flying cable monster
If you have owned a computer for more than 20 minutes you end up with a pile of cables that looks roughly like this:
I call it geek spaghetti. I keep mine in 2 storage boxes, the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and a big Tesco bag for life. The ‘best stuff’ is in the Tesco bag. For ‘best stuff’ read ‘newest stuff I don’t actually need yet‘. I need a nicer way to organise these or I’ll have to move them out to the garage.
Introducing the flying cable monster - part flying spaghetti monster, part habitat cable tie light shade.
Option one was to simply tie things to each other. But that might damage the cables and make them difficult to get at. I need a system which allows any single cable to be removed without need to disrupt the rest. So… find something that can just have cables hooked into it. Rummage in garage, bingo! An old dish rack we never used - steal the floppy shelf, tie some speaker cable to the corners. We have a dangley rack.
Just poke the USB style connector ends through , rotate by 90 degrees, bingo - they hold. Doesn’t work for fat, thin or round connectors. Time for some pliers to squeeze some of the rails together to create fat and thin bits. That works.
Hardly a thing of beauty, but a whole bag of jumbled leads - 37 in total so far - turns into a neat spaghetti monster with stacks of space to spare. I probably have 5 - 6 times that much to go, hopefully it’ll all fit.
IMPROVEMENTS
Some kind of bungee web sphere, where you pop the end through between a web of elastic would be more elegant, and likely hold the cables more securely.
Dangley LED lights, to complete the chandelier effect. This could become a genuine light source for your games room, geek room, that kind of thing.
Dangley bungee grips - like hand loops on the tube - to hook bigger cables into. Perfect for scsi / parallel cables. Why I have so many scsi cables, when I only have one scsi device left I don’t know!
wall mounted cushion - like the bungee sphere, but hangs on the wall so it doesn’t clatter your head when you stand up forgetting that its there.
Rainy Sundays huh - gotta love ‘em! Pics on flickr here.
Popularity: 20% [?]
the washcounter 3000
Black T-shirts go grey. They just do. Unless you never wear / wash them. Use ‘color’ detergents, use ‘colorstay’ dryer sheets, use voodoo and magik. Nothing stops the inevitable ageing of your black shirt into a grey shirt.The age old question though, is which t-shirt lasts longest? I have a feeling that the Meh shirt from thinkgeek stayed black-black for WAY longer than my Roots tee (the one with the cool Atari joystick). But did it, or did I just wear the roots tee more often. How many wash cycles did each pass through?
Introducing the washcounter 3000.
The washcounter is a tiny rfid embedded in the label, which has a heat sensor to tell it when it goes through the machine. It can be interrogated by the washcounter drawerwatcher - which sits in your shirt drawer / closet / wardrobe / rail. This will simply give a list of your shirts, with a simple count of how many times each has been washed. You could even post this to the washcounter live website. You would have an overall score for how often you’d worn each shirt. Some would want a low score, the dark greens would want a high score.
The trivia side alone is worth my money. But the satisfaction of knowing that Meh lasted 10 more washes than Roots must approach that of making a lumpless tasty bechamel, or nailing a perfect level on Q*bert. American apparel could boast exact figures for how black their shirts stay.
Clothing manufacturers could use them to encourage restocking - for example as my Meh shirt appraches 30 washes the drawerwatcher could start to say ‘Meh is getting grey dude, buy something fresh’. Direct access to my brain at the moment that I’m looking for something to wear. A marketers dream!
As I write, washcounter.net is available to anyone who feels the urge to take this on.
Popularity: 23% [?]
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About Steve
Steve invents things while travelling to work on the train. He sketches them in his moleskine notebooks. Instead of actually making them (and becoming a billionaire overnight) he posts them here for the good of mankind.
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