Recently visited Seoul, Korea, and took the subway to Yongsan station and walked over to what is left of the Yongsan Electronics Market (building 21).

1) It still exists. Cool. 2) What's left: Nobody taking their boxes of cables away!

Hey! It’s not just me! The other day, someone at work decided to throw away a large drawer worth of HDMI, DP, USB cables that I had neatly organized a couple of months ago. This was to make room for like 5 spare power strips that take up <20% of the drawer and while we had like 3 empty drawers in the cabinet. Needless to say, I was livid. Especially because I found out while looking for a USB cable to charge my mouse that we had at least x4 in the drawer.

Thank you for listening.

I have the same. It has saved hundreds of dineros for me and my friends and even better, prevented those ending up in the bottomless trickle up coffers of the zillionaire.

Obviously I'm going to keep the box, but the real question is how many hundreds of NEMA C13 cables should I keep?

I used to think this way, but now I know better.

My dad passed a few years back, this past year I spent a considerable amount of time helping my mom and sister tame all his junk. So much junk was tossed or donated, very little was kept and even less sold. Not wanting to burden my family with all of my junk I started working on my own hoard this summer. Letting go wasn't easy, but once it was done I felt less burdened by it.

And yes like clockwork a week after tossing it all I needed some random cable. I spent a couple of bucks for one at Walmart of all places, but Amazon and ebay would have had my back if that cable hadn't been there.

If you have a similar junk box, you have my permission to just throw it away. Don't look in it, don't worry about it, just toss it. You do not need to be carrying so much junk. You do not need 20 year old ethernet cables, 30 year old scsi and ide cables, or 40 year old audio cables. You can buy new ones, in new condition today, most of which are reasonably priced and wont produce random errors or noise due to internal faults.

tl;dr- You don't need it, toss it and do it today!

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

I too live in the firm belief that my collection of DB13W3 cables will at some point prove essential to saving humanity from nanobot goo for which the shutdown codes are only stored in earth's last remaining SGI IRIS 4D Crimson.

This is also a good reason to keep your knowledge of MIPS assembler fresh, lest you have to type lots of it very quickly as the swarm approaches.

I had an lightning cable connected to a charger, turns out the connector was a bit broken and it started to spark, in the sofa where the end was.

Luckily our fire alarm on four legs quickly alerted us.

Don't keep busted cables. It's not worth it.

I use big drawers for "types" and ziplocks for within; i have a network drawer , a media one and a generic one that says "stuff that glues or grabs" (zip ties, tape, etc)

I purge my box every few years. Do you really need 20 usb cables. I do save the esoteric ones though.