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- Hacker News
- Clear Hefty Slider bags are perfect for this! I have my cable boxes (Hefty Hi-Rise) filled with these bags, USB -A to USB-C, USB -C to USB-C (then sub-bagged with 65w, 100w, 240w) and so on.
Point is, use clear bags so you can see inside, and Hefty makes the slider version. I get the gallon and half gallon bags for this, and then the quart size as well. This is the Marie Kondo technique and it's amazing for keeping all these cables which are always coming in handy!
I keep the duplicates, because you never know which color and length is going to be the perfect fit for the current need!
by ElijahLynn - The rule: one cable per bag! At least in my case.by isodude
- I put my cables in bags then in a box. I can't tell you how helpful the bags are. It only took me like an hour to sort the first time. But it's already saved me hours only a year later. Those 5 minutes of searching add up. Just fight the laziness and don't let entropy increase. It's *far* easier to stay organized than it is to organizeby godelski
- Also helps to cut down on your number of cables once you see you have 5 USB-B cables when at most you need 1. I ziplock bagged all of my cables and cut them down to one of each type. These days I throw out the included cable with devices immediately rather than throwing it in with all the others. Thankfully a lot of new devices don't include cables now so the wastage is cut down.by SchemaLoad
- Hot tip - buy a box of small / medium zip lock bags and bag them all up. Duplicates in the same bag are ok (10cm / USB-C) etc.
For the last 10 years my "techno box" has been a box of bags - the cables don't get tangled and small bits (adaptors / notes) get to live with the cables. Its one of the rare few home environment hacks I actually have!
by piqufoh - This post isn't convincing me. I spent so much time meticulously organizing my techno box. I bought a back of the door shoe holder for tech. Every wire, charger, usb key, web cam, airline earbud, everything. It's been beautifully organized for years.
It's been beautifully organized and useless for so many years that it's all junk now. Nothing is using USB A/B. The airline earbuds are as much trash today as they were then. The usb keys are very old and untrustworthy. Even the USB-C wires are all out of spec, won't charge modern phones, etc. The old webcams look like true trash compared to the modern ones. Etc etc
And this post is basically "hoard all this garbage because in 10 years you might need one thing"? I'm sorry, but "buy that one thing for a few bucks off amazon the one time you need it" is looking a lot more attractive than "meticulously maintain a tech hoard to save $3 on a single use wire"
In engineering terms, it feels like my tech hoard is an automation I spent two weeks writing, for code that only ever runs once every ten years.
by criley2 - 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.by SkyPuncher
- And whoever needs something else, I give you permission to ignore this fool and keep your box(es) of cables. I don't regret a single thing about my ~8 boxes of cables.
- Speaking as a person that had to buy 2 additional psp chargers (my ebook reader uses one too), please throw those onto ebay or your local marketplace instead :)by desterothx
- Throwing away proprietary cables is a sin. Throwing away standard commodity USB cables is not so muchby LocalH
- I have a bin of cables marked "Obsolete". A cable only goes in there if there's absolutely no possibility of it being used for any reason ever again.
I use cables from it once every few years.
- No, this method does not work. I tried, got rid of all those stuff because why would I need it ever again. And of course a month later I needed that one stupid thing right there and then. And I remember throwing away... Not again, I keep at least one cable of each in a separate box to find immediately, the rest is stored, it is not asking for any money.by mf2hd
- For me it's not the cost that bugs me when I don't have a part, but rather the disruption to my flow. If I can't get a project done all at once I'm much less likely to ever get it done.by EvanAnderson
- You’re not serious about it if you only have one boxby random3
- Depends on how big that box isby woozlewuzzle
- I have one for video cables, one for audio cables, one for computer gear. Does that make me serious our mildly interested?by dylan604
- It's always a miniature war with my wife trying to optimize all my cables away and me trying to keep as many as possible.by pixl97
- My boxes been sorted by "what does the cable carry", one power cables, one data, one video, one patch cables, then some are split out, like sound production related cables, one with balanced 1/4", one unbalanced, one MIDI... I think in total 8 moving boxes by now.
- For real, I have like 200 kilos of cables. I could very likely reduce that down to something less severe, but that involves sorting and inventorying 200 kilos of cables.by RIMR
- Challenge: come up with categories for the boxes such that every item has exactly one box that is correct for it.
I've got "USB", "AV" and "Networking & PC Accessories", which obviously has enormous overlap, but equally divides the cables I have pretty nicely.
by advisedwang - I decided years ago to limit myself to just one box of cables... So then I ended up having to keep finding a bigger and bigger box to switch them to.
One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
If anyone has a suggestion on that or can tell me about the pop up local cable donation swap initiative I haven't heard of them that would be welcome.
by kingrolo - I keep a lot of wires around because my interests and work require that, and I find great pleasure in being able to connect anything at a whim. Right now they're all pretty tidy, sorted by role into not-giant boxes on a shelf. I don't have too much any particular type, and every one I do have works with currently-used technology.
It wasn't always that way, though -- I used to collect and keep all of the cables. It was quite a burden.
10 years ago or so, I went through them all and sorted them. I got rid of hundreds of pounds of cables. Those that went away were all broadly useless to modern society, or duplicates, or both.
I did think about taking some to a thrift store but, I mean: I see the same used wires on the shelves there sometimes for months or years: People don't want them. And I wasn't about to landfill them.
So I decided to recycle them by selling them as scrap.
In my case, with the scrap yard near me: They offered me a much better price without connectors on the wires than with them. So I cut all the ends off, bagged up all those bits of insulated copper wire, and sold them by the pound. It took a fair bit of time to prep all that stuff for scrap, but meh: I made a rather decent hourly wage doing it and felt like I was working towards the right goal.
Since this transaction gave them value, I can be reasonably certain that they got made into something instead of just being dumped into a hole in the ground.
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If direct re-use is very important: You can sell them on eBay, I guess. There's buyers there. But then you're doing all of the things that selling cheap stuff on eBay requires and that sounds like an awful way to spend time.
Otherwise, the prospects are bad. Even at hamfest fleamarkets in Ohio, people don't usually bring in collections of old miscellaneous cables. A special programming cable for a Yaesu radio? Sure! 50 feet of LMR-400 coax? Why not.
Yet-another USB A-to-B printer cable? No, nobody wants that (we already have our own burdensome stash), and even if they do then nobody wants to scan through all of the old computer power cords and audio cables to find that printer cable any more than you want to sort it all out for for display and perusal.
If the money isn't important and the main goal is to avoid the landfill, then: Just put them on Craigslist or FB marketplace (or whatever regional variation works where you are) for free, in bulk. Someone will pick them up. Whether they think they're finding a pile of scrap to get some tax-free beer money from or some kind of hidden treasure doesn't really matter.
Or, in the right neighborhood: Put them in a pile on the curb so that people can see them. They'll simply disappear.
by ssl-3 - things like old hdmi cables need to go, updated specs mean the old ones fundamentally don't work.
learn how and get the tools to strip wires and sell the metal for scrap when you have too much, do it right and better than recycling, you can sell it
- IT Recyclers will at least sort them and resell them in bulk as raw materials. Sometimes. When they are allowed to.by protocolture
- >I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there's more cables out there than functioning equipment, especially for older standards like VGA or PS/2.
It's ok to throw out junk.
by Legend2440 - Some thrift stores will take them, if you have a good one nearby (I’ve been lucky here, but they’re rare). You can also put a note on your local freebie groups and someone might bite. In some cities you can leave them bagged outside your house with a note and they’ll be gone in hours. On some tech forum classifieds, people would give away cables and junk fans for the cost of the postage.
- > One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.
This prevents me from throwing away a lot of stuff. I can't stand the idea of this stuff just going into a landfill somewhere, adding to the world's pollution. I feel like every time I put something into the trash, I might as well be beating a baby seal with a baseball bat. I also put a (perhaps insane) amount of effort into reusing things and avoiding buying things in the first place, because I know eventually it will be polluting the world.
Often I just set up a folding table at the curb, and put my boxes of stuff there with a sign that says "free". Yes, I know the next person might throw it away, but somehow it's easier to ignore that fact.
by ryandrake - Someone should make a noncommercial website that allows people to post their collection. I bet there's enough people out there willing to share their cables for free just for the delight of having one of their cables being useful to someone for some reasonby culi
- In 2021 I cut the end off a USB cable to expose the power leads which I scotch taped to the power meter on my bike to charge it. I kept that cable. In 2024 I used it to add USB disconnects to the light strip I attached to the bottom of my son's crib, allowing me to keep the light strip intact when we lowered the base from the baby height to the toddler height. A week later we got rid of the strip because we really didn't need the light like that any more. Still, no regrets. This was my version of using every part of the buffalo.by 1-more