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 @[email protected] (link)
All I’ve ever wanted is for the Revolution to knock on my door in need of a weird cable.
“Democracy is in danger!”
“But sir! Where would we possibly get our hands on 12 VGA-to-DVI connectors?!”
I’m so impressed by the organization.
I’m intrigued by the “USB WEIRD” label.
I have a USB->GBA SP cable that I have no idea where it came from. It probably came out of that box.
I have old game consoles. One cable for the USB weird pile was the odd Y cable for data and charging for a PSP
GBA SP charging cable? Or data cable? It it’s a date cable is likely for transferring Pokémon and whatnot via a trainer program on a pc or something? Just a wild guess
Charging cable. It’s definitely some 3rd party thing, but again, no clue where I got it
The movie prop companies are going to knock on your door.
I don’t like that I am in this picture.
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.
I kept my box of Nintendo 3DS LL since I bought it. After about five years I discovered that I could sell it for money. I listed it online asking for about $3.
Not too long a guy texted me and asked me if I still had it. I said sure, give me your address. I then asked my wife to ship it.
Wife said she had thrown it out a few days ago.
Guy said, “No worries, mate. It’s alright if you don’t have the outer box. It’s actually the cardboard paper which holds up the box in shape I need.”
Wife said the box was actually still in the drawer, but since I took the box out and also took out the cardboard paper for examination the other day, she threw out those cardboard paper but kept the box.
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.
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)
Hey the copper inside those bad boys will be worth a fortune in 50 years
I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.
Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.
Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.
I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.
Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.
I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!
My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I’m at a total loss
I have an Epson scanner, though I’d have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you’re only doing prints you wouldn’t need that feature.
I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.
Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You’ll learn the sound of the scanner when it’s returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.
It’s tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you’re setting up the other one. It took me months and months.
Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.
Edit - your comment has me thinking, I need work in winter time. Maybe this could be a side job…
To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can’t even crawl yet!
Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC’s 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!
But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!
In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it’d be cool if I could do it myself.
Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.
And for the photos, I’m already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it’s a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I’ll task my oldest with it later this year I’m her “down time” lol.
I’m currently looking for a good laser printer myself, if I get my hands on one I’ll pass the deets to you.
Brother laser printers are the move for sure, but as for photo printers I’m at a loss.
Hell, Brother probably makes one now that I think about it, hmm…
What are you doing, step printer? That’s not where cartridge go!
I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I’ve made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says “HP Bad”, but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad’s Epson color inkjet printer and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don’t update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.
Oh for sure lol, never update it, I usually don’t give printers access to the network anyway, I’ll just use a cable! I’ll check out that HP, thanks!
If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.
If I digitize anything, I only trust myself with that. I’m too OCD to trust a third party!
You got rid of 80TB of storage? In this economy?
I think he meant he kept 80 TB of storage.
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.
You get a zonk for using the most inefficient cooling technologies, but kudos for giving me faith that my extra stock coolers will come in handy eventually…
Oh the cooler is horribly inefficient, but it’s super light. And for the price of a battery powered compressor cooler, it’ll be many, many years before it makes up for the price difference in electricity usage.
It’s for a portable cooler though, you’re not optimizing for heat removal per watt, you’re optimizing for size and weight.
Perhaps I’m missing why an Igloo cooler won’t work here.
They said they didn’t wanna carry ice. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work, they just didn’t want to bother with ice.
Recently I picked up a new entertainment of checking reviews of audio equipment stores on local amazon
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…
And that is why you never throw out anything, because if you do you are guaranteed to need it right after
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 …
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.
I found out the hard way. I need an HDMI to VGA cable. You’ll never guess what I gave away a few weeks ago.
Many things still fall back to VGA, like old projectors.
Sure. But it is not like own the shit to plug my modern hardware to VGA.
You, next week, browsing eBay: an 8K dpl projector, in box, with mounting kit, $15, no bids, ending in 8 minutes?!
You, a few seconds later: WHY IS IT ONLY VGA WHAT THE FU-
hence my drawer of converters having Whole partition just for vga converters. I’ve needed all of them at least once.
I think I have a USB to D-SUB adapter somewhere. Just in case:)
Lots of stuff abused the DB25 and the DB-whatever it was parallel port
I used a VGA cable just last week to attach a screen to an HP micro server.
As soon as you throw away a cable, you will have sudden and very unexpected need for it.
This goes double for any cable that will be hard to get a new one of, so hold on to those centronics cables!
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 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!
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
The moral of the story is: don’t throw away your unusual old cables.
List them for sale on ebay.
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
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.
I lost my BT earbuds 2 months ago, have a Type C phone, and just chucked out my ~5 Type C earbuds, because I had never used them since I got the Bluetooth one. I only left a pair of Jack earbuds. Guess where my Type C to Jack adapter went…
As with any other thing that is kept ‘just in case’, the size and effort to store in an organized way will be the reason for keeping or discarding something. I also keep at least one of each connector that I still have could possibly use either by something I own to tech that isn’t too old for me to aquire due to needing something a week after throwing it out and having to buy an overpriced replacement.
Yes, this means I do have some ribbon connectors because I have older mobos and drives with those and VGA connectors since some of my monitors still have those as options.
My limit is one plastic tub though, with the older stuff on the bottom like sedimentary layers. When it gets full I pull it out and ditch the oldest stuff I no longer need and stack it back in. The next round will probably prompt me to ditch the older ribbon connectors and drives that use them.
