 8) and a few odds and ends. I kept one rj45 Ethernet cable and tossed the rest. I even tossed my rj45 crimping tool kit. Why? Because I don't see the need to crimp Ethernet cables anytime soon and should the need arise I can buy a kit for $30.
So at the end my cable box when from being overflowing to half full.
I had four unused HDMI cables. One day, I needed to send a signal from my PC to my tv. I usually use Plex for convenience and the "resume where I left off" feature, but that day a certain update was acting up, so I decided to use a cable instead. Easy. The next day, I wanted to send a signal from my laptop to the tv downstairs (I still hadn't fixed the Plex issue) and pulled out the second cable because I needed a different length than the first one... but it turned out to be incompatible, so I ended up using the third one.
I also did the "only keep one of each" purge, but that last part about throwing away a tool because you can just buy another one later is nuts to me. Yeah you could do that. You could also throw away all your cables and just buy them when you need another lol.
HDMI and Ethernet are comedies at this point, no need to hoard so many. The point is to not throw away the more rare/niche ones since getting one after will be hard and/or expensive.
Agreed... the realization I had recently was that if I've got boxes that I haven't touched in years, then I won't really miss them as much as I think I will if I get rid of it.
I have the same. It has saved hundreds of dineros for me and my friends and even better, prevented those ending up in the bottomless trickle up coffers of the zillionaire.
I have surplus/military bare cables dating from the 1970s or so, extra shiny silver plated copper with PTFE jacket: a joy to solder, then more "normal" ones from the late 80s and 90s, then "old" modern ones, that is, power/audio/data cables usable with recent stuff. I'll never throw away any of them because unlike most crap they bundle with consumer devices today, they're made of real copper. Take a cheap cable bought today and chances are that it either sticks to a magnet, meaning it's copper plated steel or other crappy alloy, or it doesn't and it's super light which indicates it's made of aluminium; in all cases not good where power dissipation can be a problem or where resoldering may be necessary. Keep old cables!
Hey! It’s not just me! The other day, someone at work decided to throw away a large drawer worth of HDMI, DP, USB cables that I had neatly organized a couple of months ago. This was to make room for like 5 spare power strips that take up <20% of the drawer and while we had like 3 empty drawers in the cabinet. Needless to say, I was livid. Especially because I found out while looking for a USB cable to charge my mouse that we had at least x4 in the drawer.
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.
I too live in the firm belief that my collection of DB13W3 cables will at some point prove essential to saving humanity from nanobot goo for which the shutdown codes are only stored in earth's last remaining SGI IRIS 4D Crimson.
This is also a good reason to keep your knowledge of MIPS assembler fresh, lest you have to type lots of it very quickly as the swarm approaches.
My dad passed a few years back, this past year I spent a considerable amount of time helping my mom and sister tame all his junk. So much junk was tossed or donated, very little was kept and even less sold. Not wanting to burden my family with all of my junk I started working on my own hoard this summer. Letting go wasn't easy, but once it was done I felt less burdened by it.
And yes like clockwork a week after tossing it all I needed some random cable. I spent a couple of bucks for one at Walmart of all places, but Amazon and ebay would have had my back if that cable hadn't been there.
If you have a similar junk box, you have my permission to just throw it away. Don't look in it, don't worry about it, just toss it. You do not need to be carrying so much junk. You do not need 20 year old ethernet cables, 30 year old scsi and ide cables, or 40 year old audio cables. You can buy new ones, in new condition today, most of which are reasonably priced and wont produce random errors or noise due to internal faults.
tl;dr- You don't need it, toss it and do it today!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It think it's both. The more stuff you have, the more you hoard, and the less you need to pay in terms of time/energy/money to get something you had in the past if you need it now/later, and on the flip side, you can be more minimalist, and will need to spend more time/energy/money to get the things you threw away/gave away/sold if you need them now/later.
It's mostly a resource/constraint time/space/money/effort problem.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
1. I always know where my box of cables is, because it’s never moved from its location . 2. It takes up less than two shoeboxes of space, which is hardly anything in my home. 3. If I need the cable right now, I don’t have to wait 24 hours. 4. It costs me nothing to keep them.
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.
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.
Grouping is also key to de-duplicating IMO. Can be tough to throw away a single cable. But when you have 10 of them grouped together, you know you can safely get rid of them.
IM/FWIW: I personally have found 4mil ziploc-style bags to be pretty close to indestructible. They're like thick evidence locker bags
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.
When you do that, just throw away the ones that only have power. If they're skimping that badly on the data wires, the power wires probably suck too. And it's not giving them a meaningful improvement in flexibility/weight.
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...
A few years ago I had to use a pair of high-voltage to low-voltage differential SCSI converters to connect an external DEC TK50 tape drive to my PC, because while I had plenty of HD68-to-HD68 cables, and HD68-to-Centronics cables, and a wide variety of ISA and PCI SCSI HBAs (and probably a couple EISA and Micro Channel boards if I looked hard enough, and I seem to recall finding a VL bus SCSI HBA on a shelf at work a few years ago), the only PCIe SCSI HBAs I have are multichannel cards with VHDCI ports, and the only VHDCI cables I have are VHDCI-to-VHDCI and VHDCI-to-HD68.
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).
That's pretty much exactly my organization, instead of a big box I split them into smaller tubs. USB is further divided via labeled bags into USB A->C, USB C, Lightning, and "misc". On top of those I have a R/C car battery/charging tub and a home automation tub.
There are some 3d printer models for building grids of individual cable organizers (https://makerworld.com/en/models/946444-gridfinity-cable-org...) but I have too many cables and my collection is too dynamic to well-utilize something as static as that.
Large 4mil ziploc style bags are extremely durable and are about $0.26 each in bulk on Amazon.
I very much recommend them. As a bonus, you can label them if desired. (Print a label out, or slap some tape on there and write on that, or just stick a sheet of paper inside the bag and write on that)
Depends on if you reasonably expect to encounter one of those devices again and if the future cabling is backwards compatible.
Using your list I'd likely keep one IDE and comoposite video cable, but toss the RG59 and CAT5 because I could use a current RG6 or CAT6 cable in their place.
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.
10% of my garrage... okay, exxagerating - but at least 0.1% is the big box of cables of who the fuck knows what ... including several firewire, and really old nintendo, and some that I forgot what it was about...
"Why yes I do have E1 twisted pair to E1 coax baluns, and 50 ohm BNC to 75 ohm BNC with matching stubs, and VGA to SCART cables, right here in my big box of cables!" <gestures at shed with bulging walls>
Oh never. I have 2 giant boxes of them. The absolute worst thing ever is when you need something like a USB or HDMI cable, and you're forced to spend like 40 bucks at Best Buy because you're in a pinch.
I still have quite a number of packing cubes with silicone-tie'ed and zip tie'ed cables.
I do want to mention though, a huge amount of cables can be replaced by usb-c cables + an adapter. You don't need a bus to HDMI cable: just get an adapter that has usb-c female, that your cable plugs into, that changes it to HDMI. Ditto for displayport, USB micro, USB b, USB a.
And for power VFLEX has a quite reasonably priced adapter to DC barrel jacks. I still have I dunno 70 power supplies, for laptops, gadgets and whatever. But at this point almost all my devices actually run on high efficiency gan usb-c power supplies. These once again follow the pattern: a usb-c female, then a pigtail (yay, better than fixed, like the HDMI), then the barrel jack.
You're not wrong, but many times I've gone looking for a specific adapter (because I already had a similar cable) and found out that the adapters _usually_ cost as much or more than just buying the cable.
Usually it's a bit cheaper, from what I see. Especially if you buy 3-5.
Cost or no, like it because it means much much much less space. Instead of packing for a trip and wondering what set of cables I need, I have cables, and I have adapters. A couple short cheap cables and two longer good ones work for almost any purpose.
This post inspired me to go through my box of cables and I actually found a full HTC Vive headset with controllers in there buried several layers deep that I had completely forgotten about. I think it ended up there because it came with about a dozen cables so the cable box seemed like the natural place to dump it all.
Now I need to go through that box in detail to see what else might be lurking.
Flip side? I have, in almost half a century of tech dabbling, never once needed a cable from that box that I couldn't have bought again.
I still keep _some_. A basic supply of standard cables "just in case", and clearly labeled things for "who the fuck needed to invent another connector" cases. (Looking at you, printer manufactures and WD hard drive enclosures)
But I strongly suggest tossing most of it. You need the space more than you need more cables.
Hot tip - buy a box of small / medium zip lock bags and bag them all up. Duplicates in the same bag are ok (10cm / USB-C) etc.
For the last 10 years my "techno box" has been a box of bags - the cables don't get tangled and small bits (adaptors / notes) get to live with the cables. Its one of the rare few home environment hacks I actually have!
Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc.
Grouping them is key to deduplicating.
It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them.
I also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them.
I don't group exactly, nor do I want to de-duplicate, but I've organised my boxes on the shelf and sorted and labelled them recently, in what seems the most logical way at the time; I have "networking", "USB", "power", "A/V", "PC" and some as of yet unlabelled ones with random stuff I can't place in the others.
There is some unfortunate crossover regarding where things belong because some USB are for power, some are for A/V etc, others or data...
What I realised, when going through these boxes was two things; it would cost a fortune to replace all of the cables in them, I wouldn't be surprised if replacement cost ran into the low thousands of £££ (should they be on my home insurance?!) and secondly; I'm no longer indecisive about what to do with a frayed or otherwise non-ideal cable, it goes straight in the bin; I used to retain the "nicer" ones and solder new connectors if the microUSB had worn out, or the cable was damaged near the end, that got much harder with USB-C unless I'm going for a simple +/-/D+/D-, so I just don't bother.
As for how often they're used; the USB box comes out almost daily, sometimes several times a day, if I'm charging things in my home office, or connecting something that isn't permanently plugged at my desk, I put the cables back away when I'm done. Power comes out every few weeks, and "networking" only when I need to reorganise things in the network cabinet/server rack.
For USB, the "final form" would be to create a labelling system so I can tell at a glance what each one supports, because as it stands I have to pull out my little LED cable tester thing and see how many light up to know if it'll do DP or high power charging etc.
> because as it stands I have to pull out my little LED cable tester thing
You can keep it in the same box!
I thought about that as I was writing, I think I might do just that!
This bags or bins or whatever your preferred organization method is. Don't just have "cables" group them. This is how I discovered "yeah, I don't need all these DVI/VGA cables and I can do with only 10 extra HDMI cables".
I'll second "grouping" with "capability sorting". Get a cable tester and sort your cables by Charge/USB speeds. Even with my default "grouping" of things like "USB-C -> C", "USB-A -> C", etc I still was buying new cables for projects/uses since I wanted to make sure I got exactly the speed/power requirements right. Now all my cables are sorted by capability and that led to more purging and less purchasing since I can go to my cable bins and grab exactly what I need.
God, yeah. I try to label the USB-C cables directly by capability with my label maker, if they are more than basic charging cables.
Somewhat recently, on a wild night out on the town, I ended up buying a USB-C <> USB-C cable tester[0]. Using it, I managed to find a few amazing cables amongst my collection. Gave away the others with context. I want something like this for every type of cable.
[0] https://caberqu.com/20-42-c2c-caberqu.html
I like your idea of a wild night out!
Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?
I have a cheaper version, it does basically all one needs by telling you how many conductors the cable has, if it's only got 4 lights lit up it's a simple USB2, more power LEDs is a higher power charging cable, more data pairs, higher data throughput/USB3, nearly all of the lights (usually bar 1 of the CCX) it's full DP/Thunderbot, data, charging, A/V etc.
Sometimes it even shows USB-C connectors that are only wired for one orientation!
More often than not just knowing the contact has OK connection is good enough.
As far as I know the marker chips is mostly to tell the devices to not abuse the cable.
What makes for an amazing cable? For USB, if it carries data and power, I’m usually pretty happy with it.
For USB, if it can carry 65W+ of power to my laptop as well as the Keyboard/Mouse inputs, 4K/60Hz display and audio back to the monitor as well as KB/Mouse and perhaps some external storage or network adapter, that's a pretty amazing cable.
I also have preferences between my cables by the quality and aesthetic, I prefer some over others because they look or feel nicer even if in testing they contain the same conductors, but that's just ... me.
I currently have 3 such cables connected to my work laptop each sending 4K/60Hz video to each of my 3 x 4k monitors, audio to my soundbar and one of them is powering the laptop at 90W and sending my keyboard, mouse and webcam inputs back.
What marker do you use to mark them? Is the ink durable and easy to read?
I bought a cheap pack of 5 colors of 3m electrical tape. Each cable gets one or two pieces of tape:
Data:
White if usb2
Blue if it supports USB 3 data (because 5Gbps USB 3 ports are mostly blue)
Green if TB/USB4/40Gbps
Power:
None if low/no Power Delivery
Yellow for 45W PD
Red for 65W+ PD
I suggest finding something else, electrical tape starts coming off after a few years, leaving behind sticky residue that's impossible to remove without some kind of solvent. Same goes for masking tape.
Heatshrink?
You could even do combinations of colors like on resistors.
Might get sticky residue after a few years
Love this, that sounds awesome. Thanks for sharing!
A label maker, as they said they use, prints durable and easy to read labels.
Whoops, thank, I can't read - I misread label maker as label marker!
I use a white paint pen. DATA and NO DATA.
Remember CD spindles? Those are were a quarter of my cables live now. They can be stacked! There's also a few boxes and one tech bag. Also, the 15m (50ft) HDMI cable doesn't fit anywhere so it got it's own space.
A secret I've found is use hair ties instead of rubber bands with cables, they survive long stints in the garage much better
I have a roll of velcro for this. Massive roll, and I cut off small 7-8cm pieces.
I double the cables over until they're short enough, and then tie them into a loose half knot.
No fasteners to wish for, or to fail.
Both ends of every cable are always next to each other for identification at a glance.
Different cables cannot tangle with each other in a box.
There are no axial twists imparted into the cable.
(Stage hands hate this technique, but this isn't stagecraft.)
another benefit of the hair tie method is when you go to use the cable, you can take as much length as you need from either end, then bunch/coil 'n wrap the rest with the hair tie. You have given me a lot to think about though, I'm always looking for ways to improve my cable storage techniques
It works best with short-ish cables; several meters or less is nice and quick and is simple to keep neat.
Longer cables can also work but it kind of takes more space to get it done. Like, a 30-meter extension cord or similar is completely do-able, but it's useful to be able to walk around while it is happening. If the cable is both very long and very heavy, then it's a great workout for all kinds of muscle groups that may have been forgotten about. :)
But again, it's quick for the lengths we usually use in PC and home AV spaces. Or at least becomes quick with enough repetition: My hands seem to know how to do it on their own without me really looking or even thinking about it, and that frees my other resources up enough that I can visually plan my next (unrelated) move while the first is still in motion.
Multiple cables of about the same length can be wrapped together like this. A stereo pair of RCA interconnects, or the same 3 cables that always get used with a laptop, can stay grouped together and never become separated in storage.
It also works on laptop cables with a power brick in the middle.
And it's nice to the cables. Inherently avoiding axial twists is key here and the process also tends to help remove minor twists that showed up while the cable was in-use. It does produce periodic bends, and those bends always happen at the same places, and that repeated deformation does promote stress fractures at very predictable places.
But cables generally survive thousands of iterations of this over the span of decades, and decades is good enough. :)
---
Stage hands, meanwhile: There's reasons they hate the double-double technique, above. Their cables can be very long, there can be literal tons of them, and speed is a very important factor.
So they use a very specific coiling technique called over-under that seems impossible to describe with written language alone. It does put axial twist into the cable but those twists alternate and average to 0 instead of accumulating or multiplying (like elbow-wrapping can do[1]).
Over-under always requires the coil and cable ends to be tied up together before storage. That's often accomplished with an appropriate length of stout string or even rope that is permanently tied to one end (nothing to lose), but velcro can work too.
It's a solid technique. When done right, it allows fast deployment: Untie it, hang onto one end, and the rest can be literally thrown across a stage or whatever. Since the twist averages to 0, it tends to unwind neatly as it flies and lay flat when it lands.
And, of course: It stows well. Cables wrapped over-under can be tossed into a bag or a trunk or hung on hooks or whatever; they don't tangle.
It's probably overkill for the big box of mostly-short cables at home, but it's also worth understanding for the longer stuff we also use.
[1]: Elbow-wrapping and other very common methods that aren't unwrapped exactly oppositely of how they were wrapped up to begin with, or provide some other mechanism to manage twist: Those are great ways to put permanent axial twists into a cable. It is the entire reason why the long extension cords hanging in so many home garages and work environments alike (and especially on commercial vacuum cleaners[2]) wind up looking like coil springs or curly pasta even after being stretched out flat-ish in an open space. They didn't start off that way; they were forced to be that way through handling. Friends don't let friends elbow-wrap cables.
[2]: And that's also why residential vacuum cleaners usually have a large number of ridges running down the length of their power cords.
The usual storage method has the user winding the cable around hooks on the side of the machine, and the usual deployment method involves rotating one of those hooks and liberating the entire coil of cable at once. This tends to promote axial twist.
But! The ridges enhance rotational friction. So as the ridged cable slides through the user's hand as they wind it back up onto the side of the machine after use, the ridges help those twists to be pushed down the line to the far end where the plug is. And since that end is loose at that time, it's free to rotate and alleviate twist. This happens automatically as the user winds up the cable and is a pretty good design trick. :) (I have no idea why commercial machines use smooth cable.)
I use cable velcro ties. A big roll of them is cheap.
I use twine for the same reason. Dirt cheap. Lasts forever. Doesn't leave residue on your cables. The downside is I end up cutting the twine when I need to use the cable but a couple inches of twine in insignificant.
I bought a small garden twist tie roll years ago. I don't have a garden but I have boxes of cables. Probably won't run out for another 10 years.
I’ve cut up a broken USB cable and use the wires to tie up... other wires usually, for cables I have velcro, but I think it could work there as well.
Used bicycle tube cut into rings make the best elastic bands, they don't degrade
I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.
I started with the wife's stash, then bough a few thousand in bulk so i would never have to worry about it again
you'll die violently if she find out you are behind the dissapearance of her hairbands. (At least that would happen to me)
Garden stores/sections sell circles of green Velcro you can cut; I figure of it's good enough for UV then it'll work in a box.
As a bonus, you don't need to raid her hairbands.
Ooooooo...... I hadn't thought of this. Thank you!
Bike shops have yards of that stuff in the late winter/early spring. At least Trek shops do, dunno about others. Trek uses it to tie stuff onto the frame in the box to keep it all from rattling around.
Bread ties are good too. Sometimes they're too short, but you can twist a few together
There are similar long coated-wire ties used for gardening.
Zip-ties, velcro, and twine (all suggested previously) also work well.
Ha! I use CD spindles for… wait for it… CDs! Just opened the second drawer of my desk and counted four spindles of blank CDs and DVDs that I haven't used in years.
(I also hoard blank CD/DVD jewel cases. Who says technology ruins lives?)
I like to use the round Danish butter cookie tins for cable storage.
Glad to see I am not the only one keeping our grandma's traditions alive.
Thank you for mentioning cd spindles. Good times.
That sounds hard. Is a USB-A-to-C cable in the A group or C group or neither? What about the inverse? What about cables that only do data but can't transmit enough power? What about cables that are slow but high power? What about thick cables like USB4 that barely bend or fit in the bag? What about male-to-female vs. male-to-male? What about brand-specific cables that have their own abilities (say, high-powered but not PD)? The list goes on and on...
I think I hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable, and at this point most of them are USB-C, so they'd all mostly end up in the same bag if that's the criterion.
It's not for everybody (what ever is, rite?) and since you "hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable" then congrats, you're winning at life and don't need anything like this.
Doesn't feel hard to me. I have a bag for USB A, a bag for USB C, and a bag for USB A<->C.My USB-C charging cables are all 3' or longer, so they're visually distinct from the crappy little cables that come for free inside the package for various budget-priced gizmos.
My Thunderbolt/USB4 cables are labeled as such, and I am very confused that you are talking about Thunderbolt/USB4 cables so stiff that they cannot bend to fit into a container or bag.... I mean, mine are stiff but not that stiff. Plus these are expensive cables. Not sure I have any spares. Those are bought for purpose.
I would consider tossing the usb-a to usb-c cables that do not have a confirmed 56k ohm resistor.
How do you test that?
Similarly USB cables that do not carry data lines
I think I disagree. I just (re-)discovered a couple of my cables don't have data lines a few hours ago, prompted by the earlier discussion. My initial instinct was also to throw them away like you said. But then I realized they're actually quite useful for any case where you want to prevent data transmission, whether due to security or other reasons.
agree. i have no issue with charging only cables, they’re often lighter and more flexible, but i do require the 56k ohm resistor to wrangle misbehaving devices that could start a fire.
Though these should be cut in half before discarding so that no one "helpfully" retrieves them.
Definitely not winning at life with this lol, it's actually frustrating because the cables are so similar. One has a higher speed, one has a higher power, one is shorter, one is longer, one is more flexible, one has a display showing when it's connected, etc... and in many cases it's hard to tell which at a glance so it's always a pain trying to figure out if I'm using a cable unnecessarily somewhere and unnecessarily buying another one because of that.
Charging is an interesting case, I actually deliberately use crappy cables for that too, depending on the charging time I need!
Re: stiffness: I mean I guess it depends, how big is your bag. I'm thinking like a freezer bag not a grocery bag. I could bend them to fit but then I'd probably mess them up.
When I look up thick thunderbolt 4 cables I see a bend radius of 2 inches at most. And my very thick 15 foot 4K displayport/HDMI cables came packed in a box with a 3 inch bend radius. You can manage a 3 inch bend radius with a quart bag, let alone the 1 gallon or 2 gallon bags that I'd expect to act as reasonable cable storage.
My solution is a big drawer block with lots of spots for different cables. USB c cables with video go in the video cable drawer, high power goes in the power drawer, etc. Can't mistake USB c with HDMI (and mini HDMI can burn in hell). And only buy USB C cables that state their capabilities on the housing, if they don't I'll permanently attach them to a place where they can be most useful.
Have an A bin, and a C bin, and stretch the A-to-C cords between them. Simple!
Easy. One end in each box.
Like everyone, it seems, in this thread, I have not one big box of cables but several. But my classification system is mostly around age: old USB cables (mini, micro) vs recent USB cables (USB C), old screen cables (VGA) vs recent ones (HDMI), etc.
This doesn't work for everything: audio cables do not evolve much, nor do remote cables for DSLRs; but in general it's reasonably effective.
As a musician with a modular synth, I have three boxes, two just for audio.
Somehow, after decades of careful curation, the cable I need is always missing!
Yep, ziploc bags with the type of cable written in permanent marker.
Pro-tip, use a hole punch on a corner of the bag. That way, once zipped you can just squeeze it to get the air out.
I did the same thing, albeit with some printed labels in the same corner on each, so that it's easy to flip through them when they're stacked together. Has saved me dozens of minutes over the years!
Unless you are very short on space, keep all 10. Because 50-100% of them will randomly cease to work.
I dunno, I get few thematical boxes of them (audio cables, power cables, usb stuff) and it never happened
It's anecdotical, but in my experience, USB cable break way more than any other cable I have.
I group my cables too, but it's all one group in a big plastic bin that gets bigger over time.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I was going to write. I group my cables into boxes for USB, power, network, audio/video, and power supplies. The boxes are a finite size, and when no more cables will fit into the box, I go through and do some deduplication.
Yep. I went through my big box of cables, deduped a lot of things, got rid of a bunch of stuff I'd never need, etc.
Of course, I DID need one of them just a month or two later! But it was still a good exercise.
Now I have a whole drawer in a workbench devoted to cables sorted by type. What's surprising is how I NEVER have spare USB-C cables and ALWAYS have spare lightning cables. I mean, it SHOULDN'T be surprising, since more and more devices I own are now USB-C, but it's interesting that I expect my stock to always provide, and it never does -- for that cable type.
The frequency with which I have to buy new USB-C cables of varying lengths really illustrates the migration I've undergone. "Surely I have one I can just snag for the other car..." and I'm always proven wrong.
I just sorted through like 15 years of accumulated cables. I kept any that I knew I'd need for projects or things I knew I had a use for. Everything else got slimmed down to a maximum of two of each type and general length and only if they were good quality. Type C and Cat6 were the only cables I kept several of. I threw out so many USB micro and Cat5 cables.
On a side note: grouping cables based on the connector form factor is evil when you include USB-C.
Which of the cables are for PD? How much power? Can they do USB? If yes, at which of the dozen speeds? Is it a Thunderbolt cable? Which TB version? Is it certifiable or just blatantly unstable when running 40Gbit/s? Or is it some proprietary alt mode cable? And which ones are just spec breaking fire hazards if you tried PD with 240W through them? Do the cables have markings to tell you the capabilities? Are they even correct? Were they put on as a lie to upsell cheap USB 2.1 cables?
Bonus points if there are cables with some sort of “adapter” dangling in front (quotes because these are not a thing in USB). Double all your points if there is an USB-C to USB-C extension cord in the box.
It is certainly a box of mysteries.
I do not mean to invalidate your organizational scheme, but every time I am reminded of USB I have an irrational desire to rant about the flaws of USB-C.
Yes grouping is the important part. The next important part is labeling.
For example, I have a variety of USB C to USB C cables but they each have their own capabilities. Some support high transfer speeds, so I keep them around for connecting SSDs, while others are just USB 2 speeds so they are strictly for charging.
Another case is I have a very specific USB C to USB C cable that looks incredibly generic, but it is for connecting a screen tablet to a laptop because the manufacturer decided to make the port recessed, so only their cable fits. If this cable wasn't labeled as for a specific device, I would have donated it years ago.
It is some effort, for those who don't like to tinker with tech I can understand why they just shove them all into a box in the back of their closet. But I find that culling my cables at least makes me aware of what I have and don't have.
One other suggestion I have is just buying a longer cable than you think you need because eventually you'll have the need for it anyway. I have so many 3.5mm aux cables because I kept changing my desk set up and needing to buy longer and longer cables. If I had just bought the longest cable I could have at the time I would have saved myself some headache.
Another tip is adapters. Sometimes it's easier to just have cables of one type and a bunch of adapters for when you need them rather than having a ton of different cables for each possible scenario. I used to have a mix of RCA and 3.5mm cables but never had the right combination of what I needed at the time. Eventually I caved in and just bought a ton of adapters so I could standardize all the cables and use adapters as needed. Same with USB C cables.
> One other suggestion I have is just buying a longer cable than you think you need because eventually you'll have the need for it anyway.
This only works with cables that bend easily. For something stiff/sensitive like high speed USB4 I found it more problematic than helpful.
+1000 did _exactly_ this right down to the ziploc. Also a bag for audio, HDMI, old apple cables, and "random" cables. These days, I store the ziplocs in a pelican-type case and that goes in a stack with cases for power cords, camera gear, SBC gear,etc - and the stacks all go on furniture dollies, so I can roll them out.
What bag does a cable with HDMI on one end and USB C on the other end go into?
The most specialized standard wins, so in this case I'd say HDMI.
Obviously, one cuts a small hole in the ziploc bags and runs the cable between them so that each connector can be in the correct bag.
In my system that lands in the "adapters" bin which has has a "display" bag within it.
That's still a topic of active debate
No, active HDMI cables go in a different bin.
Either create a 2-dimensional categorization system or create a priority hierarchy.
It's own bag, it won't feel lonely for long :)
Yep. It's easy to get into the mode of tossing everything into a big box and then you can't find anything anyway. After a tire, I tossed a lot but I find I still need to organize a lot of things down to a manageable remainder where I can actually find things I'm likely use.
Post author here.
I didn’t get into my organizational techniques, but agree with your take! Ziploc bags + a sharpie is exactly how I do it.
https://imgur.com/JMUIcDY
Yes, and I do the same for all DC adapters. Writing voltage etc so it's easy to find
I do this. All my FireWire 400-to-800, 400-to-400, 400-to-dinky little Sony 400, etc. cables were all in one box, the FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter was in the box with my Thunderbolt cables and adapters, and I still didn't find the FireWire 800-to-800 cable I needed to use Target Disk Mode on a friend's Mac a few months ago until a few weeks later when I was cleaning out my storage unit and found an unused FW800 cable in a box I guess I was saving on the off chance that I needed to return a 15-year-old LaCie RAID enclosure that was shucked about a decade ago off for warranty repairs.
Proper flaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbxMyytWw60
Ziptie once coiled, attach label for what format / length.
Bag cables with the same connectors. If you have more than fit in a gallon ziploc you should probably reduce them.
Bonus if you hang them on a pegboard so you can see them with big clear labels on each bag.
Edit: and shrinkwrapped labels on each end (e.g. 12345-USBC-2m) for double bonus points so that you never have to trace a cable to find the other end.
> Ziptie once coiled, attach label for what format / length.
Please god, no more zip ties. Use double sided Velcro strap. You can buy it in a roll and cut to length. Reuse it all you want. Join multiple shorter lengths to make a longer one. Just please don't make me cut another god damn zip tie off a bundled cord. I deal with enough zip tie bondage fetishists at work.
Cutting the ziptie is half the fun! Just be glad it's not shrink wrapped or clamshelled ;)
double-sided velcro holds less well and is more likely to stick to things. Just toss a pair of diags in your box if you are worried about getting the zip ties off.
There is a problem with the over-under method use for long cables. If you then grab the wrong end through the centre hole you end up with a cable with a bunch of overhand knots in, which I find much more tedious to deal with than just using normal looping of cables and making sure to add the twist each time.
Back many years when I was touring with bands, at the end of the night you'd see all the lighting crew walking around the stage coiling the long cables, with one end trailing after them, to make sure the twists were correct. That was much more useful than generic over-under for all cables.
over-under has its place, but I don't use it everywhere.
I do group them using one "type" per box too (either "audio cables" or "usb not-C", "usb C" etc. However I do not use zip-bags, instead I use core of toilet rolls - suitable to add length labeling too.
Also, if you have a heat-sealer, individually bagging the cables before grouping them avoids having cables mate and turn into a Gordian knot. A heat-sealer allows you to make bags that are just the right size for your cable, vs. generic ziplocs.
I grouped mine a few months ago. Since then, several times, I've been able to find a cable and use it right away. Before that the prospect of digging through the massive tangle often led me to (lazy!) order new cables.
I'll pay the price to sound like your average redditor but... thanks, Internet stranger, for this advice. I will follow it from now on - especially for the "prevent tangles" part.
And then, when you really need them, it turns out that out of ten maybe one still works and you couldn't predict which one it will be. :)
Same, my categories are power, data, audio, video (for mysterious reasons networking cables are renting a small space into the video’s box).
I put them into individual bags, usually group of two of the same kind e.g. USB a to c.
USB B cables are also notoriously sensitive and the slightest damage can result in malfunctions. Went through this recently with a PreSonus AudioBox.
> USB B cables are also notoriously sensitive and the slightest damage can result in malfunctions. Went through this recently with a PreSonus AudioBox.
Do you mean micro-USB-B? Full size (and mini) USB-B cables (comparatively) built like tanks.
Even though it's annoying, I understand the design tradeoff. You definitely would rather your (replaceable) cable get damaged than the port it's plugged into.
I have this issue with cables between my Pi 4B and my slightly old 3D printer.
USB-A to micro-B cables, and the connection is tetchy beyond belief about which ones it will accept and which it won't, either with or without the theoretically-unnecessary-for-this-printer power wire blocker. I can see no rhyme or reason to it but now I have a cable that has a dot painted on it...
I'm going to steal your idea. What ziploc baggie size have you found is best for cables?
Quart ziploc for most. A couple gallon sizes for longer or thicker cables.
And then there's the bags from Bed Bath & Beyond where they were made to hold giant pillows and blankets all together . . .
> clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies
> transparent plastic box
> Banker's Boxes
Do not do this. All plastic baggies, storage tubs, and grocery bags, are going to build up with static electricity. While it may seem totally fine to drop inert cables into a plastic bag, eventually you'll come up against a USB stick, or an SSD or SDRAM, or something, and that ESD damage will not be a pleasant customer experience.
Go here: https://silicagelpackets.com/aluminized-and-clear-moisture-b...
I picked up some resealable, aluminized bags and they've lasted for years. I also purchased fistfuls of silica gel packets, and I toss one into each bag when I seal it up.
I'm not sure if organizing "by cable type" would make sense to me, when there are adapters and dongles involved. Some of these baggies have been labeled by the central device, e.g. "All ThinkPad accessories are in here".
Also, for cable organizing, I've ordered rolls of plain Velcro strips: https://www.amazon.com/VELCRO-Brand-VEL-30765-AMS-Self-Gripp...
You can just cut these to the desired length and wrap them around your cables, for routing or bundling. They are, of course, reusable. I cut little notches in them so that they stay locked to each cable. You could get them in rainbow colors, but I like the white rolls so that I can write on them with a Sharpie.
> I also purchased fistfuls of silica gel packets, and I toss one into each bag when I seal it up.
Keep in mind that not everything stores optimally at very low humidity.
I was surprised to learn (from a recent thread here) that books will degrade more quickly if they are kept completely dry.
Hmm, interesting. I've never had a static charge issue, but then again, maybe I will someday. I'll definitely look into that next time I mess around with my storage. Thank you.
That link almost gave me cancer. Here's the clean version for those who come after:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QH2NVM1
>"Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc."
Yeah. I do the same
This is rough when you have lots of weird one offs. Strange trrs->rj45 for programming a radio you still use but haven't reprogrammed in 10 years; does that go in "generic serial stuff" or "things you want to keep but haven't used in a long time" (right next to the 13w3 -> 5 wire component cable for the sparc in the other corner)
Yeah, "grouping" is largely the way to go for the generic parts, and keeping parts together when they really do need to go together is another.
I used to just have a generic big tub with all the generic cables and wires. Some were nicely wrapped up, others often got themselves into a giant tangled mess. I could never find anything. I got a bunch of small/medium sized plastic bins with lids for all the generic stuff. An old labeler quickly made them "USB cables", "A/V Cables", "DC Power Adapters", "AC Power Cables", "Coax Cables"...now it takes me two seconds to find any particular random cable.
>However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them.
My first thought was "awesome, what project can I start that uses ten of those cables?"
Did you come up with anything? Because I'm drawing a blank.
10 printers, one for each finger, outputting a page per letter used by analyzing your bash_history.
Welcome to the OCD lounge. I also put my cables into bags, which helps me sleep better at night.
Stackable bins work too. Need various sizes as backup as you accumulate though.
Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives.
I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends.
Modular PSU cables never go in the big box. They go back in the PSU box if I'm being smart. Then I know which PSU they came from and can throw them out in ten years along with the PSU itself.
(I'm rarely smart and have a second big box of modular PSU cables that I maybe ought to get rid of.)
They aren't even consistent within manufacturer!
They're standardized on the device side, but not the PSU side. So always check pinout before you make the very reasonable assumption that if it fits it works
> They aren't even consistent within manufacturer!
Especially if the "manufacturer" is just a reseller.
A PSU cable tester is valuable for this. They're much cheaper than a replacement PSU, and you can plug in cables wherever they fit on a PSU, and test whether the output is correct for the CPU/PCI/motherboard/SATA connector you want to plug it into. The PSU and cable might be a black box, but the output is always testable.
Couldn't you still fry a PSU if the cable assumed multiple common pins to the PSU, but the PSU had different voltages across those connectors?
At least for the layouts listed here: https://pc-mods.com/blogs/psu-pinout-repository
The motherboard cables do all kinds of different scary crossovers so never separate them, though you'll probably never have an "extra" motherboard cable in the first place.
None of the other cables bridge pins on the PSU side, they "just" scramble the pins they're attached to at the other end.
That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU.
It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.
It wasn't actually very expensive in money, because I was still able to RMA the pair of fried drives, but it did cost me $30 in shipping, a month of waiting, a lost delivery via UPS, and tons of time dealing with customer support for both UPS and Seagate to actually get a second set of replacement drives.
On the bright side, the actual replacements that eventually got to me were both 2TB bigger than the originals. They didn't tell me about this, so I'm not sure if they silently upgraded me to apologize for the wait, it was an accident, or they happened to be out of stock and just grabbed the next size up.
You destroyed the drives by using an incompatible cable (I.e. clear user error) and they still sent you (upgraded) replacements? That is unusual.
Before you fry a whole 12bay drive array and backplane let me tell you this:
6 pin EPS and 6 pin PCIe power cables are not the same. Even though the connector may fit they are not the same pinout.
Looks the same? Should be fine.
uh oh
I too have been burned by the BBOC, although not as badly as this:
I picked out a random short ethernet cable that looked nice (it was flat) to connect my wifi AP to my router.
It took me about a month to realize my 100mbit internet connection had dropped down to about ~85-90mbit, but more importantly, transferring files between a wifi client and the wired network was also only ~90mbit.
Turned out the cable was so bad that it only connected at 100mbit...
I have now gone the other way and I actually curate the BBOC: All cables I get for 'free' with random appliances now go straight to the bin (unless they are specialised) and I only keep cables I specifically bought and know they adhere to a standard.
I had the same thing happen to me when I plugged in my massager charger into the blood pressure monitor and fried it
Oh for crying out loud, I've spent my life believing if it fits it's right. %$@&#!
Right? And people say assembling a PC is just like LEGO!
I hope you never have to work with serial D9 cables. The variation of pinouts for legacy equipment is massive! Pretty sure every theoretical variation became some standard.
Hah there was one on the 8088 I was allowed to play with as a child, but I only used the parallel port to switch on/off a motor via a relay.
Better to learn from my experience than yours.
I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.
I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately.
It's what JIT (just-in-time) inventory and offshore manufacturing took away from us. Hold onto your spare parts.
My dad worked at Lockheed and in the 80s they joked they used JIC (just in case) manufacturing. They had so many parts without a clear reason as to why they created so many.
JIC! That's funny. It may sound like inefficiency, but really it is an option on future flexibility. Just like the big box of cables.
> I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
What you've got to do is become more forgetful.
Ask not what a 17v power supply can do for your friends. Ask if you'll remember it and find it when that moment comes.
I have decided to not keep many cables. USB thingies, DVIs, VGAs, audio... you can get it from Amazon in pinch with same day delivery and I don't have that much space to spare.
But you can pry my Palm data cables from my cold, dead hands.
I agree with you 100%. except for some legacy stuff that would be pretty hard to find I toss everything else out. If I really need it I can just buy a new one.....turns out I never need to buy a new one....yeah maybe once every 10 years....
In 2021 I cut the end off a USB cable to expose the power leads which I scotch taped to the power meter on my bike to charge it. I kept that cable. In 2024 I used it to add USB disconnects to the light strip I attached to the bottom of my son's crib, allowing me to keep the light strip intact when we lowered the base from the baby height to the toddler height. A week later we got rid of the strip because we really didn't need the light like that any more. Still, no regrets. This was my version of using every part of the buffalo.
While I like to improvise I'd never want to use a cut-off cable anywhere near a toddler. Whatever the savings or practical benefits, they just can't outweigh the risk of the toddler doing something that causes a shock, fire, ... Maybe for the best that you removed that light strip.
If you are worried about 5 Volt electric shocks (!), I presume 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity' is also something you worry about?
waiting for the next piece of this story, where your toddler turns 13 and gets their first mp3 player, which doesn't ship with a charger and guess who still has 18 inches of cable left?
My cable box Protips:
1: use transparent boxes like an 11l IKEA Samla so you can easily see what you have.
2: fold each cable in half or a few times more and apply the granny knot[1], this will prevent your cables becoming an entangles mess. There are superior(tm) ways to fold cables, but doing the granny knot for household cables seems the way to go. Doing festivals with retro gaming computers I’ve done this thousands of times and it’s fast, saves space, gives quick and reliable access and prevents damage by pulling on cables from clutter etc
3: use multiple boxes for different categories: audio, game computers, standard power cables, pc cables (sata, usb), power bricks and so on to have some sort of a system, any system will work
4: don’t keep an inventory list: let the anarchy that is you, your memory and family, add and take away cables ad hoc. You will forget what is in the box and that is fine.
5: don’t forget the box exists and look in the box :)
[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-g7cauAe7Ec
For 2, I just keep these little thingies that come with the sliced bread bags. Of course that requires a little thingies box.
I feel seen.
When my wife and I moved into a new house, my big box of cables got sorted into several smaller boxes of cables, and an "other" bin.
I also have a travel bag of meticulously packed USB cables of all kinds.
3 times in the last month, I produced exactly the right cable for helping her set up some older hardware at her office at her small business.
The kinds of cables lesser men would have thrown away long ago.
I have also accepted I need duplicates of stuff for convenience.
I have one box that has all that I need when we go away for the weekend/week (by car, not plane). All the chargers since the family now has a lot of phones, headsets, kindles, cameras etc. 2 HDMI cables, audio splitters, speakers, extension leads etc that I nearly always need when away for a while.
And then my commute bag has a small essentials bag for the now rarer times I work elsewhere.
All with duplicates of what I already have at home. That I before instead used to unpack and reuse at home, then find and repack all the time, and forget some. Not a problem anymore. My tech packing is literally picking up a box and put it in the boot of the car. Done.
I decided years ago to limit myself to just one box of cables... So then I ended up having to keep finding a bigger and bigger box to switch them to.
One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
If anyone has a suggestion on that or can tell me about the pop up local cable donation swap initiative I haven't heard of them that would be welcome.
Someone should make a noncommercial website that allows people to post their collection. I bet there's enough people out there willing to share their cables for free just for the delight of having one of their cables being useful to someone for some reason
>I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there's more cables out there than functioning equipment, especially for older standards like VGA or PS/2.
It's ok to throw out junk.
Some thrift stores will take them, if you have a good one nearby (I’ve been lucky here, but they’re rare). You can also put a note on your local freebie groups and someone might bite. In some cities you can leave them bagged outside your house with a note and they’ll be gone in hours. On some tech forum classifieds, people would give away cables and junk fans for the cost of the postage.
IT Recyclers will at least sort them and resell them in bulk as raw materials. Sometimes. When they are allowed to.
I keep a lot of wires around because my interests and work require that, and I find great pleasure in being able to connect anything at a whim. Right now they're all pretty tidy, sorted by role into not-giant boxes on a shelf. I don't have too much any particular type, and every one I do have works with currently-used technology.
It wasn't always that way, though -- I used to collect and keep all of the cables. It was quite a burden.
10 years ago or so, I went through them all and sorted them. I got rid of hundreds of pounds of cables. Those that went away were all broadly useless to modern society, or duplicates, or both.
I did think about taking some to a thrift store but, I mean: I see the same used wires on the shelves there sometimes for months or years: People don't want them. And I wasn't about to landfill them.
So I decided to recycle them by selling them as scrap.
In my case, with the scrap yard near me: They offered me a much better price without connectors on the wires than with them. So I cut all the ends off, bagged up all those bits of insulated copper wire, and sold them by the pound. It took a fair bit of time to prep all that stuff for scrap, but meh: I made a rather decent hourly wage doing it and felt like I was working towards the right goal.
Since this transaction gave them value, I can be reasonably certain that they got made into something instead of just being dumped into a hole in the ground.
---
If direct re-use is very important: You can sell them on eBay, I guess. There's buyers there. But then you're doing all of the things that selling cheap stuff on eBay requires and that sounds like an awful way to spend time.
Otherwise, the prospects are bad. Even at hamfest fleamarkets in Ohio, people don't usually bring in collections of old miscellaneous cables. A special programming cable for a Yaesu radio? Sure! 50 feet of LMR-400 coax? Why not.
Yet-another USB A-to-B printer cable? No, nobody wants that (we already have our own burdensome stash), and even if they do then nobody wants to scan through all of the old computer power cords and audio cables to find that printer cable any more than you want to sort it all out for for display and perusal.
If the money isn't important and the main goal is to avoid the landfill, then: Just put them on Craigslist or FB marketplace (or whatever regional variation works where you are) for free, in bulk. Someone will pick them up. Whether they think they're finding a pile of scrap to get some tax-free beer money from or some kind of hidden treasure doesn't really matter.
Or, in the right neighborhood: Put them in a pile on the curb so that people can see them. They'll simply disappear.
things like old hdmi cables need to go, updated specs mean the old ones fundamentally don't work.
learn how and get the tools to strip wires and sell the metal for scrap when you have too much, do it right and better than recycling, you can sell it
Grouping is what actually forces the dedup decision. A single cable always looks useful until you see ten of them side by side.
You’re not serious about it if you only have one box
Challenge: come up with categories for the boxes such that every item has exactly one box that is correct for it.
I've got "USB", "AV" and "Networking & PC Accessories", which obviously has enormous overlap, but equally divides the cables I have pretty nicely.
Funny this came up hn today. this week I did some organization of my cable boxes. I use banker boxes on a steel shelving unit. I put the cables and parts inappropriate boxes and labeled them and feel that my corner of the universe is a little bit better organized than before.
Mine is similar but I split audio and video since I have a lot of audio-specific stuff. "Video" only has the various monitor cable standards going back 20-odd years.
I think I've got the same three boxes. HDMI cables and adapters fall into the Venn diagram overlap of the last two IMO. You could also make a strong argument for USB also falling into "PC Accessories". But there's nothing quite as satisfying as having the _exactly right_ cable or adapter on hand to solve a problem. Makes it all worth it!
Easy! I put exclusions on my labels
"USB cables, standard"
"USB passive/special, except pigtails and USB->AV"
"AV, including USB-AV cables"
I have USB, Generic Power, IEC, Network, Audio/Video, Misc
Audio, computer, electric!
Hey could you put these powered computer speakers away for me? :)
Those are my categories!
"USB", "TV/HDMI", "Networking", "Every Audio Connector Known to Man", and the inimitable: "Plugs-to-Wall"
We have the same. Do you know why the ‘every audio connector known to man’ box contain every audio connector known to man but yet never a stereo 1/8” headphone-jack to headphone-jack cable?
don't know any audio engineers? If your bboc is simply a mishmash of things you've accumulated over the years, and not intelligently designed, it won't, but don't make the mistake of extrapolating from your own experience and thinking it applies to everybody.
AV, Network, Data, Power (if it doesn't fit the first category, try the next)
If one of those buckets is too full, prepend it with something more specific
i.e. USB, Data instead of just Data
My boxes been sorted by "what does the cable carry", one power cables, one data, one video, one patch cables, then some are split out, like sound production related cables, one with balanced 1/4", one unbalanced, one MIDI... I think in total 8 moving boxes by now.
It's always a miniature war with my wife trying to optimize all my cables away and me trying to keep as many as possible.
Depends on how big that box is
I have one for video cables, one for audio cables, one for computer gear. Does that make me serious our mildly interested?
Cable curious.
My categories are identical to yours. Home Depot had a sale on these stackable dewalt boxes that are much more cost effective for semi-junk stuff than Milwaukee pack outs.
For real, I have like 200 kilos of cables. I could very likely reduce that down to something less severe, but that involves sorting and inventorying 200 kilos of cables.
Whoever does need it, I give you permission to throw out all your old cables, power adapters, and routers. Yes, on the off chance you do decide you need a Palm III dock, Linksys WRT54G, or Sony PSP charger that means you'd have to buy one on Ebay, but you can cross that $10 bridge if it actually happens.
For me it's not the cost that bugs me when I don't have a part, but rather the disruption to my flow. If I can't get a project done all at once I'm much less likely to ever get it done.
No, this method does not work. I tried, got rid of all those stuff because why would I need it ever again. And of course a month later I needed that one stupid thing right there and then. And I remember throwing away... Not again, I keep at least one cable of each in a separate box to find immediately, the rest is stored, it is not asking for any money.
You’re not replying to the comment.
If you’re using 20 year old hardware, okay - keep 20 year old wires and accessories.
Most are not.
Put an expiration date on your neuroticism. Old dirty stuff can literally consume you.
Ask me how I know!
Yeah, what happens to me is I need a thing, go to Amazon to order it, see that I already bought it 4 years ago, spend 30 minutes trying to find it, then let out a big sigh and order it again.
Most recently: a USB to TTL serial adapter.
I have a bin of cables marked "Obsolete". A cable only goes in there if there's absolutely no possibility of it being used for any reason ever again.
I use cables from it once every few years.
And whoever needs something else, I give you permission to ignore this fool and keep your box(es) of cables. I don't regret a single thing about my ~8 boxes of cables.
For me, the hardest part is actually figuring out what the cable is called in order to find a replacement.
Google Lens
hardest part was
Throwing away proprietary cables is a sin. Throwing away standard commodity USB cables is not so much
Give them away to a thrift shop instead. Then you've helped somebody else who will find that cable in the thrift shop. So they can put it on ebay and sell it back to you when you need it two months later.
Yeah its hard enough when you need a Mini USB cable. When you need the proprietary RS232 cable for an old piece of hardware, at short notice, that stings.
I put my cables in bags then in a box. I can't tell you how helpful the bags are. It only took me like an hour to sort the first time. But it's already saved me hours only a year later. Those 5 minutes of searching add up. Just fight the laziness and don't let entropy increase. It's *far* easier to stay organized than it is to organize
Also helps to cut down on your number of cables once you see you have 5 USB-B cables when at most you need 1. I ziplock bagged all of my cables and cut them down to one of each type. These days I throw out the included cable with devices immediately rather than throwing it in with all the others. Thankfully a lot of new devices don't include cables now so the wastage is cut down.
Only one big box? The poor people. I have at least five big boxes and I'm regularly being accused of being a hoarder. Except of course when someone needs a cable ;)
What self-respecting household has one one box of cables?
You need at least one big one for the mains-rated bulky ones, and a few smaller ones: USB, Monitor/Ethernet etc, Audio.
I can recommend the small Ikea Knagglig boxes, they look nice and have the right size.
The problem with the big box of cables is that they multiply over the years. I now have 3 big boxes of cables. And a few smaller ones.
At least they are see trough plastic so I can easily see what is inside them though.
I think what nerds need to understand is that normal people hate accessories. Superheroes need no IV lines, they lose power when they are added and regain it when they are removed. They think throwing away cables and accessories make machines healthier.
So, the way it needs to be communicated is that they are necessary evil that help machines be happy. And also to allow special purpose tools and cables to be stored inside the machine if possible, so they don't psychologically present as excess decorations and/or gifts.
I have cabinets for cables (all tie-strapped), arranged in separate compartments:
- USB cables with at least one USB-C end
- All other USB cables
- Network cables
- Audio and video related (RCA, HDMI, SCART, phono, XLR, displayport, BNC, S/PDIF, etc)
- Power cables
- Power adapters
- Batteries and battery chargers
- Flash sticks, type adapters, diagnostic tools
- Spare keyboards and mice
Not a week goes by where I'm not grabbing something from that cabinet. A couple of months ago I actually needed a SCART cable for the first time in forever for some old hardware.
I am sharing this link to my wife right now!
In my defense, over the years, I upgraded the box for one of this big semitransparent IKEA boxes, lid included.
We moved a few months ago and it was so satisfying seeing the inventory of cables I had been saving for years getting used up. The cable-watermark in the box actually started noticably lowering. Nobody gave me the loud praise I deserved but it sure was satisfying saying "yeah I have the cable for it, here you go" with a distinct feeling of superiority.
Clear Hefty Slider bags are perfect for this! I have my cable boxes (Hefty Hi-Rise) filled with these bags, USB -A to USB-C, USB -C to USB-C (then sub-bagged with 65w, 100w, 240w) and so on.
Point is, use clear bags so you can see inside, and Hefty makes the slider version. I get the gallon and half gallon bags for this, and then the quart size as well. This is the Marie Kondo technique and it's amazing for keeping all these cables which are always coming in handy!
I keep the duplicates, because you never know which color and length is going to be the perfect fit for the current need!
The rule: one cable per bag! At least in my case.
My yearly cull of cables across several boxes:
1. Sort into cable type
2. Keep the shortest and longest of each type
3. Ditch all the others
I still have 6 drawers of cables.
In my big box of cables I have, among other things, a double-ended USB-A cable. I understand that this is absolutely not standards compliant, and I have absolutely no idea of where I got it from. I have never used it. But it is a thing that exists.
Getting rid of almost 10 different proprietary charging cables for pre-smart phones and some old laptops felt great though :P
There are also cables that look exactly like a double-ended USB-A cable but aren't. https://ftdichip.com/products/usb-nmc-2-5m/
Neat, I had never heard of those.
You and the other responders are probably familiar with it, but you made me look up this decent StackExchange answer again, coming from a search for "the forbidden usb cable" :)
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/444287
I have a few of those too. My laser cutter needs one. I've seen lots of "expensive equipment" use USB A-to-A cables, for some odd reason.
This came with a double-ended USB-A for charging: https://www.rei.com/product/248291/biolite-luci-original-cle...
I had one of those to charge a bicycle headlight. I gave it away with the bicycle, but in the span of time I had it, one visiting guest borrowed it to recharge a portable generic USB battery pack. So there you go, two product categories known to use that sort of cable!
Double-ended USB A cables were popular in the 2000s/early 2010s for powering external hard drives or USB DVD drives.
I installed some HP slide-out rackmount keyboard/monitor units that used these as the host connection. This was back in the days when PS/2 was still around so they usually weren't used.
I've got a 7 port USB 3.0 hub that connects with a double ended USB-A cable.
Put a USB C to A adapter on each end and you’ve got yourself a perfectly serviceable USBC cable.
Mine came from usb<->sata adapters.
mine had 2 male USB ends on one side and 1 on the other. It was to power a laptop hard disk drive from USB if one port couldn't provide enough power. Feels illegal. I bought it off eBay with a money order in like 2003.
mine came from a USB charger spycam
> double-ended USB-A cable.
Decades ago, I purchased a usb external hard drive case with a usb-a for the connection to the computer. Returned that pretty quick because eww.
I'm terrified of not being able to find old USB cables.
My D2A converter I use to route TV audio to a small amplifier died. It was cheap, but decent. I wanted another cheap one. I had trouble finding any. Finally, I snagged a pair on Amazon/eBay, but it used ancient USB connections. Luckily, I had old USB cables, so I'm good. But what will I do if the USB cable stops working?
What are ancient usb connections? Type A? B?
How are you going to download photos from your USB Nikon camera to your USB iPod Photo if you don't even have a UC-E6 to 30-pin dock connector cable?
Mini-B cables can be somewhat hard to find.
There was also the Micro-A which I found on some dev boards. I think the Arduino Due (Arm Cortex M3 chip) used one for the USB host port as well as an Atmel Arm uc board.
Also that weird, really small USB connector that was found on some early digital cameras. I think Kodak was a big user of it. Sorta looked like a narrower and taller version of the Mini-B. Maybe the Mini-AB but that doesn't look like it. I have one in my box at home.
Old digital cameras just used non standard usb shapes so they are almost impossible to find now.
Ah, they were proprietary then. I thought they were an early standard that lacked a 5th pin.
Since school started this year, I bought both my kids TI-84 plus CE calculators. Both were being sold cheap because “no charging cable” (uses a mini-B) while I had a dozen in a box.
I wish that happened a lot less as I have entirely too many old cables.
I hold on to my precious few mini-Bs. They also seem to have a tendency to break.
For evidence that Bluesky is a long-term living facility operating as a social media platform...look no further than how their users employ the word "skeet" to refer to "post".
I almost died from cringe when I hovered over the link and realized what he was talking about.
Only one big box of cables! What an amateur.
You need at least 4. And another one for power supplies.
Yes. And it's not even a big box.
i bought a few loads of nice quality plastic boxes, with plastic lids (its got small handles that "clasp" around the lid, so they're almost air tight)
then i sorted my cables and printed out a normal piece of paper, with the text like "networking", or "PC cables" or whatever and placed that in the side of the boxes
then i can stack them in the basement and easily know which box i need, when i need a cable
its been super handy.
ive used the same trick, for same boxes, for our other storage boxes too. Wifes hobby items, christmas decorations, old consoles, or whatever
makes it super organized. (you need transparent boxes if you wanna just throw in a label print on the inside. i can place one on top of the items and i can see it from above, or either side of the box)
Often people don't realize there is only "downwards-compatibility", meaning later technologies can "tunnel" an "older" signal (such as DisplayPort being able to Tunnel DVI/HDMI) when using passive adapters, while the other way it's not possible.
Wait,.. you guys only have one big box of cables?
My cable box is my retirement fund. Copper prices are rising, and scrap-metal dealers pay pretty well for it. But jokes aside: last year I also sorted some out and took 10 kilos of household cables to the local scrap-metal dealer here in Germany and got €30 for them. Better than throwing them away.
Do you have flea markets in DE? I'm pretty sure 10 kg of cables could be sold for more than €100 in a single day. Is it not common in DE?
My gold plated monster cables are going to make me a millionaire
there’s a post-apocalyptic novel waiting to be written where civilization collapses and the cable hoarders sit on the thrones
Forwarding this to my wife.
I have a rack of boxes of cables in my home, its not that out of the ordinary since I'm in the industry and am the network admin for my entire block in my housing community.
The other day I was fabberglased I could not find an HDMI to HDMI cable! HDMI > DVI yes, to VGA yes, to display port yes, to mini-HDMI yes. it was so shameful, for me having to go to amazon/best buy to purchase an HDMI cable is the lowest of the low.
I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.
The delight of having one of those cables be useful is immeasurable. It doesn't even have to be for your own good. In fact, I bet if we made a site where everyone can catalog their collections and automatically match them up with neighbors that have that cable, people would be more than happy to share cables for free.
I often thought about that too. There's a similar thing for sharing tools in the neighborhood.
This post is basically Futurama's "assorted lengths of wire" in text-form, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxu7z7hfVns
I recently purged my cable box. I had 8 HDMI cables... 8. What do I need 8 HDMI cables for?
I tossed them in the garbage with a ton of other use less cables. I kept one HDMI cable (not 8) and a few odds and ends. I kept one rj45 Ethernet cable and tossed the rest. I even tossed my rj45 crimping tool kit. Why? Because I don't see the need to crimp Ethernet cables anytime soon and should the need arise I can buy a kit for $30.
So at the end my cable box when from being overflowing to half full.
Onto the next project.
I had four unused HDMI cables. One day, I needed to send a signal from my PC to my tv. I usually use Plex for convenience and the "resume where I left off" feature, but that day a certain update was acting up, so I decided to use a cable instead. Easy. The next day, I wanted to send a signal from my laptop to the tv downstairs (I still hadn't fixed the Plex issue) and pulled out the second cable because I needed a different length than the first one... but it turned out to be incompatible, so I ended up using the third one.
I also did the "only keep one of each" purge, but that last part about throwing away a tool because you can just buy another one later is nuts to me. Yeah you could do that. You could also throw away all your cables and just buy them when you need another lol.
HDMI and Ethernet are comedies at this point, no need to hoard so many. The point is to not throw away the more rare/niche ones since getting one after will be hard and/or expensive.
> What do I need 8 HDMI cables for
5 for five generations of consoles into the same TV
1 for the audio bar
1 for the hdmi switch to the tv
1 for a laptop when nothing else works
What TV do you have that has 8 HDMI inputs?
They said there's a switch, so a bunch of those console are probably going through it.
AV receiver maybe.
Literally today my friend asked me if I have a cable for an iPod :P
I had four big plastic totes full of cables. I pared them down to just one recently. I'm 90% happy with the move. It's ok to let go sometimes.
Agreed... the realization I had recently was that if I've got boxes that I haven't touched in years, then I won't really miss them as much as I think I will if I get rid of it.
I have the same. It has saved hundreds of dineros for me and my friends and even better, prevented those ending up in the bottomless trickle up coffers of the zillionaire.
Recently visited Seoul, Korea, and took the subway to Yongsan station and walked over to what is left of the Yongsan Electronics Market (building 21).
1) It still exists. Cool. 2) What's left: Nobody taking their boxes of cables away!
I have surplus/military bare cables dating from the 1970s or so, extra shiny silver plated copper with PTFE jacket: a joy to solder, then more "normal" ones from the late 80s and 90s, then "old" modern ones, that is, power/audio/data cables usable with recent stuff. I'll never throw away any of them because unlike most crap they bundle with consumer devices today, they're made of real copper. Take a cheap cable bought today and chances are that it either sticks to a magnet, meaning it's copper plated steel or other crappy alloy, or it doesn't and it's super light which indicates it's made of aluminium; in all cases not good where power dissipation can be a problem or where resoldering may be necessary. Keep old cables!
Obviously I'm going to keep the box, but the real question is how many hundreds of NEMA C13 cables should I keep?
I periodically go through the big box of cables and pull out anything that I don't expect to ever need again.
I put those in another box, seal it completely, and write a message on the outside along the lines of "presumed useless - Sep 2016".
If I come across that box in, say, September 2026, I feel entirely comfortable tossing the whole thing.
My problem is I would feel entirely too curious to see what was in that ersatz time capsule I created a decade ago.
I purge my box every few years. Do you really need 20 usb cables. I do save the esoteric ones though.
Empty toilet rolls. That way I can see the connectors and quickly find what cable I need.
Hey! It’s not just me! The other day, someone at work decided to throw away a large drawer worth of HDMI, DP, USB cables that I had neatly organized a couple of months ago. This was to make room for like 5 spare power strips that take up <20% of the drawer and while we had like 3 empty drawers in the cabinet. Needless to say, I was livid. Especially because I found out while looking for a USB cable to charge my mouse that we had at least x4 in the drawer.
Thank you for listening.
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.
I had an lightning cable connected to a charger, turns out the connector was a bit broken and it started to spark, in the sofa where the end was.
Luckily our fire alarm on four legs quickly alerted us.
Don't keep busted cables. It's not worth it.
I too live in the firm belief that my collection of DB13W3 cables will at some point prove essential to saving humanity from nanobot goo for which the shutdown codes are only stored in earth's last remaining SGI IRIS 4D Crimson.
This is also a good reason to keep your knowledge of MIPS assembler fresh, lest you have to type lots of it very quickly as the swarm approaches.
I used to think this way, but now I know better.
My dad passed a few years back, this past year I spent a considerable amount of time helping my mom and sister tame all his junk. So much junk was tossed or donated, very little was kept and even less sold. Not wanting to burden my family with all of my junk I started working on my own hoard this summer. Letting go wasn't easy, but once it was done I felt less burdened by it.
And yes like clockwork a week after tossing it all I needed some random cable. I spent a couple of bucks for one at Walmart of all places, but Amazon and ebay would have had my back if that cable hadn't been there.
If you have a similar junk box, you have my permission to just throw it away. Don't look in it, don't worry about it, just toss it. You do not need to be carrying so much junk. You do not need 20 year old ethernet cables, 30 year old scsi and ide cables, or 40 year old audio cables. You can buy new ones, in new condition today, most of which are reasonably priced and wont produce random errors or noise due to internal faults.
tl;dr- You don't need it, toss it and do it today!
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.
This is the thing I almost, but don't quite, get.
Throw away what doesn't work - either because it is complicated or...its protocol is needlessly contrived.
Next step: do whatever you want. Upstream it, downstream, whatever.
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)
Same here. I also keep an inventory and labels for Box A, Box B, etc.
I prefer getting rid of old devices that needing to store old cables ad-infinitum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDRBVaH6Rc is an earworm of a song exactly about this.
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.
good for them. essential infrastructure. pillars of a civil society.
Somewhere, deep in a storage tote, a UW SCSI cable I paid 50 bucks for at Fry's shows a glimmer of hope.
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.
Reminds me of this Onion classic: https://theonion.com/jumbled-nest-of-cords-makes-move-to-thi...
Very funny comedy about this kind of stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6wZUV1t1y0
And a Futurama moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxu7z7hfVns
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.
> if you have graduated from "big box of cables" to "cabinets full of cables"
I have much yet to learn, cable master :)
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...
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure those are easy to find usb adapters for it you ever do need them in the future anyways.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Same goes for a box of nails and screws.
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.
It think it's both. The more stuff you have, the more you hoard, and the less you need to pay in terms of time/energy/money to get something you had in the past if you need it now/later, and on the flip side, you can be more minimalist, and will need to spend more time/energy/money to get the things you threw away/gave away/sold if you need them now/later.
It's mostly a resource/constraint time/space/money/effort problem.
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 need help.
Call SOS on your telegraph?
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.
You buy it. You do task X, and go to store cable. You discover old cable Y exactly where you were going to store the new one.
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.
1. I always know where my box of cables is, because it’s never moved from its location . 2. It takes up less than two shoeboxes of space, which is hardly anything in my home. 3. If I need the cable right now, I don’t have to wait 24 hours. 4. It costs me nothing to keep them.
> it is easy to buy a cable and have it delivered to your home in 24 hours
* for now, in certain locations, from certain retailers
On the other hand, it feels great to no longer have a box of old cables...
Yes. In a different version of the future, the bboc is replaced by next day amazon a universal adapter.
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.
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.
Grouping is also key to de-duplicating IMO. Can be tough to throw away a single cable. But when you have 10 of them grouped together, you know you can safely get rid of them.
IM/FWIW: I personally have found 4mil ziploc-style bags to be pretty close to indestructible. They're like thick evidence locker bags
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.
When you do that, just throw away the ones that only have power. If they're skimping that badly on the data wires, the power wires probably suck too. And it's not giving them a meaningful improvement in flexibility/weight.
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...
A few years ago I had to use a pair of high-voltage to low-voltage differential SCSI converters to connect an external DEC TK50 tape drive to my PC, because while I had plenty of HD68-to-HD68 cables, and HD68-to-Centronics cables, and a wide variety of ISA and PCI SCSI HBAs (and probably a couple EISA and Micro Channel boards if I looked hard enough, and I seem to recall finding a VL bus SCSI HBA on a shelf at work a few years ago), the only PCIe SCSI HBAs I have are multichannel cards with VHDCI ports, and the only VHDCI cables I have are VHDCI-to-VHDCI and VHDCI-to-HD68.
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).
That's pretty much exactly my organization, instead of a big box I split them into smaller tubs. USB is further divided via labeled bags into USB A->C, USB C, Lightning, and "misc". On top of those I have a R/C car battery/charging tub and a home automation tub.
There are some 3d printer models for building grids of individual cable organizers (https://makerworld.com/en/models/946444-gridfinity-cable-org...) but I have too many cables and my collection is too dynamic to well-utilize something as static as that.
Large 4mil ziploc style bags are extremely durable and are about $0.26 each in bulk on Amazon.
I very much recommend them. As a bonus, you can label them if desired. (Print a label out, or slap some tape on there and write on that, or just stick a sheet of paper inside the bag and write on that)
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...
Depends on if you reasonably expect to encounter one of those devices again and if the future cabling is backwards compatible.
Using your list I'd likely keep one IDE and comoposite video cable, but toss the RG59 and CAT5 because I could use a current RG6 or CAT6 cable in their place.
You get into vintage computer collecting and regret all things that you tossed...
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.
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.
Rubbermaid Roughneck half size of resealable bags of cables.
Tthe 2 days delivery is MUCH quicker to buy a new cable instead of searching for that cable in your many boxes of tech crap.
Today I learned another definition of skeet.
They knew what they were doing.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means...
group all, and use reusable zip ties. then it's something to be proud of
group plus reusable zip ties. then it's something to be proud of
that's boxen in my case and I'm sure others
one box of cables?
those are rookie numbers
10% of my garrage... okay, exxagerating - but at least 0.1% is the big box of cables of who the fuck knows what ... including several firewire, and really old nintendo, and some that I forgot what it was about...
"Why yes I do have E1 twisted pair to E1 coax baluns, and 50 ohm BNC to 75 ohm BNC with matching stubs, and VGA to SCART cables, right here in my big box of cables!" <gestures at shed with bulging walls>
I need to get this under control.
Yesterday I found I still have a dozen firewire cables of different types but no devices to use them with. I put them in the possible recycle box.
Oh never. I have 2 giant boxes of them. The absolute worst thing ever is when you need something like a USB or HDMI cable, and you're forced to spend like 40 bucks at Best Buy because you're in a pinch.
I still have quite a number of packing cubes with silicone-tie'ed and zip tie'ed cables.
I do want to mention though, a huge amount of cables can be replaced by usb-c cables + an adapter. You don't need a bus to HDMI cable: just get an adapter that has usb-c female, that your cable plugs into, that changes it to HDMI. Ditto for displayport, USB micro, USB b, USB a.
And for power VFLEX has a quite reasonably priced adapter to DC barrel jacks. I still have I dunno 70 power supplies, for laptops, gadgets and whatever. But at this point almost all my devices actually run on high efficiency gan usb-c power supplies. These once again follow the pattern: a usb-c female, then a pigtail (yay, better than fixed, like the HDMI), then the barrel jack.
> a huge amount of cables can be replaced by usb-c cables + an adapter.
And now you have a bunch of boxes with adapters ;P
You're not wrong, but many times I've gone looking for a specific adapter (because I already had a similar cable) and found out that the adapters _usually_ cost as much or more than just buying the cable.
Usually it's a bit cheaper, from what I see. Especially if you buy 3-5.
Cost or no, like it because it means much much much less space. Instead of packing for a trip and wondering what set of cables I need, I have cables, and I have adapters. A couple short cheap cables and two longer good ones work for almost any purpose.
Throwing all that shit in a box and spending half an hour digging through it is half the fun. Your organization systems distress me.
This post inspired me to go through my box of cables and I actually found a full HTC Vive headset with controllers in there buried several layers deep that I had completely forgotten about. I think it ended up there because it came with about a dozen cables so the cable box seemed like the natural place to dump it all.
Now I need to go through that box in detail to see what else might be lurking.
Flip side? I have, in almost half a century of tech dabbling, never once needed a cable from that box that I couldn't have bought again.
I still keep _some_. A basic supply of standard cables "just in case", and clearly labeled things for "who the fuck needed to invent another connector" cases. (Looking at you, printer manufactures and WD hard drive enclosures)
But I strongly suggest tossing most of it. You need the space more than you need more cables.