There's this notion that folks my age "should" have a whole bunch of cables in a box somewhere. Old RCA cables, maybe some USB or ancient iphone cables. I'd expect IDE cables, power cables, frayed cords, etc.
You don't have to. You can have none of that. It's completely OK. It's also completely OK too have that junk, but as that is generally believed, this post is about not owning such junk.
We get rid of wires with force.
Around about once a year, and certainly each time we move, we go through the wires. Plus, if we see a wire we don't recognize then we decide what to do with it. Either at our planning sessions, or just when we're cleaning.
We'e got one 3.5mm headphone jack left, and that's for the nearly decade old NPR-branded radio. It plugs into a dongle, so we can use it as a speaker system for phones. Eventually, I want to replace that but I like that radio and we don't use it this way very often. It's very low on the list of priorities, is what I'm saying.
We're slowly getting rid of miniUSB wires, as both our phones now have USBC or whatever it's called. Point being, the phones can't plug into that. And they can't plug into a 3.5 mm headphone jack without a dongle. We keep a spare pare of old unpowered headphones with a dongle, but we both have new ones that natively talk to the phones.
The only plugs that go into the chromebooks are for power. We cast from the chromebooks to the TV using a chromecast. I intentionally keep a spare one of those, as we've given them away if folks think they are magic. The spare is visually hidden behind a picture.
Also: Chromecasts are magic. Three things plug into our TV: power, chromecast, digital antenna. We use the antenna to watch Jeopardy! We've tried using it to watch The Good Place, but the commercials really reduce the fun. The chromecast is used for essentially everything else.
Anyway; you don't need to have a whole bunch of wires. You do not have to horde them. It's ok to get rid of them. It's completely OK to say "I don't know what this goes to", and then toss the thing.
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When the skeletons rise up, you'll be begging us for our horded unidentified power bricks.
ReplyDeleteDude. I have kids. Kids have dumbass toys with dumbass cords that they lose somewhere in the house and six months later come at us desperate to recharge the whatever-the-fuck they haven’t played with forever but absolutely have to right now. We have a big ol box of cords.
ReplyDeleteJosh Roby Did you miss "It's also completely OK too have that junk," ?
ReplyDeleteI'm not telling you not to have junk. I'm saying it is OK not to.
Isaac Kuo When the skeletons rise up, I expect to have my back against the wall.
ReplyDeleteI was disconnecting my PS4 to lend it to my sister I was dreading having to extricate it's cables from the mass of others which go into my TV (four consoles, satellite TV) but then I realised that the only cables attached to the PS4 are a figure-8 power cable and an HDMI output. It was wonderful, I could leave my cables where they were and pass on the PS4 knowing that my sister has her own cables.
ReplyDeleteUmm those wires you're trying to eliminate is what runs my tech.
ReplyDeleteNot all of us live on the bleeding edge of tech. Heck, I still have two non-digital radio stereos in use in my home. My TV its running on RCA style cables to use the DVD player (and yes I use DVDs, I have a whole library of them as I don't believe in the cloud as the end all and be all. I know better).
USB is in use all over the place. I won't buy a computer that is totally mini-usb or USBC. Heck the only apple piece of equipment I have in use is an ancient hard drive based ipod classic. (there is an old mac pro before they went single body tucked in storage that overheats and an even older Mac Desktop my wife uses for accounting that is USB-2 based but doesn't talk to the internet at all).
No Chromebooks. Only Android based device I have is my Zenpad and that only because my old Nexus2 pad died and could not be repaired. I wouldn't want a chromebook as I don't trust Google in the long run. That's why I keep a big sd thumbdrive to back up my google storage. At this point any time the whim hits them they could shut down ANY software they make and if its all on the net you own nothing.
My wordprocessor is Wordperfect because I OWN IT and the net can go away and it will still work.
I do not trust the cloud. I know its not always there. I know what its like to live without it 24/7. I've been here before it existed as a public thing. I've been using computers since 78, and I know better to trust it.
I'm not sure whether to respond to the tone of defensiveness, laughable description of a five-year-old thirty five dollar chromecast as "bleeding edge", or length.
ReplyDeleteI think I'll go with the defensiveness, as it bothers me the most: The thesis is that it is OK not to have a box of junk wires. Why do you feel the need, when you see that, to defend having stuff?
There is -- intentionally! -- no statement here to the contrary. That position was intentional to defuse and avoid positions such as the one you claim. Your position is a non sequitor. Please engage with the position, or come back some other time.
Actually I think I'm done. We've done this dance before. I'm not here for an argument or to defend a position. A Thesis is not what I came for. I'm here for conversation and express feelings on a subject.
ReplyDeleteLength is my nature, you should know that from several years of conversations here. I'm not a 'post a twitter like response' kind of guy. Never have been. Making that something you consider in your response and making a public point about it is irritating.
Seeing how some of the other folks above have replied, you may want to rethink how you respond to folks online. I've seen more than enough folks over time become frustrated when conversing with you on subjects.
I just don't have enough spoons and social flexibility to deal with this anymore.
There is a special hell for people who deliberately go off-topic because it's the only way they can pick a fight, then when they get called on it respond "I'm not here for a fight."
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I carefully worded my silly joke to address the actual premise, basically saying "You'll be sorry for getting rid of your cables"
ReplyDeleteBut of course, I didn't mean it. Because:
A) There's no way unidentified power bricks will ever be useful
and
B) There is no B. The skeleton uprising is definitely a possible possibility.
I think about possessions like this as something that I keep because I feel a curator's responsibility to them. Which is not to say that I ought to feel that responsibility, but thinking of it that way helps me to frame the question of whether I am the right person to attempt to maintain an archive of (e.g.) lost connection technologies. In some cases the answer is "Yes": I have a small cache of comic books, carefully wrapped and protected, which I have both the skills and the emotional connection to make me a good curator for. In other cases, the answer is "No": I've got a cache of old computer-program manuals that I should really get rid of, and likely will when I actually need the attic space they're occupying (or need the option of moving somewhere without attic space). It's hard, though.
ReplyDeleteCareful, guys: Joseph has left the conversation, and I'd rather avoid any directed swipes. Anything before this is OK, but let's avoid it going forward.
ReplyDeleteMore in a bit, on skeletons and curation!
Anyway, less flippantly - this is sort of like the "minimalism" movement. Minimalism works great when you've got enough money to just buy a replacement if necessary. Most of the time, you won't need a replacement, so it's a win. You get a lot less clutter and all it costs you is a little money occasionally.
ReplyDeleteThose of us who horde stuff are more likely to not have the sort of spare money to just shrug off a $12 cable here and there.
That said, unidentified power bricks are almost 100% guaranteed to be worthless forever.
Tony Lower-Basch Yep.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I know your cache of digitized Captain America comics has come in handy in interview arguments. The actual physical ones? Well, maybe the Smithsonian would be an even better caretaker, but you get affordable enjoyment from them, so it's all well and good.
Getting rid of old junk is hard; it takes emotional energy and resilience, as it goes against much of what society routinely tells us. Yes, we disdain "hoarders", but the primary message remains consume, possess. etc.
Isaac Kuo Obvious admission: My wife and I are doing alright, and rent is expensive.
ReplyDeleteWe try to avoid paying to store stuff. There's a reasonable -- though somewhat disingenuous -- argument to be made that having less stuff in a smaller space is cheaper than more stuff in a larger space. If I need a hundred square feet for all that stuff that I probably won't need, that's thousands of dollars a year in rent. Ten square feet is still hundreds of dollars a year.
The disingenuous bit is I don't believe that's the driving motivator for us to have minimal stuff. Especially cables. I find that sort of crap to be distracting and emotionally exhausting. I think cables are ugly, and I'd rather use the space for something pretty. Even if they are in a box, that box is probably not as pretty or useful as, say, a copy of Catan. Another board game I'll play once a year is probably more useful than some cables, where I might need one cable a year.
Similarly: Our laptops live in a stack in a cube in a bookcase. It helps keep that mess contained. Ideally, these would all have the same power plugs but that never seems to happen even with chromebooks.
I'm sure that's something having to do with costs and hardware standards, but the end result is the same -- I've got several different types of power bricks.
That digressed a bit; I think financially it might be better to not have the space required for extra wires and other stuff, stuff is emotionally exhausting and distracting. There seems to be a bloody conspiracy to not let me have everything have the same power cord.
What I find strange is that the balance of emotional power often goes the opposite of how useful something is to me. Like, with the bike that I rode all the time, when it became sensible for me to buy a replacement and hand the old one off to my son (he’s gotten so big!) there was zero emotional attachment. No “take good care of this old soldier” or that jazz. It was just “Yeah, it’s a good bike, it’s yours now, I don’t even think about it any more.”
ReplyDeleteBut talk to me about getting rid of the mismatched decorative lamp that the cats broke the brother of a decade ago, and my heart surges up to cry “it’s a perfectly good lamp, and you are a wasteful person if you can’t make it an important center-piece of your life!”
Right, like the old windows laptop we've got that barely runs, was always too hot, and has bad ergonomics. It's too old to run even, say, Oxygen Not Included. But, it continues to live in the cube with the other laptops.
ReplyDeleteBecause what kind of person would you be if you abandoned it?
ReplyDeleteUpdate: That laptop was gutted, it's insides given to folks who can use extra RAM, and the chassis tossed. I'd mostly forgotten.
ReplyDeleteSo, we are terrible people.
It's important to have spare cables and it's equally important to purge obsolete tech.
ReplyDeleteI will resurrect my Palm Life drive one day!
ReplyDelete<-- has box of cables
ReplyDeleteThe funniest thing in that box was "octopus tail" concatenated serial cables for a Livingston Portmaster, which we DID get rid of in the last move, because WTF I do not have a Livingston Portmaster and while they are very durable, they haven't even been made for a very long time. On the plus side, I did in fact use to use those cables.
ReplyDelete