And this is how I learn that I have a secret sibling

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

The time will come. The virtue of a great hunter is the patience.

It's like screwdrivers. No matter how many you have and how prepared you try to be, the next thing you need to open will have a screw you don't have the tool for opening. And you will realize that you're screwed.

Since you're here - we really need to find a way to spike Dad's YouTube algorithm. I saw his feed and it was all Fox News and OANN stuff.

hence my drawer of converters having Whole partition just for vga converters. I've needed all of them at least once.

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."

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

Lots of stuff abused the DB25 and the DB-whatever it was parallel port

Never in my entire life have I ever used FireWire.

🧐which box holds the DVI cables?

delete the history and then watch a bunch of my little pony stuff on his account. like, a lot a lot.

my box used to be organized. now it's all just a jumbled mess and i'm scared to open it

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.

I did this, and then my then-gf desperately searched for a cable one day...

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.

You forgot to mention the rca cables. So many rca cables.

Didn’t know I was a dad. 😢 Come visit your old man.

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.

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.

Wanna hook up a thing to another thing? I got a drawer for that.

I think I have a USB to D-SUB adapter somewhere. Just in case:)

Those are digital cables. The analog cables are things like RCA connectors, old stereo cables and wires, old VGA connectors. That sort of thing.

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

You forgot the outdated ethernet cables. Cat4 or worse only.

I ended up stealing a lot of the USB-B cables for arduinos.

It was my main port for close to a decade.

If for your dad it was a random offcut of wood you're in the picture.

fuck this one hits the hardest out of all of them. I refer to myself as an old man all the time, but this is shit I did in high school.

https://youtube.com/shorts/R7LsubMttMs

And loads of RF cables

My bag of cables in the attic that’s been there for the last 25 years says hello

Give me a 8-pin Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter or cable for less than 20$ and we'll talk.

It was noticeably faster for external hard drives than USB 2.0 back in the day (though if anything I miss eSATA).

There's still some Windows XP-era A/V equipment still in use at work that is Firewire.

I still have a Firewire 800 drive connected through a Thunderbolt 2 adapter in use right now.

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.

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)

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!

TV! Not PC. Thanks!

This is me and I'm mad about it.

They wrote duplicates.

Are you sure? I vaguely remember finding that some of these pins were shorted when I tested the same hypothesis... Maybe I'm remembering wrong

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

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)

We have a Dad?!

They are the glue that tangles all the other ones together. Them and one VGA that gets snagged on the screw handles.

Recently I picked up a new entertainment of checking reviews of audio equipment stores on local amazon

Cue Children of Omnissiah

One of the reviews was from a woman who ordered a microphone, an XLR to 3.5mm cable, an apple type c headphone dongle, plugged all that into a car charger and complained that it did not turn her car into karaoke.

Another from a guy with a couple of active speakers who bought an insert cable, so he had to put one of the speakers sideways on top of another to make it reach both ports. Rated 5 stars.

Another picked old soviet DIN5 to 3.5mm cable, jammed it into MIDI OUT port on his digital piano and the other end into line in on his pc soundcard...

Ah btw, crossover cables are not needed anymore.

☺️

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