Control those cables and power adapters

From Life­hacker: an excel­lent list of 10 ways to gather, tie and oth­er­wise con­trol com­puter cables. Some of these tips can be used right away. Other tips require a bit of work. This video from the Life­hacker arti­cle is a brief how-to seg­ment. Build your own cable charg­ing sta­tion from a plas­tic box!

How To Make A CHARGER BOX Very Easy — No More Cable Mess! — video pow­ered by Meta­cafeEvery com­puter needs at least one cable – for elec­tri­cal power. Even if there’s a bat­tery, it needs to be charged sometime.

A desk­top com­puter may have more cables con­nected for net­works, print­ers, USB devices, key­boards and mice.

That mass of cables behind the desk becomes a dust mag­net over time. Pet own­ers get the extra bonus of fur or hair cling­ing to the cables.

There’s always the fun of untan­gling a pile of cables. The first cham­pi­onship in com­pet­i­tive cable untan­gling or speed­ca­bling was recently held, and here’s a web site with details and a video.

It’s not always a mess. Data cen­ters and server rooms need to keep their cables labeled and neatly arranged. Royal Ping­dom (via Boing­Bo­ing Gad­gets) ran an arti­cle on 24 Jan­u­ary 2008 about well-managed cables.

My usual solu­tion for tam­ing long cables is double-sided Vel­cro tape. There’s no adhe­sive – the hooks are one one side while the loops are on the other side. I usu­ally keep a few strips in my drawer and my com­puter bag.

The power adapter dat­ing game

There’s always the chal­lenge of deter­min­ing what each cable rep­re­sents. I use labels or col­ored stick­ers to iden­tify cables, espe­cially power adapters. It’s a bet­ter solu­tion than play­ing the “power adapter dat­ing game” with a drawer full of adapters, plug­ging each in until a plug fits the power jack.

Even if the plug fits, it’s always a good idea to dou­ble check the volt­age and amper­age on the device and the adapter. Plug­ging a power adapter that is too pow­er­ful into a device may dam­age or destroy that device. It’s like plug­ging a car bat­tery into a flash­light… boom!

Most peo­ple don’t under­stand elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, so it’s far eas­ier to slap a writ­ten or printed label on the adapter in the first fren­zied moments after unbox­ing. Write the same doo­dle or let­ters on two match­ing stick­ers. Put one sticker on the power adapter, and another on the device. As long as the stick­ers don’t fall off, it’s easy to match the device with its adapter.

Tagged as: cable, electricity, hardware, network, power, USB, video