• UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    198·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
      26·
      9 days ago

      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!

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        10·
        9 days ago

        The moral of the story is: don’t throw away your unusual old cables.

        List them for sale on ebay.

      • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
        8·
        9 days ago

        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.

        • notabot@piefed.socialEnglish
          4·
          9 days ago

          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!

          • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 days ago

            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

    • morto@piefed.socialEnglish
      8·
      9 days ago

      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

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
      5·
      9 days ago

      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…

    • iegod@lemmy.zip
      4·
      9 days ago

      Just this past year I had to buy a usb-c to vga adapter/cable for a trade show setup. Shit’s still in use today.

    • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • pressedhams@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    60·
    9 days ago

    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.

  • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
    57·
    9 days ago

    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!

    • ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      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

    • limelight79@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 days ago

      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!

    • scott_anon_21@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      If it brought you joy, especially repeated joy, none of your investment was wasted. Thanks for sharing that with us.

      • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        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.

        🥲

    • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      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

    • Killer@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 days ago

      The ipod touch didn’t have an onboard camera till the 4th generation. Still a fun story nonetheless.

      • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 days ago

        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.

  • how_we_burned@lemmy.zip
    28·
    9 days ago

    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)

    inheritance

    • Zanathos@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 days ago

      I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.

      Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.

      • limelight79@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 days ago

        Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.

        I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.

        Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.

        I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!

        • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          I did the same with my own photos during the lockdown years. Started by scanning physical photos, then got hold of any old negative scanner which supported APS. I’ve scanned everything except I seem to be missing one of my APS negative cartridges. I now can’t get rid of my negative scanner because I know I’ll find that missing cartridge as soon as I do. I also can’t do much with the old PC as it’s the only full size one which will take the SCSI card that I have.

          • limelight79@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 day ago

            Damn, aps support?! I assume you have to take the negatives out of the cartridge.

            There’s a seller on ebay that 3D prints negative holders for the scanner I have, so for example I could scan the 110 cartridge (not the really old roll film) negatives I have. I wonder if he makes one to do APS.

            But on the other hand, the APS camera I had was cheap, point and shoot, and the prints came back with a note that they were severely overexposed, so it probably wasn’t even working correctly. Not much point in spending money to save some forgettable shots of a local river.

            • Chris@feddit.ukEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              Yeah, it’s a Canon scanner (can’t remember the model of the top of my head), a lot of the listings I saw for it were missing the APS part so maybe it was an optional extra?

              They are mounted in the scanner cartridge and then the scanner takes care of advancing through them - or maybe it was manual. I can’t remember now!

              I had more rolls of APS than I thought, quite cool as you get the full frame rather than what was selected on the camera, so you see bits that were hidden for years.

              Edit fs2710 - just looked in the metadata!

        • Zanathos@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 days ago

          To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can’t even crawl yet!

        • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I’m at a total loss

          • limelight79@lemmy.world
            2·
            7 days ago

            I have an Epson scanner, though I’d have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you’re only doing prints you wouldn’t need that feature.

            I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.

            Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You’ll learn the sound of the scanner when it’s returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.

            It’s tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you’re setting up the other one. It took me months and months.

            Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.

            Edit - your comment has me thinking, I need work in winter time. Maybe this could be a side job…

            • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              7 days ago

              Holy shit. You crazy motherfucker. You actually put the photos on the frame one by one? And scanned them one by one?

              I gotta say…

              You may be insane, but you get the job done, as opposed to me, who am still trying to figure out the best way to do it.

              That’s why we are still trying to understand how they built the pyramids, while the pyramid builders simply did it.

              • limelight79@lemmy.world
                1·
                6 days ago

                Yeah. I don’t remember how many of the pictures I scanned were prints, but it was quite a few, maybe close to 1,000. As I said, just watched TV and did it. It’s pretty mindless once you get into the groove doing it.

                Like I said before, I did try to find the negatives and scan those instead when possible. Better quality and more efficient. But for quite a few, no negatives. I also had to take pictures out of frames and stuff like that. My parents wedding picture was in a cardboard frame I had to disassemble carefully…

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        8 days ago

        Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC’s 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!

        But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!

        In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it’d be cool if I could do it myself.

          • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            2·
            8 days ago

            Brother laser printers are the move for sure, but as for photo printers I’m at a loss.

            Hell, Brother probably makes one now that I think about it, hmm…

            • Zanathos@lemmy.world
              3·
              8 days ago

              I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I’ve made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says “HP Bad”, but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad’s Epson color inkjet printer and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don’t update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.

              • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                1·
                7 days ago

                Oh for sure lol, never update it, I usually don’t give printers access to the network anyway, I’ll just use a cable! I’ll check out that HP, thanks!

        • Zanathos@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 days ago

          Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.

          And for the photos, I’m already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it’s a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I’ll task my oldest with it later this year I’m her “down time” lol.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.

  • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
    27·
    9 days ago

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

    • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
      23·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • TxzK@lemmy.zip
        5·
        9 days ago

        It is still a thing. Many Laptops still have USB-C ports supporting Thunderbolt

      • homes@piefed.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 days ago

        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.

  • sanbdra@lemmy.world
    26·
    9 days ago

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

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
    23·
    9 days ago

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

  • Lexam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      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.

    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      4·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        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

        • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          2·
          7 days ago

          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.

    • Deebster@infosec.pub
      2·
      9 days ago

      from the computer to the PC

      While I’m sure that this is just a braino and one of those was meant to be “monitor”, I like the idea that you’re somehow both techie enough to have your HDMI cables to hand and nontechie enough that you call the screen the computer.

    • limelight79@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • Deacon@lemmy.world
      13·
      9 days ago

      Same but it only needed to happen once to make me feel I’d validated my entire collection.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        9 days ago

        So many plastic storage bins… in my office closet. Stacked. One for network cables. One for power cables. One for video cables… these are the large bins. please, send help.

        • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          Aaahahaha thats me. One for A/V (with separated enclosures), one for data transfer, one for network, and one for power. You have to have a system or you’re doomed.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    17·
    9 days ago

    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.

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    9 days ago

    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.”

  • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
    14·
    9 days ago

    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)