Comic Strips

One thing I learned after using computers for 34 years: As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it. I cannot see how that could be true for VGA and old centronics printer cables, but I shall not risk to find out.

I recently pulled a DVI to VGA RadioShack branded cable to connect a camera system to an old monitor. The dopamine of victory is worth it fellow cable hoarders.

Story time:

I was over in rural Western Ireland at the end of 2023 when a relative, who was cleaning some junk out of the house, offered me a white 1st gen iPod Touch. I had previously expressed my soft spot for tech history, so this wasn't completely random, and they would have binned it otherwise. It was seemingly unharmed by the intervening years albeit missing a charging cable.

The weather outside was what the Irish (with their particular brand of humor) might describe as "a soft fine day", and what I would refer to as "a relentless bone-chilling mist". We had no plans that day, so I located the nearest tech shop.

I arrived at this tiny shop in the nearby village, thinking they might have this specific proprietary cable. I describe to the guy inside what I'm looking for. He presumably owns and runs the wee place alone, but he has no fucking clue. I couldn't really blame him though, because Apple had just gone to the USB-C standard at that point, at least in Europe, so this was a cable 2 generations of proprietary connectors ago. Not the previous "lightning" cable with 8(?) pins, but the OG one, a thick, wide fucker with hella pins. Some of you might remember these, as they were seemingly in every room, car and backpack by around 2010.

The guy had a pegboard on the wall behind him with all his wares hanging up. I scanned the various cables, adapters, and peripherals until I landed on a small box containing "cable: 30-pin apple dock connector to USB A" in trademark Apple white. Come to Papa. It was the very last one, surely at this particular shop, maybe in the entire region. After making sure it was actually still in the box, I forked over 8 euros for the thing while expressing immense surprise and gratitude to the shop guy for having stocked this kind of item. I went back home with my quarry.

I plugged in the iPod. Not only did it take a charge and boot, it was unlocked too, and worked flawlessly! The thing was a veritable time capsule -- chock full of era-appropriate pop music, mundane notes and voice memos, and even some silly photos and videos taken with the shitty little onboard camera.

My wife still ribs me for this one: the time I "spent a whole day of our Irish holiday ignoring us to play with obsolete tech", but for me it's a fond memory, and I'm serious about that. I still have the device in its unaltered form and I go through its contents now and again, and that reliably brings me a rare sort of joy.

All because some dude decided to hang onto a single cable long enough to forget what it was even for, allowing it to take up precious shelf space in what might be the only tech shop in Connemara. He even looked like the guy in the meme! He must have figured that someday, someone like me might need it!

This was my mother when she passed. She left me so many many boxes of cables and equipment. Sooooooooo many power supplies.

After a 2 ton truck worth of gear later I realised that I couldn't do the same to my son. It would be criminal to leave him my garage worth of gear on top of his grandma's.

I'm proud to say I'm down to two boxes (20 litre containers) worth of active day to day stuff (jugs cables, hdmi, usb, gpus and about 80TB of storage, probably more) .

And 1/3 of a garage filled with tapes and digital tapes (one day I'll go through them. Ideally upload them to YouTube so people can see her work (she worked in film and television)

Firewire was awesome, and so was thunderbolt. Do you like USB-C? Cause that’s how we got there.

This perfectly captures the universal “box of random cables” every parent somehow kept for decades.

Sent this in a family group chat, referring to my dad. My kids found it funny because they claim it is me.

Cleaners broke the HDMI cable from the computer to the TV. Reached into my cable drawer and pulled out two good new ones. It was a very proud moment for me.

These situations actually happen to me from time to time.

This is where I keep my various lengths of wire

I dig into my (organized) box of cables 2-3x a year. I still have functional older equipment that still sees occasional use.

Pro tip: go through the box and get rid of the duplicates of older items. No need to have 3 IDE ribbon cables, 4 SATA to 4-pin power adapters, or two parallel port cables.

Lies. All he has is 4 different VGA cables, USB-A to USB-B, and the proprietary data cable for a pocket camera he gave you 14 years ago "because he doesn't use it any more."

Modern raspberry pi GPIO pins are compatible with floppy disk cable (similar to PATA). I can tell you how much I enjoyed telling about this to my wife, when I pulled one of them from my magical cable drawer, were I have stored one since the 90's.

(Just make sure that there isn't the one blocked pin, otherwise you might break things)

Quoting @jlamoree@infosec.exchange (link)

All I’ve ever wanted is for the Revolution to knock on my door in need of a weird cable.

This is me and I'm mad about it.

My dad had a collection of old and weird stuff, and he'd frequently joke about it; when you need it, remember that there's a microphone wire for a 1932 Edison dictaphone in this drawer right here.

Didn’t know I was a dad. 😢 Come visit your old man.

FireWire mentioned

My landlady and good friend of the family came for a visit from abroad, she's very rich but stuck in her ways, and refuses to buy a smartphone.

She came over in a hurry and asked if by some wild chance I had a charger for a Nokia 3410 laying around somewhere.

I literally reached over into a box next to my desk and gave it to her. She was surprised and elated. "Dumb question, do you have another for my backup 3410?"

I reached into the box and gave her another.

That's the day I started suspecting I may have a problem.

True story, happened back in 2014.

I haven't had time to respond to this, but, on a related note...

I bought my car new in 1999, and I still love driving it. Many years ago, say 2003 or so, I bought a resistor to enable to daytime running lights, then I realized I needed other components, and never got around to finishing the job.

A few weeks ago, a guy from the car club asked if I still had it, because he wanted to enable the daytime running lights and that was the last piece he needed, and no one seemed to have one. I looked and looked but couldn't find it anywhere. I think I threw it away a few months ago, figuring I wouldn't ever need it.

Sorry, bud. I had that thing sitting around for two plus decades, only to need it a few weeks after I tossed it.

"did you say you needed a piece of scrap wood about this wide and about that long and about yea thick?!"

Happiest day of my "uncle's" (actually Dad's cousin in law) life.

My bag of cables in the attic that’s been there for the last 25 years says hello

Recently I picked up a new entertainment of checking reviews of audio equipment stores on local amazon

Cue Children of Omnissiah

One of the reviews was from a woman who ordered a microphone, an XLR to 3.5mm cable, an apple type c headphone dongle, plugged all that into a car charger and complained that it did not turn her car into karaoke.

Another from a guy with a couple of active speakers who bought an insert cable, so he had to put one of the speakers sideways on top of another to make it reach both ports. Rated 5 stars.

Another picked old soviet DIN5 to 3.5mm cable, jammed it into MIDI OUT port on his digital piano and the other end into line in on his pc soundcard...

Wanna hook up a thing to another thing? I got a drawer for that.

I'm getting worried my din to PS2 keyboard adapter will never get used again

Never in my entire life have I ever used FireWire.