Large 4mil ziploc style bags are extremely durable and are about $0.26 each in bulk on Amazon.
I very much recommend them. As a bonus, you can label them if desired. (Print a label out, or slap some tape on there and write on that, or just stick a sheet of paper inside the bag and write on that)
For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
Grouping is also key to de-duplicating IMO. Can be tough to throw away a single cable. But when you have 10 of them grouped together, you know you can safely get rid of them.
IM/FWIW: I personally have found 4mil ziploc-style bags to be pretty close to indestructible. They're like thick evidence locker bags
Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc.
Grouping them is key to deduplicating.
It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them.
I also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them.
This bags or bins or whatever your preferred organization method is. Don't just have "cables" group them. This is how I discovered "yeah, I don't need all these DVI/VGA cables and I can do with only 10 extra HDMI cables".
I'll second "grouping" with "capability sorting". Get a cable tester and sort your cables by Charge/USB speeds. Even with my default "grouping" of things like "USB-C -> C", "USB-A -> C", etc I still was buying new cables for projects/uses since I wanted to make sure I got exactly the speed/power requirements right. Now all my cables are sorted by capability and that led to more purging and less purchasing since I can go to my cable bins and grab exactly what I need.
Somewhat recently, on a wild night out on the town, I ended up buying a USB-C <> USB-C cable tester[0]. Using it, I managed to find a few amazing cables amongst my collection. Gave away the others with context. I want something like this for every type of cable.
Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?
I have a cheaper version, it does basically all one needs by telling you how many conductors the cable has, if it's only got 4 lights lit up it's a simple USB2, more power LEDs is a higher power charging cable, more data pairs, higher data throughput/USB3, nearly all of the lights (usually bar 1 of the CCX) it's full DP/Thunderbot, data, charging, A/V etc.
Sometimes it even shows USB-C connectors that are only wired for one orientation!
Huh, looking at the photos, they really don’t do the board justice. It’s a gorgeous thing to look at and one of the only “bare pcb” tools I’ve used that still functions after years of being thrown in a backpack. It is Fully passive I think (the newer BLE one does emarker queries etc.). But it does the job very well. I haven’t had it fail to identify the capabilities of any cable yet.
I've got a Treedix[0] which does A, C to Lightning, mini-B, C, MicroB3.0, and Micro. Super handy for identifying the nonsense C-C cables you can chuck.
For USB, if it can carry 65W+ of power to my laptop as well as the Keyboard/Mouse inputs, 4K/60Hz display and audio back to the monitor as well as KB/Mouse and perhaps some external storage or network adapter, that's a pretty amazing cable.
I also have preferences between my cables by the quality and aesthetic, I prefer some over others because they look or feel nicer even if in testing they contain the same conductors, but that's just ... me.
I currently have 3 such cables connected to my work laptop each sending 4K/60Hz video to each of my 3 x 4k monitors, audio to my soundbar and one of them is powering the laptop at 90W and sending my keyboard, mouse and webcam inputs back.
Generally no, you're far more likely to get something that DOESN'T do what's asvertised in my experience.
You can almost always tell the second it's in your hand; in order to do the high throughput stuff, 20Gb, 40Gb etc, the wire is much thicker and stiffer, it needs conductors for all of those contacts. Ive never counted but it's something like 20 of them vs 4 in a standard cable.
Of course always C to C; the A connectors with the extra contacts in between the normal USB 2 ones still aren't enough.
I just checked and there's 4 levels of data speed (including USB 4 Gen 4) and 3 levels of power (up to 240 W) but I wouldn't be surprised if that is an outdated answer.
I went for a colour label system - one colour for type of cable (C-C, A-C, etc.) and one colour for capabilities (power, usb2, usb3, usb4+, etc.)
Makes it super easy to find, say, a data microUSB (blue, orange) for the Audiomoth) or a simple charging microUSB (red, orange) for the old blood pressure cuff).
I suggest finding something else, electrical tape starts coming off after a few years, leaving behind sticky residue that's impossible to remove without some kind of solvent. Same goes for masking tape.
I should have clarified: I use a 1" piece of maybe 5mm wide good quality 3M tape that wraps over itself.
This follows (at least my local) electrical code--it's quite robust. I have 40 year old electrical conduit that has tape applied like this and there's no movement, no fraying, no stickiness.
I've yet to find instances where electrical tape comes off of its own accord when wrapped. Even the electrical tape submerged 24x7 on my well pump had to be unwrapped.
Heatshrink is great if you're making cables but you would need a really high shrinkage ratio to fit over the connector and then shrink enough, the common cheap stuff is usually 2:1, maybe 3:1.
You could cut the heatshrink tube, wrap it around the cable and then secure it with transparent tape. It would slide around but at least it wouldn't leave residue on the cable.
Maybe clip-on cable markers like this? [1] Easy to 3D print if you're so inclined.
Brother label printers (and I assume others) can print text small enough and sharp enough to fit onto USB connectors. (You'll need to manually trim the label with scissors to fit of course)
Visually, if it's something I'm going to be staring at on a daily basis, I like this much better than having tags hanging off of the cable. Tip: consider white-on-black labels.
The labels have been plenty durable in my experience, but if you need extra durability, you could probably just brush some lacquer over it with a Q-tip.
I use wire cutters. Non-compliant cables get cut & discarded. I've got a dedicated USB condom with USB-PD support for cases where I want to block data, since those are always charging and I want the negotiation to work for fast charging.
Transparent ziplock bags changed my cable organization significantly. I also put a lot of accessories into them. Preferably together with a small note about what it is for, or with the manual of the device it belongs to.
Storing stuff in individual boxes takes up too much space. The transparent bags can just go into a box and it's easy to just browse through. Nothing gets entangled.
I didn't see his video, but after many years I finally figured that out independently and felt like a fool for it taking so long to realize. That's a real game changer.
That sounds hard. Is a USB-A-to-C cable in the A group or C group or neither? What about the inverse? What about cables that only do data but can't transmit enough power? What about cables that are slow but high power? What about thick cables like USB4 that barely bend or fit in the bag? What about male-to-female vs. male-to-male? What about brand-specific cables that have their own abilities (say, high-powered but not PD)? The list goes on and on...
I think I hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable, and at this point most of them are USB-C, so they'd all mostly end up in the same bag if that's the criterion.
It's not for everybody (what ever is, rite?) and since you "hardly have any pairs of cables that are similar enough to be interchangeable" then congrats, you're winning at life and don't need anything like this.
The sounds hard
Doesn't feel hard to me. I have a bag for USB A, a bag for USB C, and a bag for USB A<->C.
My USB-C charging cables are all 3' or longer, so they're visually distinct from the crappy little cables that come for free inside the package for various budget-priced gizmos.
My Thunderbolt/USB4 cables are labeled as such, and I am very confused that you are talking about Thunderbolt/USB4 cables so stiff that they cannot bend to fit into a container or bag.... I mean, mine are stiff but not that stiff. Plus these are expensive cables. Not sure I have any spares. Those are bought for purpose.
I think I disagree. I just (re-)discovered a couple of my cables don't have data lines a few hours ago, prompted by the earlier discussion. My initial instinct was also to throw them away like you said. But then I realized they're actually quite useful for any case where you want to prevent data transmission, whether due to security or other reasons.
agree. i have no issue with charging only cables, they’re often lighter and more flexible, but i do require the 56k ohm resistor to wrangle misbehaving devices that could start a fire.
Definitely not winning at life with this lol, it's actually frustrating because the cables are so similar. One has a higher speed, one has a higher power, one is shorter, one is longer, one is more flexible, one has a display showing when it's connected, etc... and in many cases it's hard to tell which at a glance so it's always a pain trying to figure out if I'm using a cable unnecessarily somewhere and unnecessarily buying another one because of that.
Charging is an interesting case, I actually deliberately use crappy cables for that too, depending on the charging time I need!
Re: stiffness: I mean I guess it depends, how big is your bag. I'm thinking like a freezer bag not a grocery bag. I could bend them to fit but then I'd probably mess them up.
When I look up thick thunderbolt 4 cables I see a bend radius of 2 inches at most. And my very thick 15 foot 4K displayport/HDMI cables came packed in a box with a 3 inch bend radius. You can manage a 3 inch bend radius with a quart bag, let alone the 1 gallon or 2 gallon bags that I'd expect to act as reasonable cable storage.
Everybody's situation is different but for me, it hasn't been too big a problem really.
There are only a couple of places where I need the fancier cables that can carry video and have super high xfer speeds. Those don't move around because they're connected to monitors and external hard drives and usually come labeled USB4/Thunderbolt from the factory anyway.
The rest of my USB cables are just rando charging cables... attached to various chargers sticking out of various outlets around my house. No data functionality required and I think iPhone and Android both warn you now if you're plugged into a slow charger.... so I don't really need to differentiate these...
> Re: stiffness: I mean I guess it depends, how big is your bag. I'm thinking like a freezer bag not a grocery bag. I could bend them to fit but then I'd probably mess them up.
A few years back I bought a crapton of 2mil and 4mil clear ziploc style bags in various sizes from amazon. The 6x6" ones are plenty big enough for nearly any modern cable, except for long HDMI/Ethernet. Then those get grouped into big 2x2ft ish 4mil bags.
I guess maybe it is a bit of work in an absolute sense. But, it requires basically zero brainpower. I just sorted and bagged them all up when I was watching a game on TV or something. So it didn't really feel like work lmao
This is exactly why my reaction to this was “who has one box of cables? Doesn’t everyone have an array of 18 stackable bins of cables sorted by function and vaguely grouped by vintage?”
Don’t ever let anyone take away your wildly overengineered cable shrine.
My solution is a big drawer block with lots of spots for different cables. USB c cables with video go in the video cable drawer, high power goes in the power drawer, etc. Can't mistake USB c with HDMI (and mini HDMI can burn in hell). And only buy USB C cables that state their capabilities on the housing, if they don't I'll permanently attach them to a place where they can be most useful.
Remember CD spindles? Those are were a quarter of my cables live now. They can be stacked! There's also a few boxes and one tech bag. Also, the 15m (50ft) HDMI cable doesn't fit anywhere so it got it's own space.
another benefit of the hair tie method is when you go to use the cable, you can take as much length as you need from either end, then bunch/coil 'n wrap the rest with the hair tie. You have given me a lot to think about though, I'm always looking for ways to improve my cable storage techniques
It works best with short-ish cables; several meters or less is nice and quick and is simple to keep neat.
Longer cables can also work but it kind of takes more space to get it done. Like, a 30-meter extension cord or similar is completely do-able, but it's useful to be able to walk around while it is happening. If the cable is both very long and very heavy, then it's a great workout for all kinds of muscle groups that may have been forgotten about. :)
But again, it's quick for the lengths we usually use in PC and home AV spaces. Or at least becomes quick with enough repetition: My hands seem to know how to do it on their own without me really looking or even thinking about it, and that frees my other resources up enough that I can visually plan my next (unrelated) move while the first is still in motion.
Multiple cables of about the same length can be wrapped together like this. A stereo pair of RCA interconnects, or the same 3 cables that always get used with a laptop, can stay grouped together and never become separated in storage.
It also works on laptop cables with a power brick in the middle.
And it's nice to the cables. Inherently avoiding axial twists is key here and the process also tends to help remove minor twists that showed up while the cable was in-use. It does produce periodic bends, and those bends always happen at the same places, and that repeated deformation does promote stress fractures at very predictable places.
But cables generally survive thousands of iterations of this over the span of decades, and decades is good enough. :)
---
Stage hands, meanwhile: There's reasons they hate the double-double technique, above. Their cables can be very long, there can be literal tons of them, and speed is a very important factor.
So they use a very specific coiling technique called over-under that seems impossible to describe with written language alone. It does put axial twist into the cable but those twists alternate and average to 0 instead of accumulating or multiplying (like elbow-wrapping can do[1]).
Over-under always requires the coil and cable ends to be tied up together before storage. That's often accomplished with an appropriate length of stout string or even rope that is permanently tied to one end (nothing to lose), but velcro can work too.
It's a solid technique. When done right, it allows fast deployment: Untie it, hang onto one end, and the rest can be literally thrown across a stage or whatever. Since the twist averages to 0, it tends to unwind neatly as it flies and lay flat when it lands.
And, of course: It stows well. Cables wrapped over-under can be tossed into a bag or a trunk or hung on hooks or whatever; they don't tangle.
It's probably overkill for the big box of mostly-short cables at home, but it's also worth understanding for the longer stuff we also use.
[1]: Elbow-wrapping and other very common methods that aren't unwrapped exactly oppositely of how they were wrapped up to begin with, or provide some other mechanism to manage twist: Those are great ways to put permanent axial twists into a cable. It is the entire reason why the long extension cords hanging in so many home garages and work environments alike (and especially on commercial vacuum cleaners[2]) wind up looking like coil springs or curly pasta even after being stretched out flat-ish in an open space. They didn't start off that way; they were forced to be that way through handling. Friends don't let friends elbow-wrap cables.
[2]: And that's also why residential vacuum cleaners usually have a large number of ridges running down the length of their power cords.
The usual storage method has the user winding the cable around hooks on the side of the machine, and the usual deployment method involves rotating one of those hooks and liberating the entire coil of cable at once. This tends to promote axial twist.
But! The ridges enhance rotational friction. So as the ridged cable slides through the user's hand as they wind it back up onto the side of the machine after use, the ridges help those twists to be pushed down the line to the far end where the plug is. And since that end is loose at that time, it's free to rotate and alleviate twist. This happens automatically as the user winds up the cable and is a pretty good design trick. :) (I have no idea why commercial machines use smooth cable.)
Hint for long cables: figure out what end you will be looking for first when unwrapping and start at the opposite end. For extension chords I'm going to plug it in and then unwrap to where I want to use it, so I always start at the socket end thus ensuring the plug is easy to access when I next use it.
It took a while, but I learned the over-under technique. It isn't hard at all and works well, but I have no clue who to describe it in text. Come over to my house and I'll be glad to teach you on a real cord - it won't take long. (I did learn it online not in person so I'm sure there are good instructions out there, I don't know which are good, and there are a lot of bad ones)
I use twine for the same reason. Dirt cheap. Lasts forever. Doesn't leave residue on your cables. The downside is I end up cutting the twine when I need to use the cable but a couple inches of twine in insignificant.
I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.
Bike shops have yards of that stuff in the late winter/early spring. At least Trek shops do, dunno about others. Trek uses it to tie stuff onto the frame in the box to keep it all from rattling around.
Ha! I use CD spindles for… wait for it… CDs! Just opened the second drawer of my desk and counted four spindles of blank CDs and DVDs that I haven't used in years.
(I also hoard blank CD/DVD jewel cases. Who says technology ruins lives?)
I did the same thing, albeit with some printed labels in the same corner on each, so that it's easy to flip through them when they're stacked together. Has saved me dozens of minutes over the years!
Do not do this. All plastic baggies, storage tubs, and grocery bags, are going to build up with static electricity. While it may seem totally fine to drop inert cables into a plastic bag, eventually you'll come up against a USB stick, or an SSD or SDRAM, or something, and that ESD damage will not be a pleasant customer experience.
I picked up some resealable, aluminized bags and they've lasted for years. I also purchased fistfuls of silica gel packets, and I toss one into each bag when I seal it up.
I'm not sure if organizing "by cable type" would make sense to me, when there are adapters and dongles involved. Some of these baggies have been labeled by the central device, e.g. "All ThinkPad accessories are in here".
You can just cut these to the desired length and wrap them around your cables, for routing or bundling. They are, of course, reusable. I cut little notches in them so that they stay locked to each cable. You could get them in rainbow colors, but I like the white rolls so that I can write on them with a Sharpie.
Hmm, interesting. I've never had a static charge issue, but then again, maybe I will someday. I'll definitely look into that next time I mess around with my storage. Thank you.
Like everyone, it seems, in this thread, I have not one big box of cables but several. But my classification system is mostly around age: old USB cables (mini, micro) vs recent USB cables (USB C), old screen cables (VGA) vs recent ones (HDMI), etc.
This doesn't work for everything: audio cables do not evolve much, nor do remote cables for DSLRs; but in general it's reasonably effective.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I was going to write. I group my cables into boxes for USB, power, network, audio/video, and power supplies. The boxes are a finite size, and when no more cables will fit into the box, I go through and do some deduplication.
I don't group exactly, nor do I want to de-duplicate, but I've organised my boxes on the shelf and sorted and labelled them recently, in what seems the most logical way at the time; I have "networking", "USB", "power", "A/V", "PC" and some as of yet unlabelled ones with random stuff I can't place in the others.
There is some unfortunate crossover regarding where things belong because some USB are for power, some are for A/V etc, others or data...
What I realised, when going through these boxes was two things; it would cost a fortune to replace all of the cables in them, I wouldn't be surprised if replacement cost ran into the low thousands of £££ (should they be on my home insurance?!) and secondly; I'm no longer indecisive about what to do with a frayed or otherwise non-ideal cable, it goes straight in the bin; I used to retain the "nicer" ones and solder new connectors if the microUSB had worn out, or the cable was damaged near the end, that got much harder with USB-C unless I'm going for a simple +/-/D+/D-, so I just don't bother.
As for how often they're used; the USB box comes out almost daily, sometimes several times a day, if I'm charging things in my home office, or connecting something that isn't permanently plugged at my desk, I put the cables back away when I'm done. Power comes out every few weeks, and "networking" only when I need to reorganise things in the network cabinet/server rack.
For USB, the "final form" would be to create a labelling system so I can tell at a glance what each one supports, because as it stands I have to pull out my little LED cable tester thing and see how many light up to know if it'll do DP or high power charging etc.
Yes grouping is the important part. The next important part is labeling.
For example, I have a variety of USB C to USB C cables but they each have their own capabilities. Some support high transfer speeds, so I keep them around for connecting SSDs, while others are just USB 2 speeds so they are strictly for charging.
Another case is I have a very specific USB C to USB C cable that looks incredibly generic, but it is for connecting a screen tablet to a laptop because the manufacturer decided to make the port recessed, so only their cable fits. If this cable wasn't labeled as for a specific device, I would have donated it years ago.
It is some effort, for those who don't like to tinker with tech I can understand why they just shove them all into a box in the back of their closet. But I find that culling my cables at least makes me aware of what I have and don't have.
One other suggestion I have is just buying a longer cable than you think you need because eventually you'll have the need for it anyway. I have so many 3.5mm aux cables because I kept changing my desk set up and needing to buy longer and longer cables. If I had just bought the longest cable I could have at the time I would have saved myself some headache.
Another tip is adapters. Sometimes it's easier to just have cables of one type and a bunch of adapters for when you need them rather than having a ton of different cables for each possible scenario. I used to have a mix of RCA and 3.5mm cables but never had the right combination of what I needed at the time. Eventually I caved in and just bought a ton of adapters so I could standardize all the cables and use adapters as needed. Same with USB C cables.
+1000 did _exactly_ this right down to the ziploc. Also a bag for audio, HDMI, old apple cables, and "random" cables. These days, I store the ziplocs in a pelican-type case and that goes in a stack with cases for power cords, camera gear, SBC gear,etc - and the stacks all go on furniture dollies, so I can roll them out.
Yep. I went through my big box of cables, deduped a lot of things, got rid of a bunch of stuff I'd never need, etc.
Of course, I DID need one of them just a month or two later! But it was still a good exercise.
Now I have a whole drawer in a workbench devoted to cables sorted by type. What's surprising is how I NEVER have spare USB-C cables and ALWAYS have spare lightning cables. I mean, it SHOULDN'T be surprising, since more and more devices I own are now USB-C, but it's interesting that I expect my stock to always provide, and it never does -- for that cable type.
The frequency with which I have to buy new USB-C cables of varying lengths really illustrates the migration I've undergone. "Surely I have one I can just snag for the other car..." and I'm always proven wrong.
Yeah, "grouping" is largely the way to go for the generic parts, and keeping parts together when they really do need to go together is another.
I used to just have a generic big tub with all the generic cables and wires. Some were nicely wrapped up, others often got themselves into a giant tangled mess. I could never find anything. I got a bunch of small/medium sized plastic bins with lids for all the generic stuff. An old labeler quickly made them "USB cables", "A/V Cables", "DC Power Adapters", "AC Power Cables", "Coax Cables"...now it takes me two seconds to find any particular random cable.
DO NOT DO THIS. It is 2026, just buy a 6 or 7 A/micro/mini adapters and just keep a handful of usb-c cables. It takes up less space and is easier to organize. And your cables are now mostly up-to-date and useful PD carriers.
I do this. All my FireWire 400-to-800, 400-to-400, 400-to-dinky little Sony 400, etc. cables were all in one box, the FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter was in the box with my Thunderbolt cables and adapters, and I still didn't find the FireWire 800-to-800 cable I needed to use Target Disk Mode on a friend's Mac a few months ago until a few weeks later when I was cleaning out my storage unit and found an unused FW800 cable in a box I guess I was saving on the off chance that I needed to return a 15-year-old LaCie RAID enclosure that was shucked about a decade ago off for warranty repairs.
> Ziptie once coiled, attach label for what format / length.
Please god, no more zip ties. Use double sided Velcro strap. You can buy it in a roll and cut to length. Reuse it all you want. Join multiple shorter lengths to make a longer one. Just please don't make me cut another god damn zip tie off a bundled cord. I deal with enough zip tie bondage fetishists at work.
double-sided velcro holds less well and is more likely to stick to things. Just toss a pair of diags in your box if you are worried about getting the zip ties off.
I am talking about frivolous use of zip ties and over-application. Things like zip tying an extension cord for storage. And over application as in every 2-4 inches on cable bundles. Madness.
There is a problem with the over-under method use for long cables. If you then grab the wrong end through the centre hole you end up with a cable with a bunch of overhand knots in, which I find much more tedious to deal with than just using normal looping of cables and making sure to add the twist each time.
Back many years when I was touring with bands, at the end of the night you'd see all the lighting crew walking around the stage coiling the long cables, with one end trailing after them, to make sure the twists were correct. That was much more useful than generic over-under for all cables.
over-under has its place, but I don't use it everywhere.
I just sorted through like 15 years of accumulated cables. I kept any that I knew I'd need for projects or things I knew I had a use for. Everything else got slimmed down to a maximum of two of each type and general length and only if they were good quality. Type C and Cat6 were the only cables I kept several of. I threw out so many USB micro and Cat5 cables.
I have to admit I am getting closer to being half a century old and this is probably the single best idea I have heard in a very long time. Baggies are cheap af from the 'dollar store' so this is brilliant.
This is rough when you have lots of weird one offs. Strange trrs->rj45 for programming a radio you still use but haven't reprogrammed in 10 years; does that go in "generic serial stuff" or "things you want to keep but haven't used in a long time" (right next to the 13w3 -> 5 wire component cable for the sparc in the other corner)
I 3D printed bunch of "tubes" where cables are stored, caps indicate what is stored inside. As a result, threw away a lot of A->C cables, preserved cursed cables like USB-C to 12V barrel jack.
Yep. It's easy to get into the mode of tossing everything into a big box and then you can't find anything anyway. After a tire, I tossed a lot but I find I still need to organize a lot of things down to a manageable remainder where I can actually find things I'm likely use.
I do group them using one "type" per box too (either "audio cables" or "usb not-C", "usb C" etc. However I do not use zip-bags, instead I use core of toilet rolls - suitable to add length labeling too.
Also, if you have a heat-sealer, individually bagging the cables before grouping them avoids having cables mate and turn into a Gordian knot. A heat-sealer allows you to make bags that are just the right size for your cable, vs. generic ziplocs.
I grouped mine a few months ago. Since then, several times, I've been able to find a cable and use it right away. Before that the prospect of digging through the massive tangle often led me to (lazy!) order new cables.
On a side note: grouping cables based on the connector form factor is evil when you include USB-C.
Which of the cables are for PD? How much power? Can they do USB? If yes, at which of the dozen speeds? Is it a Thunderbolt cable? Which TB version? Is it certifiable or just blatantly unstable when running 40Gbit/s? Or is it some proprietary alt mode cable? And which ones are just spec breaking fire hazards if you tried PD with 240W through them? Do the cables have markings to tell you the capabilities? Are they even correct? Were they put on as a lie to upsell cheap USB 2.1 cables?
Bonus points if there are cables with some sort of “adapter” dangling in front (quotes because these are not a thing in USB). Double all your points if there is an USB-C to USB-C extension cord in the box.
It is certainly a box of mysteries.
I do not mean to invalidate your organizational scheme, but every time I am reminded of USB I have an irrational desire to rant about the flaws of USB-C.
I'll pay the price to sound like your average redditor but... thanks, Internet stranger, for this advice. I will follow it from now on - especially for the "prevent tangles" part.
> USB B cables are also notoriously sensitive and the slightest damage can result in malfunctions. Went through this recently with a PreSonus AudioBox.
Do you mean micro-USB-B? Full size (and mini) USB-B cables (comparatively) built like tanks.
Even though it's annoying, I understand the design tradeoff. You definitely would rather your (replaceable) cable get damaged than the port it's plugged into.
I have this issue with cables between my Pi 4B and my slightly old 3D printer.
USB-A to micro-B cables, and the connection is tetchy beyond belief about which ones it will accept and which it won't, either with or without the theoretically-unnecessary-for-this-printer power wire blocker. I can see no rhyme or reason to it but now I have a cable that has a dot painted on it...
..., a bag of thick SCSI cables, a bag of Firewire 400 cables, a bag of AppleTalk cables, a bag of PS 2 cables, a bag of RS232 cables, a bag of Firewire 800 cables, a bag of ADB cables, ...
A $20/month Gemini subscription is truly all you need, then yeah, sure.... obviously a homelab setup is a ridiculous alternative on a pure cost basis. For most people doing "real" work with LLMs 40+ hours per week, a more apt comparison would be one or multiple $200/month subscriptions. At which point the break-even point of a homelab is much sooner.
However, most people running homelabs are doing it for other reasons. Independence, learning, and/or privacy issues.
I have not spun up my own homelab, but, I have researched it and the electricity costs can be mitigated to a large extent.
One... the GPUs can be massively clocked down during idle state, to the point where the fans can be shut off as well. The machines themselves can be shut down and wait for a magic wake-on-LAN packet if needed.
Two... even under load, the GPU cores can be significantly underclocked with very little performance loss. The GPU and VRAM/HBM clocks are independent, and the GPU is largely bottlenecked on VRAM/HBM so you can just drop the GPU speed. A commonly reported figure I saw was, basically, 350W nominal cards being underclocked to consume "only" 200W under load with ~5-10% perf loss.
This all assumes you're using discrete GPUs and not AIO systems like a Mac Studio which is going to be pretty efficient just by design; they idle at 35W or so and in practice max out at a few hundred watts. I believe DGX Spark and Strix Halo are similar.
I must stress that this is second-hand anecdata here, admittedly, but my understanding is that it can be pretty manageable.
Wild oversimplification, and benchmarks vary widely, but I've read a lot of benchmarks suggesting that Qwen3.8-27B (xhigh effort) competes with near-frontier models at a lot of coding tasks. To the best of my understanding it's not going to run very feasibly in 16GB of VRAM at usable quants however.
r/LocalLLM and r/LocalLlama are noisy, but valuable sources of anecdata if you have the time (or the tokens, hah) to comb through them. You are going to see a lot of modest setups there, and also guys with $20K+ of hardware.
The two things (besides my bank account) that keep me from investing heavily in local are (1) we are not guaranteed to get a steady release of open models in the future (2) a lot of the "fun" stuff LLM stuff that interests me involves orchestrating lots of parallel agents, which of course multiples the hardware you need to achieve it.
For example, I've been having good results having both Sol and Opus review the same PR, and then I have them cross-review each others' PRs. A next step I'd like to consider is maybe having a swarm of Luna agents review the same PR and have them fight it out... maybe with Sol doing final arbitration? I suspect 5-10 Lunas might outperform a single Opus. Or maybe not. But at any rate, that would be impractical in a homelab without a pretty big hardware (or time) budget.
Anecdotally, ~$500-1500/month token spend at API OpenAI/Anthropic pricing seems pretty realistic for full-time engineers at companies with "liberal but not unlimited" LLM spend policies.
This is of course anecdata. I know plenty of outliers, too. I know a principal engineer who uses many multiples of the number I quoted above. I am sure we also know many people making do with much much smaller budgets as well, via all kinds of well-discussed methods.
But, "$500-$1500 per month per full-time developer" is just kind of the personal mental baseline I use when making my decisions with regards to thinking about whether any of this makes any economic sense.
Compared to pricing from 3 years ago, it's insane.
The Sparks admittedly are kind of anemic: 273GB/sec is the same bandwidth as a midrange 4060, although (depending on how you configure things) you can effectively have much greater bandwidth by connecting them.
Compared to 1-2 years worth of LLM tokens for a full-time software engineer making $100K+/year, a one-time spend of $12K for 4 Sparks for on-prem private LLM inference starts looking reasonable, particularly if privacy is an important consideration. It starts looking even more reasonable if running something like a private cloud to service multiple developers because then you likely need less hardware per developer.
(Also, it is going to be a long time until RAM+GPU prices return to what we used to call "normal." If ever. I am not endorsing the current state of affairs and I am not saying you wrong to find it insane, but it is definitely the new reality)
I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile.
Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run.
So perf does matter for us.
We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really.
However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.
GREAT classic question (with a well-defined answer)
In general, the reason why modern CPUs are so complex is because the gap in performance between CPU and memory has grown massively over time.
In the old days, something like a 6502 was running nearly synchronously with RAM.
That gap has grown massively over time; a modern CPU is orders of magnitude faster than RAM. So they have to jump through a lot of loops to avoid simply idling 99.99% of the time while they wait for some new data or instructions from RAM. On-CPU cache memory is one answer. Branch prediction and speculative execution are others. As you may imagine, speculatively executing code based on branch prediction is very complex because you must roll back any side effects from that execution if your prediction turns out wrong.
Example:
# assume `i` is a value stored in main memory
if i == 42
j += 1
k -= 1
l = 666
else
z = 123
q = 5879873
Waiting for `i` to arrive from main memory might take thousands of CPU cycles. So instead we will execute one, and possibly both of those branches. But we'll need to undo those side effects if turns out we executed something with an invalid prediction. It's complex, and messy, but still better than sitting around doing nothing for thousands of cycles.
That's why we can't just take an R2000 and scale it up to 3ghz. I mean, we could, but it wouldn't work very well unless we also had low-latency 3ghz main memory to pair with it.
I very much recommend them. As a bonus, you can label them if desired. (Print a label out, or slap some tape on there and write on that, or just stick a sheet of paper inside the bag and write on that)
reply