If I can deal with my shameful pile of cables, so can you
- How-To Geek, Nov. 19, 2025
https://www.howtogeek.com/if-i-can-deal-with-my-shameful-pile-of-cables-so-can-you/
By Tim Brookes
Though we live in an increasingly wireless world, cables are still a necessary evil. If you’re anything like me, you just keep collecting them and putting them away just in case you need them at some point in the future.
At this stage, I’ve been collecting cables for decades, so it’s time to deal with the problem.
My pile of shame
I’ve been unintentionally collecting cables since the early 2000s, and in that time, I’ve amassed quite a collection. Despite my best efforts to organize them, they always seem to revert to the same spaghetti-like mess that makes finding anything near impossible. The more you dig, the more they unravel, the more tangled everything becomes.
I try to keep all of these cables together, in a big box, for obvious reasons. There are enough cables in my house without sprinkling 20-year-old phone chargers and deprecated video cables everywhere. When I need something, I venture into the abyss, fish it out, close the lid, and never speak of the horrors I have seen.
- more at link: https://www.howtogeek.com/if-i-can-deal-with-my-shameful-pile-of-cables-so-can-you/
This one hits close to home! I've definitely got a ridiculous collection of things like chargers for long-lost iPods, cables for printers with parallel ports, coax video cables, every kind of obsolete audio cable and patch cord imaginable, etc. etc. etc. Fortunately we have a recycling center around here that will take these off my hands and extract what's reusable.
My motivation is partly the dream of living slightly less encumbered by clutter, but mostly to spare my poor kids the horror of going through all this mess someday when I've transitioned to a collection of unanimated atoms.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I actually do have mine reasonably well organized, with Velcro ties on most of them and twist-ties on the rest. The problem is all the ones that work only with electronics I no longer own. For example, I think I can safely say goodbye to those IEEE 1394 ("Firewire" ) cables now.
some of us have a penny collection and some of us have a box of assorted cables and connectors.
I shamelessly have both.
I received a gift of a bunch of "Indian Head" pennies as a gift from a relative when I was a kid, and I have quite a few Lincolns, too. 
I look forward to the day when they're worth more than Bitcoin, which may not be that far off. 
