- cross-posted to:
- dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
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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.
As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it.
This goes double for any cable that will be hard to get a new one of, so hold on to those centronics cables!
my boss has the biggest, ugliest old printer. it’s half the size of one of those big office printers, only it’s supposed to be a “goes in the corner of your desk” printers. has a feed for dot matrix paper and everything.
it has never broken once.
it has never had any network problems.
when he retired and the firm closed, and we all had a free for all looting the company, if we were the type of people to come to blows over things we would have come to blows over that printer. we settled it over a game of “i’m your boss, i get to take my printer home. go steal a box of pens and one of the other printers”
the monstrosity uses LPT cables. I don’t know how it connects to anything anymore, but every once in a while my old boss sends me a letter on dot matrix paper and that gives me a chuckle.
I know the sort of beast you mean. Solid enough that you could drive a car over it, and can probably be serviced with just a hammer and a wrench. It was undoubtedly an excellent piece of kit, and I envy your old boss!
Solid enough that you could drive a car over it,
you’d need one hell of a ramp and the car would take more damage than the printer, yeah. one of those. gets fifteen pages to the gallon
It’s still pretty common to see vga cables in use here in Brazil, and I believe that in many parts of the world as well. These old printer cables, they’re useful for arduino uno boards
I found out the hard way. I need an HDMI to VGA cable. You’ll never guess what I gave away a few weeks ago.
Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.
Sure. But it is not like own the shit to plug my modern hardware to VGA.
You, next week, browsing eBay: an 8K dpl projector, in box, with mounting kit, $15, no bids, ending in 8 minutes?!
You, a few seconds later: WHY IS IT ONLY VGA WHAT THE FU-
I lost my BT earbuds 2 months ago, have a Type C phone, and just chucked out my ~5 Type C earbuds, because I had never used them since I got the Bluetooth one. I only left a pair of Jack earbuds. Guess where my Type C to Jack adapter went…
As with any other thing that is kept ‘just in case’, the size and effort to store in an organized way will be the reason for keeping or discarding something. I also keep at least one of each connector that I still have could possibly use either by something I own to tech that isn’t too old for me to aquire due to needing something a week after throwing it out and having to buy an overpriced replacement.
Yes, this means I do have some ribbon connectors because I have older mobos and drives with those and VGA connectors since some of my monitors still have those as options.
My limit is one plastic tub though, with the older stuff on the bottom like sedimentary layers. When it gets full I pull it out and ditch the oldest stuff I no longer need and stack it back in. The next round will probably prompt me to ditch the older ribbon connectors and drives that use them.
I used a VGA cable just last week to attach a screen to an HP micro server.
Na, at that point through the device away.
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.
I’ve been working in AV for the past five years. The amount of times I’ve needed DVI and VGA is astounding.
That might just bring me to orgasm.
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It’s some pressed hams my friend.
When it comes to obscure cabling I have diamond hands
🫲💎🫱
Apes hold strong!
We seriously need to bring a wsb like community on here because I miss it
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!
If it brought you joy, especially repeated joy, none of your investment was wasted. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Whenever I come across old dial phones in flea markets I go into nostalgic meltdown. I’m showing my age but anything that reminds us of our childhoods are fond moments. I miss when Apple computers were called Macintosh and were genuine masterpieces of hardware and design. Turning on the computers came with a very pleasant chime, to let you know that you were powering up something special.
🥲
Just checked in the parallel universe what you would’ve been up to instead, turns out the two of you bought a lottery ticket as a goof & won
(life was never simple or pure again) PHEW dodged it
I still have a cable with one of those very connectors in use today. Some will recall that a lot of stereos and clocks had those connectors built in to dock and charge your ipods on. I bought a 2007 Eclipse that didn’t support Bluetooth and I wanted to add it. I then bought a Bluetooth receiver designed to plug into those ipod connectors and a cable I could attach to the backend of my car stereo that had the same. I still have that car today and that wiring and Bluetooth receiver is still tucked away behind my dashboard, working as well as it did almost 20 years ago when installed.
Should’ve called me, we have several of those cables around. And that’s after culling the herd of those cables we used to have!
Oh we should start a community for, “I need this cable…” where we can all help each other out!
To us kids who grew up with the technological revolution, finding old tech gear is to us what seeing old cars and motorbikes is to boomers hahaha
The ipod touch didn’t have an onboard camera till the 4th generation. Still a fun story nonetheless.
Interesting. I must have mandela-effected myself. It’s been a few months since I last looked at the thing. It does have photos on it - they must have been transferred from iTunes.
Firewire was awesome, and so was thunderbolt. Do you like USB-C? Cause that’s how we got there.
Couldn’t agree more. FireWire’s Direct Memory Access was such a game changer for scrubbing video footage right from the camera.
There’s plenty of reasons to hate Apple but their I/O has never been one.
Core Audio, for instance, is practically magic. Absurdly low latency with no need for device drivers with hardware that’s class compliant. Just plug it in over USB-C.
That’s fucking goddamn right
So was Thunderbolt? I thought it was still a thing?
Still around, but it’s no longer being actively developed. All effort is going into USB-C and turning it into what it was supposed to be 25 years ago.
This perfectly captures the universal “box of random cables” every parent somehow kept for decades.
My Mom always throws out old cables like a week before I head over there and need that specific cable.
Am parent, can confirm. But i started about 20 years before becoming a parent. To go ahead of the curve.
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.
I had a FUCK of a time a couple weeks ago, oh my GAWD. I wanted a less insanely heavy-duty cable to connect my portable monitor to a temporary computer setup because the monitor was light, making it awkward. I looked through my Everyday Cable Drawer with no success. I’ve got a few routed around my displays in my house, but those are all bundled up and cable-managed.
So I go to my backup drawer, with assorted cables.
DisplayPort…
DisplayPort…
VGA…
DVI-D…
DVI-D…
DisplayPort…
HDMI… EXTENDER. Thick as shit.
It took me going to the Old Console Drawer and finding my bag of Switch accessories to find a Switch HDMI cable! I am completely out of HDMI backup cables that aren’t insanely heavy duty.
The number of times I’ve needed a HDMI extender = the number of times I’ve been blown by a unicorn
The number of HDMI extenders in my box > the number of times I’ve been blown by a unicorn
Bahahaha I actually used my extender… extensively! I got it to enlongify my VR Kit’s cables so I could have drunk ass friends over and play VR games without worrying about them destroying the kit or the computer. VR has been shelved for a while but I just finished my VR machine so I’m busting that thick ass HDMI extender right back out!
Also I think unicorns pass the Harkness test, so I’m down. I’ll have to get another extender if that happens, though.
TIL Harkness Test, and what the ACTUAL FUCK
One of the perks of working for a tech company on a hybrid schedule. They inventory the issued laptops, but that’s about all they have time for. And every once in a while they clean out and let us take stuff home. After 5-ish years, I and the people closest to me will always have monitors, monitor stands, at least one working UPS and all the peripherals, HDMI and Ethernet cables we could ever need.
Our cleaners are wizards at pulling the optical audio cable out of our sound bar or television. It’s not too short or anything like that, but it’s happened at least half the times they have been here. And it’s behind the sound bar and television. I can’t figure out why it’s always that specific cable. Plenty of others nearby.
Just tell them to pull out those other cables instead.
These situations actually happen to me from time to time.
Same but it only needed to happen once to make me feel I’d validated my entire collection.
Sent this in a family group chat, referring to my dad. My kids found it funny because they claim it is me.
In some ways, we all become our fathers I guess, lol.
Especially when you bring time travel into the mix
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.
+1 I only keep multiples of commonly used cables and I use ziplock bags to keep cables of the same type together in my cable box so it’s easy to tell if I’ve accumulated too many.
my box used to be organized. now it’s all just a jumbled mess and i’m scared to open it
Shut your filthy mouth! I need all of them ALL OF THEMMM
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.”
You forgot to mention the rca cables. So many rca cables.
To my defense I can fully charge all of the broken cameras I have hoarded since the 90s!
I said data cable. Something so obscure you mistook it for the charging cable.
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.
The movie prop companies are going to knock on your door.
I’m so impressed by the organization.
“Democracy is in danger!”
“But sir! Where would we possibly get our hands on 12 VGA-to-DVI connectors?!”
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.
I kept my box of Nintendo 3DS LL since I bought it. After about five years I discovered that I could sell it for money. I listed it online asking for about $3.
Not too long a guy texted me and asked me if I still had it. I said sure, give me your address. I then asked my wife to ship it.
Wife said she had thrown it out a few days ago.
Guy said, “No worries, mate. It’s alright if you don’t have the outer box. It’s actually the cardboard paper which holds up the box in shape I need.”
Wife said the box was actually still in the drawer, but since I took the box out and also took out the cardboard paper for examination the other day, she threw out those cardboard paper but kept the box.
FireWire mentioned
