Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

How about obsolete cables? IDE, RG59 coax, Cat 5, Composite video, etc...

Somewhere, deep in a storage tote, a UW SCSI cable I paid 50 bucks for at Fry's shows a glimmer of hope.

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

What if you have 7 big boxes of cables…?

do yourself a favour and buy some zip mesh bag on amazon (often used for children's toy sorting; they're much more robust than zip-locks) and use them to group your cables. the big box(es) goes from a source of stress to an absolute delight.

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.

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.

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).

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...

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...

Rubbermaid Roughneck half size of resealable bags of cables.

"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.

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.

Today I learned another definition of skeet.

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.

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