Cleaned out my cable drawer this weekend

Needed some space in my office this weekend so I dared to empty out my cable drawer and throw out the cruft that has aggregated over 5 years. Serial cables – db9, db25, every gendered alternative of these, serial switchers, gender converters – all gone, hopefully I will never need one of these again. Parallel cables – cables, gender converters, switchboxes – again i hope all gone for good. Wall warts – a huge variety of amperages and voltages – I’ll cannibalize some for halloween projects but most are gone. Midi cables and midi interface boxes for old pcs. All kinds of goofy crappy quality audio cables – rca jack, mini jack, some with video too, all kinds of converters – i could still justify keeping some of these, tho most of them came bundled with some device and are of crappy quality. Enough rj-11 cabling to circle the globe – cables, gender converters, splitters – all gone. Coax gear – cables, splitters, switchboxes – most of it 900Mhz gear and thus incompatible with HDTV – all gone. Some old ps2 port mouse and keyboard cables/converters/extenders – gone.

I ended up with a much smaller pile – cat5 cabling, usb cables and converters, high quality audio cables, and some truly oddball a/v cables that probably are required for the various cameras I own but I can’t remember what goes with what – I’ll keep them so that I won’t have a disaster some day when I really need them.

I wish I could say that I’ll never have to do this again, but with HDMI, optical and copper spdif, higher speed evolutions of usb and firewire, cat5e, and gosh knows what else – I’ll probably have to do this again in 5 years.