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One time I had an ex ask me for some obscure cable that I happened to have. We went over to my cable drawer and as I pulled it out she said “Why do you have this drawer of random cables?”
FOR THIS EXACT PURPOSE BECCA YOU removed
Think about the apocalypse BECCA
I don’t like Becca.
You shouldn’t. I also have an ex named Becca.
Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
Auric Goldfinger
Am old, gold, quote, Mr. Bond…MWAHAHA
Why the hell not?
I’ve heard that name before somewhere.
Goldfinger
Sounds like a removed.
For this exact purpose. To impress your ex? Sounds fair enough.
You never know where you’ll be when you need a mini-B usb to 30 pin apple sync cable.
I actually needed a 30pin the other day. I’m glad I still had one
Landline telephones will soon be popular enough to need all these extenders and splitters.
You mean my serial console cables?
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Those got cut to make console cables.
I can always make them into regular phone cables later.
I have two of those in my hoard… One new in box still…
There’s a tool sharing program in my neighborhood. You pay like $20 a year for access, and come by, borrow a tool/leave a tool. It’s great as people leave lots of big tools sitting around doing nothing.
I want that for computer parts and wires.
Lets pool our ps/2 keyboard adapters and VGA cords together!
You’ve already got a decent business name for it (minus the “@slrpnk.net” part)!
Neighbourtools. But with fewer vowles
Nghbrtls
Less, not none. The U has to stay to appease the UK regulatory boards.
Fewer
Nghbrtlsy
It needs a catchy theme song. Something like:
Neeeighbour tools…
Everybody needs good neeeighbour toolsand then I don’t know, a saxaphone or something
There is a long running tv drama called Neighbours in Australia. Should just re use that one.
Australian here, too many words
It’ll sound of from what I remember the song sounding like but I don’t actually watch it and have only heard it a few times on TV
I used to watch that show everyday after school. I still vividly remember the theme song.
Neighbours in Australia, yeah!
Coming at ya like a man on fire
Libby and Harold and all the rest
Come and get it all of your chest, yeah!That’s not the one I remember, but I may be getting it mixed up with home and away. It has been almost 15 years since I have seen the show.
I’ve heard home and away has gone to shit recently but I don’t actually watch it because it doesn’t interest me
Home and Away also had a kickass theme:
We’ve never been that long together
You and Fred, and Eva, and Heather
No matter who you are
You’re not shy you starAnd the very first moment I sold you
I never felt such a motion
I’m walll-kiiiiing oh nair
Just a gnome (just a gnome)
You were deeaaad (you were deeaad)
Neighbourhood Tools
I refactor the box every year because there are usually some new cables.
Some simple empirical rules:
- keep the shorter cables
- maximum of 3 cables of the same type: for donating, for lending, for spare
- USB cables that can transfer data > USB cables that don’t transfer data
- no damaged cables
- store long cables as coils (tied up tight)
- store short cables in bunches (tied up tight)
- should be sorted and grouped into categories
- box should be sealed, but aired out once in a while (outgassing)
Wait, there are USB cables that don’t transfer data? What do they do then, charge only?
Yup. Notorious with usb c cables. Lots of battery powered tools give you a cable that only works for charging, and looks the exact same. I guess you could test the cable and mark them as charge only, but it’s a hassle
I’ve got a USB-c cable that can charge and transfer data at high speeds… But ask it to transfer display data to a screen and it won’t do a thing.
The USB-c standard is a nightmare… While having the same port for everything sounds like a decent idea to reduce waste, not every product requires the full spec. Maybe mandatory labeling (like some companies are doing already) would be a solution, but it’s rather late to start with that now.
4 will solve some of this, and bring it up to a minimum usable standard generally, hopefuly we can use the numbers arms race to eliminate some of the bullshit being pulled
USB A to C maybe, but C to C cannot work without data. To me MicroUSB was notorious for that. At this point all my micro USB cables that I have left don’t do data because I’ve given away, or worn out/broke all the ones that did data.
Now I just have a bunch of USB C to ___ adapters. Right now on my desk I have a USB C to Micro, Micro to USB C (just in case) and a USB C to lightning adapter all stuck together.
Yep. Very annoying in some cases.
I bundle my cables and put them in ziplock bags by type. I bought a whole spool of twist tie wire with it’s own built in cutter. I also keep a bag with damaged cables because sometimes I make my own custom cables or just need some scrap wire.
Just be sure to not damage cables with plastic zip ties or other things that crimp the wires inside.
Wait why does the box need to be closed?
To avoid the collection of cables growing?
So, don’t leave male and female cables alone in a dark box!
To avoid dust.
To not ever let them escape
Less degradation of the plastic maybe? Idk
I think so. Keeps the insulation from dry rotting.
Keeping it closed also means that you don’t have to breathe it in (and prevents dust from getting in).
but what if I like the smell like a steam deck vent
Get your hormone levels checked once in a while.
hormones? Yeah he do :)
So that the cables don’t get covered in humid air and dust which sticks to them and forms a grime (with bonus added chemicals from the plastics).
My wife had her finger nail grinder break and it turned out to be the power adapter. It was an obscure 9.6V. guess who had it in my box.
She still complains about my box, but that night she complained a little less.
Voltage fluctuates. You could put 9v into it and it will be just fine. Hell you can probably put 12v into it and it will be fine. I have a switch at work that only exists to split one ethernet cable into two, and it’s rated for either 5 or 9v, but I’m using a 12v power supply on it and it’s just fine because it’s power conversion is rated for well over that (I think 16v max).
Disclaimer: don’t blindly put higher voltage into a device rated for a much lower voltage. 9v devices will usually tolerate 12v, but not all.
Ya, I run 18V for for my kid’s 12V power wheel and he can drift with it now.
What’s a finger nail grinder?
It’s like a grinder, but for fingernails
Do you wear eye protection when using it?
Bro… full hazmat!
You can save on that by just using pre-ground!
She uses this demenel looking grinding tool to remove gel nail. She likes doing pedicures herself.
Vindication of the box is better than cocaine.
Amen brothuh
Been there, done that…tossed the hd with crypto…
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On a hard drive? I remember a bunch of people messing around with bitcoin when it was new, relatively unknown and considered a niche nerd thing. There were online competitions with money prizes where the “last winner” (eg. third place) would win like one bitcoin.
Fast forward 15 years and the stuff you mined for fun in high school and forgot about on some dusty old computer is worth thousands of dollars.
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Honestly, I kind of wish crypto hadn’t gone to shit with the whole speculation thing… It was just this fun thing where obscure websites would let you buy random shit for laughs sometimes. Then suddenly investors had to try making money off something with no inherent value and ruined it :/
If anyone here has that problem I can solve it for you
Last move, I collected all cables in a one HUGE box.
After the majority of the unpacking (like I’ll ever finish that) was completed, I sat down with the box and sorted out all the cables.
I kept a sane amount of each cable, at least one and trashed the rest.
I now have half a dozen labeled sterelite dollar store organizers with the cables in them.
add it to your bucket list…
I organized all my cables into like types and put them in gallon sized plastic bags to prevent all that intertangling, at least nominally. I still hardly go into that box though. It’s still a pain in the ass, just less of one.
LPT: intertangeling only happens when cables are looped. Just put them together linke you would crumble a piece of paper and put them in your bottles. No more intertangeling
Same, except I kept all of each kind that have potential use, and set aside any that are technologically obsolete by over two decades so I could throw them out.
That box is still on the shelf as well …
I did this last time I was unemployed. Garage is super organized now
I store all mine in a closet door shoe keeper. Each pocket is 1 type. And I keep as many as will fit in that pocket except for a few special things I keep a ton of. PC power cables, Current USB, HDMI/DP
Thanks, J. Walter Weatherman!
No one f’ing dare touch my box of obscure cables and stupid converters I’ll probably never use !
After switching to solar DC and batteries I suddenly cared a lot more about ac/dc power inverters needlessly wasting my limited energy supply.
Slowly I figured out how to power my devices without ac outlets. Mercifully 5v,9v,12v,19v at 1-5A are pretty standard values for most lower powered DC appliances.
A good DC barrel plug 5.5mm universal adapter kit, a usbc-PD adapter cable with manually selectable voltage levels to 5.5mm barrel plug, and a car plug to dc barrel plug universal adapter kit have taken good care of 95% of my adapter woes.
It feels sooo good to figure out how to power something directly with USBC and see the wattage drawn get cut down significantly.
Whats my point? If people knew a little bit more about the finer details of power supplies and dc barrel plugs most of their box of junk cables could be phased out with confidence. If you have 20 year old electronics with some weird incredibly specific voltage and barrel plug I would heavily consider just getting a new version that runs on usbc-pd or a more standard power rating. And if I ever need an old video cable? You’d better believe amazon and eBay still got it.
Yeah I have a handful of USB-to-random 5v nonsense adapters and they’ve saved my ass so many times.
You have inspired me.
Are you suggesting that modern USBC power supplies don’t have that parasitic draw that other DC power packs have?
They have solar + batteries, so they have to convert the sun into DC, hopefully directly supply that DC to their batteries, then convert that DC to AC power, then convert that AC power back to DC. Converting AC to DC or vise versa is a reasonably lossy process, so not doing double the conversion is even better.
Also some less than ideal setups convert solar directly to AC, so in order to charge your batteries you have to convert it back to DC.
Thanks, glad to have inspired you! The other person who replied is spot on. I have an entirely DC system so my main advantage comes from cutting out pointless double-conversion from dc to ac back to dc again. Powering on an DC to AC inverter is a parasitic draw that consumes enough power to eat through a good amount of battery capacity if left on by itself. Then using that AC inverter just to power another inverter to step back to DC introduces even more losses and parasitic load. So, its worth my time to try figuring out ways to directly power devices by directly converting DC to DC voltages and cut those needless loads out greatly boosting total efficiency.
USBC-PD technology is an incredibly useful innovation for direct variable dc to dc voltage supply. Specifically a 100 watt usbc-pd charger can supply 5v,9v, 15v, 20v at up to 5 amps (5Ax20V=100 watts). A car cigarette plug can supply 12V at 10A or 120 watts of power. Together they can directly power a great many household DC appliances off of batteries powering a DC to DC inverter.
For some examples:
A 24" lcd computer monitor at full brightness consumed 50Wh through AC inverter. It was brought down to 25Wh running through DC inverter. On half brightness it consumed 15Wh and 10Wh at minimum brightness.
A thinkpad laptop full brightness was 25wh idle -50wh full load, then brought down to 12-20wh.
My nintendo switch game console docked into the lcd screen consumed about 15-20Wh with inverter, brought down to 10Wh.
Desktop dry herb vaporizer (Arizer Extreme Q): 80Wh heating up, 30-50wh idle brought down to 50Wh heating up 15-25Wh idle.
Electric blankets. During the cold months using my electical energy to help keep warm is very important to me. But I cannot keep a regular house electric blanket on for more than an hour or two. I could not keep a car plug blanket on overnight at 80wh. I could keep on a USB powered blanket on overnight at 10-15Wh. And you know what suprised me most? It was damn warm, when I figured out the right way to sleep with it. Have to sleep on it as a matress warmer and layer some heavy blankets on top and let it warm up for an hour or two. But it works and works well. The USB blanket doubles as wearable poncho too which is nice. I wish a USBC-PD one existed with variable wattages.
So as you can see each time I macguyver a way to directly power these devices the total power usage is cut by almost half per device. To someone else who can afford an array of solar panels and a massive bank of batteries they can get away with not caring about saving 20Wh here or 15Wh there. I have a very modest system of 200watts solar feeding into ~400Wh battery capacity total so these savings mean the difference between my batteries being dead overnight and having lots of spare juice left over to brew a cup of coffee with those AC inverters when I wake up.
Of all these devices listed, the LCD monitor is one that has a noticable parasitic load even when the screen is off it consumes a noticable amount of power at idle. The way I would deal with most instances of parasitic draw like this is to find a product throws a physical switch to manually cut contacts with the DC-DC inverter when not being used. In this case a car plug extention cable with a knife switch built in would work great.
Okay so the magic sauce here is USBC-PD which is some type DC-DC voltage converter. Then it’s just a matter of barrel connector roulette to find the appropriate plug for each device.
I live part time out of an RV semi-off grid for some of the year and the “using AC/DC power packs off an inverter” always struck me as super dumb which your data basically confirms.
What you’ve given me is a roadmap to figure this out without having to reinvent the wheel.
You got it man, right on. I would like to give you some more information about the usbc-pd stuff and some of the things I figured out with it. So here is a link to the farsense usbc-pd to standard DC 5.5x2.5 adapter with manually selectable voltage based on button press. This cable is the most important part and I will explain why its so important. USBC-PD essentially requires three things to work right.
The first thing is a charger(the DC to DC inverter in our context) ideally rated at either 65w or 100w as both of those support up to 20v the difference being 65W can only go up to like 3.25 amps or something like that. The simplest and cheapest dc to dc chargers are usbc-pd car plug chargers which convert the 12v from a car battery to the required voltages. The anker one I just linked is a little pricy you can find them for cheaper but it seems good quality and I like the cable I bought from them.
Speaking of, the second thing you need is a USBC-PD power cable that specifically supports the same wattage your charger outputs. Not all of them are rated the same you gotta use a specifically rated cable that handles higher voltages. If you use a 100W charger gotta get a 100W cable. I’ve had good luck with this anker one
The third and most crucial thing to understand for our purposes, is that you need a communication chip on the appliance side that tells the charger/inverter what voltage to send. The nice thing about that farsense manual voltage selector cable is that it has that communication chip built in with all the different voltages to pick from. Thats the real secret sauce of this setup. That cable and its ability to choose voltage levels is the heart of it. All thats left is to track down the specific dc 5.5x2.5 to X adapter bit and select the proper voltage on the cable and its good to go.
There are USBC-PD adapter bits that have this chip built in for a specific voltage, commonly for laptops at 19-20v. If you manage to track down the proper usbc-pd to barrel plug adapter at your specific needed voltage it will cut out having to manually set the voltage each time you plug it in compared to the farsense cable. But it may be hard tracking down such a specific adapter bit.
Oh I never of this. So do you have different electrical systems in your house for each voltage or how does it work?
I am off-grid for much of the time so I rely on an entirely DC to DC system. 200 watts of solar panels power up my batteries which supply 12V at a capacity of about 400 watt hours. So for many appliances like laptops and speakers and computer screens which use DC power it makes sense to try to convert the voltages directly though other means than the typical AC to DC power plug supplies that you usually use in homes. Doing this I can cut down total power consumption for each device down by about half which is really important for conserving power on a limited energy supply.
In a theoretical scenario you could totally run a seperate voltage line for DC energy through a house, though this has several complications. The main drawback of DC energy is that the lower the voltage the more resistance losses you get running power through a foot of cable. So the cable losses would become signifigant after running 200 feet of cable probably less even. You could bump up the voltage to 48VDC for longer stretches of wire and to power high end RV appliances but now were loosing some of the safety that comes from a lower voltage DC system. Im not familiar with commercial solar installations in homes but I think its easier and more economical to eat inverter losses and use the batteries to supply AC power using preexisting wiring. If you were building a offgrid home its a design thing to consider, reducing and centralizing wiring and appliances.
But then what are you doing? Are you connecting your laptop directly to the battery with shorter cables?
Thank you for taking the time to reply, this is very interesting.
I have my portable folding 200w solar panels on the ground and run about 20ft of weatherproof cabling running along the ground through a small inlet hole into my residence. They connect to my battery system which is located in a good central spot for all my electrical stuff to comfortably reach. Everything I own that runs on electrical power that cant be powered with portable rechargable battery banks is located in the same room as my batteries.
I can deliver DC power through car plug ports, USBC-PD 100W and regular usb A outlets. The 600w AC inverter is useful for brewing cups of coffee, running fans, and turning on a desktop pc for advanced GPU workload stuff. Its important to keep that ac inverter off most of the time especially at night so prefer using car plug adapters and USBC-PD to directly power most of my DC appliances with variable voltages instead. From the car plugs and usbc-pd charger ports, I run my dc appliance cords to my devices which are usually 6-10 ft long. My laptop is usually powered up through a car port travel adapter but I can also use USBC-PD and an adapter bit if the car ports are all taken up.
Thank you for showing interest if you want to know anything else ill be happy to explain. lowtechmagazine’s “Slow Electricity: The Return of DC Power” is a great read on the subject the info has been very useful for my purposes. They cover residential dc wiring like we are talking about and its located around the end of the article in the ‘How To Limit Cable Losses’ section.
I really like your comment. Nothing gets me going more than eliminating unnecessary waste and streamlining the system to a simpler one, even if it is more work. 😤
It’s true. That box has the utility of the highest utility cable in it. Which means it’s a lot. Worth taking up space under a bed you aren’t using. Anti-horder culture goes too far. It’s more complicated than dogmatically throwing away everything or keeping everything. Don’t throw away things with real utility. Civilization is built on accumulated utility in durable goods.
I finally got a house so I can hoard everything in the basement and attic away from the wife and I can finally keep my precious safe forever muhaha
Also, if you tell yourself “I’ll just buy a new one if it breaks”, take note that the quality of whatever new thing you buy will be worse than the current one you have due to decades of companies skimping on quality to remain profitable.
Of course.
Also, though it might not happen today, apocalypse things could happen to Amazon or delivery services…better to have things on hand than have to buy them again.
Microcenter is the answer. But never ever give up the box. One day you may need to daisychain VGA to DVI to HDMI through a series of adapters.
Only a very lucky few live near a Microcenter.
The rest are a 8-16 hour drive away from one.
I miss Radioshack. Old radioshack, not the “Come in and buy a smart phone and toys” radioshack.
As a hobbyist in the 80s, RadioShack was a tinkerer’s play space. I miss those days.
They opened up a MC by me about a year ago.
I was returning an item last weekend and the employee made a comment on how many times I’ve been there haha.
Microcenters cables and adapters are outrageously expensive, and at least the one near me has the least useful supply of shit.
This is natures way of punishing you for defiling and disrespecting the box.
The Box should always be kept, and respected, lest it bring ruin to your household.
So, so true. And yet my wife questions the merits of my vast attic collection. I shall tell her later how I discovered that the Internet agrees with me.
Bro I literally just used 2 of my cables from the cable box today. Never giving that up.
A few months ago I FINALLY organized my cluttered box of miscellaneous technology and cables into one of those plastic bin drawers with wheels. I now know what I have and can keep it all fairly organized. Found some stuff I could’ve thrown out, but this post just told me not to. So thanks!
I still have my 5 1/4 inch floppy drive in a box. At some point someone or some company will need it desperately and I can fund my retirement
Look for aviation maintenance businesses, you might get a good price. Testing equipment never gets upgraded, just replaced. intel 386 32MHz with a 5 1/4 floppy and Windows 3.1 is pure gold.
