If you need to get rid of a pile of DC power supplies and they're all similar, consider donating them to a stem youth club. I have a huge pike of 12v power supplies with the 5.5-2.1mm plug on them and they work great with breadboard power supplies.
After switching to solar DC and batteries I suddenly cared a lot more about ac/dc power inverters needlessly wasting my limited energy supply.
Slowly I figured out how to power my devices without ac outlets. Mercifully 5v,9v,12v,19v at 1-5A are pretty standard values for most lower powered DC appliances.
A good DC barrel plug 5.5mm universal adapter kit, a usbc-PD adapter cable with manually selectable voltage levels to 5.5mm barrel plug, and a car plug to dc barrel plug universal adapter kit have taken good care of 95% of my adapter woes.
It feels sooo good to figure out how to power something directly with USBC and see the wattage drawn get cut down significantly.
Whats my point? If people knew a little bit more about the finer details of power supplies and dc barrel plugs most of their box of junk cables could be phased out with confidence. If you have 20 year old electronics with some weird incredibly specific voltage and barrel plug I would heavily consider just getting a new version that runs on usbc-pd or a more standard power rating. And if I ever need an old video cable? You'd better believe amazon and eBay still got it.
This was me. A few months ago, I threw out a cable I thought was for a 20 year old flipphone that I'll never use again, but it was a charger for something else and I wanted it last week for a relative. Now we need to buy new hardware. Don't do it, kids, horde those cables. Horde them like you don't fancy spending an unnecessary 30 smackers next year.
One time I had an ex ask me for some obscure cable that I happened to have. We went over to my cable drawer and as I pulled it out she said "Why do you have this drawer of random cables?"
There's a tool sharing program in my neighborhood. You pay like $20 a year for access, and come by, borrow a tool/leave a tool. It's great as people leave lots of big tools sitting around doing nothing.
I want that for computer parts and wires.
Lets pool our ps/2 keyboard adapters and VGA cords together!
It's true. That box has the utility of the highest utility cable in it. Which means it's a lot. Worth taking up space under a bed you aren't using. Anti-horder culture goes too far. It's more complicated than dogmatically throwing away everything or keeping everything. Don't throw away things with real utility. Civilization is built on accumulated utility in durable goods.
A few months ago I FINALLY organized my cluttered box of miscellaneous technology and cables into one of those plastic bin drawers with wheels. I now know what I have and can keep it all fairly organized. Found some stuff I could've thrown out, but this post just told me not to. So thanks!
I had an ISA serial card sitting on a shelf next to my desk at work for 14 years. In the yearly clean up it was kept. 10 years after the last ISA machine had been in the office it was scrapped.
Not 2 days after the truck I had to order one exactly like it for a machine i did not know exsisted in a printing press i did not know at a customer... NEVER throw out anything!
This has happened to me, which is why I now have an entire section of a cupboard dedicated to parts and cables. I'm not entirely sure an ISA card would ever be needed today, but you never know!!!
OMG! I was just about to throw away a box of "cables" I've been accruing since college. My wife has been complaining about these cables that never get used. I think I'm going to have to hold off now. Thanks for the warning!
Have none of you learned the law!!?? The act of throwing the cable away is what created the need for that cable. The cable gods MUST be appeased. (Also applies to adapters and random hardware.)
Beginner move, you go through the box, check all cables, and do one of two things:
Get rid of all duplicates but keep one of each type of cable.
Catalog and label all cables in the box, make a list of all cables including their numbers. List all known devices that use them, index their usefullness based on how many devices you know use them and how long ago it was that you needed them. The more usefull the cable the more copies you keep, but you allways keep one type.
I lugged a box of cables around for 10 years without ever needing one. I finally decided that I was being foolish and donated all of them. Literally the next day I needed one.
Apparently we have a digital camera, which I'm sure we have no way to connect to our current computers, and he is convinced someone stole it even though it's from like 2004.
I could probably get rid of some of the cables in my cable box, but that damn thing came with my on my sudden cross country move and was almost immediately useful so no one will ever convince me to throw it all away.
I got around this by keeping several USB-C to USB-C cables around, and buying female USB-C to male whatever adapters. Doesn't cover everything, but enough that I got rid of a small crate full of cables and only have to keep a half-dozen or so other cables.
Trim it down to one of each cable. You don't need a half-dozen patch cables. That weird wall-wart with the proprietary DIN plug for the laptop you no longer have, or the voltage- and milliamp-specific application you'll never need. The 4 SATA cables...etc.
Pare it down in order of likely need. You might need a couple USB cables and maybe a couple SATA cables, but you don't need 3 34-pin floppy drive ribbon cables.
Yes. The correct approach is to get rid of all the cables that are not needed, and to keep the few cables that might come in handy. Throwing away a collection in bulk is risky.
I took the middle road: use cable zip ties to bundle them and put all in a bag. Since finding a cable is infrequent, you don't need to optimize for that case.