Comic Strips

My landlady and good friend of the family came for a visit from abroad, she's very rich but stuck in her ways, and refuses to buy a smartphone.

She came over in a hurry and asked if by some wild chance I had a charger for a Nokia 3410 laying around somewhere.

I literally reached over into a box next to my desk and gave it to her. She was surprised and elated. "Dumb question, do you have another for my backup 3410?"

I reached into the box and gave her another.

That's the day I started suspecting I may have a problem.

True story, happened back in 2014.

I love old AC adapters. Whenever I'm tossing something out, I keep the adapter. I have a box full of them.

A couple of years ago, I got into home music recording, and started buying used gear at auctions. If they come with the box, manual and accessories, they can be expensive, but I don't need the box, and you can find any manual online, so all I need is the adapter. Without the adapter, the thing sells for real cheap, and I almost always have an old adapter that works.

Nothing is more satisfying than getting a piece of used gear in the mail, and digging through the box for the right adaptor, plugging it in, and seeing it come to life.

I had this box that carried/moved from 1996 - 2016 (when boxes weren’t cheaply made) that had every cable from scsi, power, ps, usb and more. I can count on one hand the 3 times I needed something from it. I moved with it 5x between 2 states and apartments and a house, and when I moved it the last time from my basement office to my upstairs office, I decided to turn those cables into money (copper). I never looked back because I found myself being lazy and searching Amazon for a 3$ cable.

I shall live with this tech nerd shame, but honestly I sold everything to move to Spain, so whatever. Heh.

"did you say you needed a piece of scrap wood about this wide and about that long and about yea thick?!"

Happiest day of my "uncle's" (actually Dad's cousin in law) life.

Quoting @jlamoree@infosec.exchange (link)

All I’ve ever wanted is for the Revolution to knock on my door in need of a weird cable.

I don't like that I am in this picture.

My dad had a collection of old and weird stuff, and he'd frequently joke about it; when you need it, remember that there's a microphone wire for a 1932 Edison dictaphone in this drawer right here.

I haven't had time to respond to this, but, on a related note...

I bought my car new in 1999, and I still love driving it. Many years ago, say 2003 or so, I bought a resistor to enable to daytime running lights, then I realized I needed other components, and never got around to finishing the job.

A few weeks ago, a guy from the car club asked if I still had it, because he wanted to enable the daytime running lights and that was the last piece he needed, and no one seemed to have one. I looked and looked but couldn't find it anywhere. I think I threw it away a few months ago, figuring I wouldn't ever need it.

Sorry, bud. I had that thing sitting around for two plus decades, only to need it a few weeks after I tossed it.

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)

I still have the 5.25 inch floppy drive with ribbon cable.

Som e day a bank that never upgraded will need it desperately and then I'll cash in. Bwahahaha

We are on a road trip right now. we travel with a 12v peltier cooler. (don't need to lug around water/ice), the night before we leave, the internal fan whines and freezes.

Wife, what was that? I check, fan just died.

Wife, fuck now what, if we move it to the other cooler i won't all fit with ice.

Me: TO THE BASEMENT.....(DAD-CAPE) Shelves, boxes, PC parts, dig dig, Intel stock cooler on it's heatsink. flush cutters, snip strip, tape.

If I had more time, I'd have bought a direct replacement from noctua (already replaced the eternal fan years ago)

Having parts around is a bad investment until that one time you need it now.

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.

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...

I'm retro computing, retro everything tech, and I DO need my collection!

Just had to order a keyboard DIN connector (pre PS-2) adapter for a old 80386. Because I obviously still don't hoard enough old stuff!

One of the few things I'm afraid I won't be able to use anymore are UMTS (3G) sticks and routers. Although, the router still works a perfectly fine mobile Wifi router, hmmmmm ....

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!

☺️

future goals fr

I had this exact feeling when my kid brought home an old laptop he found from his grandpa and it was one of those IBM T23s from the early 2000s but there was no power cable with it. Guess who had one still in his tangle of wires? lol Now we'll see if the laptop still actually works.

Doesn't everyone keep a bag of random cables and a box of random screws?

And that is why you never throw out anything, because if you do you are guaranteed to need it right after