My cable box is my retirement fund. Copper prices are rising, and scrap-metal dealers pay pretty well for it. But jokes aside: last year I also sorted some out and took 10 kilos of household cables to the local scrap-metal dealer here in Germany and got €30 for them. Better than throwing them away.

I have a rack of boxes of cables in my home, its not that out of the ordinary since I'm in the industry and am the network admin for my entire block in my housing community.

The other day I was fabberglased I could not find an HDMI to HDMI cable! HDMI > DVI yes, to VGA yes, to display port yes, to mini-HDMI yes. it was so shameful, for me having to go to amazon/best buy to purchase an HDMI cable is the lowest of the low.

I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.

The delight of having one of those cables be useful is immeasurable. It doesn't even have to be for your own good. In fact, I bet if we made a site where everyone can catalog their collections and automatically match them up with neighbors that have that cable, people would be more than happy to share cables for free.

I recently purged my cable box. I had 8 HDMI cables... 8. What do I need 8 HDMI cables for?

I tossed them in the garbage with a ton of other use less cables. I kept one HDMI cable (not 8) and a few odds and ends. I kept one rj45 Ethernet cable and tossed the rest. I even tossed my rj45 crimping tool kit. Why? Because I don't see the need to crimp Ethernet cables anytime soon and should the need arise I can buy a kit for $30.

So at the end my cable box when from being overflowing to half full.

Onto the next project.

This post is basically Futurama's "assorted lengths of wire" in text-form, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxu7z7hfVns

Forwarding this to my wife.

I had four big plastic totes full of cables. I pared them down to just one recently. I'm 90% happy with the move. It's ok to let go sometimes.

I have surplus/military bare cables dating from the 1970s or so, extra shiny silver plated copper with PTFE jacket: a joy to solder, then more "normal" ones from the late 80s and 90s, then "old" modern ones, that is, power/audio/data cables usable with recent stuff. I'll never throw away any of them because unlike most crap they bundle with consumer devices today, they're made of real copper. Take a cheap cable bought today and chances are that it either sticks to a magnet, meaning it's copper plated steel or other crappy alloy, or it doesn't and it's super light which indicates it's made of aluminium; in all cases not good where power dissipation can be a problem or where resoldering may be necessary. Keep old cables!

Literally today my friend asked me if I have a cable for an iPod :P