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

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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

#161

Post by Gigachad »

MisterTea wrote: post #157
pdpi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Old digital cameras just used non standard usb shapes so they are almost impossible to find now.

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

#162

Post by MisterTea »

Gigachad wrote: post #161
MisterTea wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#165

Post by SkyPuncher »

VariousPrograms wrote: post #37

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, the hardest part is actually figuring out what the cable is called in order to find a replacement.

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

#166

Post by dataflow »

booty wrote: post #142
dataflow wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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 cabl…

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.

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

#167

Post by JMiao »

OroPla wrote: post #159
booty wrote: post #24

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 a…

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.

Thank you for mentioning cd spindles. Good times.

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

#168

Post by lynndotpy »

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.

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

#169

Post by carlosjobim »

LocalH wrote: post #112
VariousPrograms wrote: post #37

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.

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.

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

#170

Post by JMiao »

booty wrote: post #142
dataflow wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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 cabl…

I would consider tossing the usb-a to usb-c cables that do not have a confirmed 56k ohm resistor.
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