Confessions of a Tech Hoarder: This Mortal Coil

Part one covered the bits and bobs binder. This one is about the cables.

The Labyrinth

Everyone has a box, drawer, bowl (whatever your preference) of cables. Mine has gotten out of control. Hoarder mentality prevents me from throwing them away - the idea of a working cable ending in a landfill gives me the fear.

They live in three cheap grey 30cm fabric storage boxes, one each for USB, Network and A/V. Every cable individually coiled, twist-tied, dropped in. On paper, organised. In practice the twist ties slip off, the coils interlock, and reaching for one means dragging out five.

Caveat: I forgot to photograph the actual rats nest before bagging started, so the "before" shots above are already partway through. Picture a much worse version - same boxes, every cable loose and tangled.

Ariadne's Thread

Cull first, then put every survivor in its own labelled bag, then hang the bags.

Cull. Half the supply problem is that everything you buy ships with cables you don't need. New router, cable. New monitor, three cables. New shaver, somehow a USB-A from 2014. For each one: do I have anything that connects to this? If no, bin. If maybe, keep the best one or two and bin the rest. The Hydra grows back next purchase, but starting from a smaller pile makes the rest solvable.

Bag. Loose coiled cables are physically incapable of staying out of each other's business - put two in the same container and they'll find a way to entangle. The fix is removing the proximity entirely. Reusable food-storage pouches with a built-in label panel work better than dedicated ziplocs and a stickered label that'll peel off in three years. One cable per bag, sealed, thermal-printed label saying exactly what's in it - USB-C, MAINS-USB, ETHERNET, SFF8087-SFF8482, USB-HIDInjector. Specificity is the point.

Hang. A binder clip through the top of the ziplock hooks over a rail. Cheap, rigid, ages better than any sticky-back euro-slot tab. The cupboard already had a curtain rail and a pegboard panel on one wall, so the bags hang from the rail and additional hooks have been added to the pegboard.

Left wall	Whole cupboard	Right wall

Each cable is visible at a glance, grabbed one-handed by lifting the clip, and physically incapable of tangling because it's flat, sealed, suspended in mid-air. The hard 3-box categorisation (USB / Network / A/V) is gone, but soft grouping survives by rail - the USB-C rail also gets USB-Micro and USB-Mini, the MAINS-USB rail also gets OTG and the proprietary leads (Sony, Apple). Same vibe, less rigid.

The fabric boxes don't go away. The top shelf keeps a couple for things that don't bag well - PDUs, GPUs, the Vive kit. Bottom boxes hold the SATA and SAS drives, which are too heavy and rigid to bag-and-hang reliably. RAM, conversely, goes in bags like cables, since "this specific stick or pair" maps cleanly to one label.

Open the cupboard, see exactly what you have, grab what you need, close the cupboard. No more rummaging.