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?
deleted by creator
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.
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)
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
Neighbourhood Tools
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.
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.
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.
Vindication of the box is better than cocaine.
Amen brothuh
Been there, done that…tossed the hd with crypto…
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…
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
No one f’ing dare touch my box of obscure cables and stupid converters I’ll probably never use !
Thanks, J. Walter Weatherman!
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.
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.
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. 😤
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.
Work at retirement home doing tech. My drawer has grown to a closet of old cords.
It pays off weekly. Too many people with too many different generations of tech. Never know what you’ll run into.
Old Person (on deathbed): “This disk contains my entire life’s work, I want you to take it.”
many years later, playing in park
“Daddy, where did you get this weird frisbee?”
“Dunno. Some old guy wanted me to have it.”The magnavox tv on the shelf makes it not that far off lmao
Umph.
Gut shot.
I guess I hadn’t had a bad enough Dad joke this week.
Starting to speak in tongues, give thanks unto Jesus my brethren
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.
I had an ISA serial card sitting on a shelf next to my desk at work for 14 years. In the yearly clean up it was kept. 10 years after the last ISA machine had been in the office it was scrapped.
Not 2 days after the truck I had to order one exactly like it for a machine i did not know exsisted in a printing press i did not know at a customer… NEVER throw out anything!If you’ve got the money, and just want to reduce clutter, get some adapters for existing standards like USB-C cables instead.
I have multiple Micro USB, Micro-B, Audio Jack, and Lightning cable adapters that take up less space than one single USB-C cable.
I lugged a box of cables around for 10 years without ever needing one. I finally decided that I was being foolish and donated all of them. Literally the next day I needed one.
Hey! You’re in this meme!
I haven’t donated a cable since then. Never again!
