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: 19% [?]
international standard tshirt number
I love tshirts. I love geek tshirts. Never am I happier than when explaining that “no, in the context of the Tshirt 10 means 2, not 10″ or “the wee arrow means greater than“. Or “no, it’s not just an arbritrary orange, it’s a software company logo“. One of the problems with these Tees is that they wear out, get solder burned, or get toasted to a half sized crisp in the dryer.
Ordering a fresh one should be easy. But it isn’t. You look inside the average Tshirt and this is what you get:
Useful. Threadless get closer with this:
Books have the ISBN. Tshirts should have a ISTN. A standardised system for organising tshirt designs. It would make tshirt searching so much easier. I propose a 4 part system limited to 16 characters.
TGEK-BINP-MBAA-XL
producer - design - item - size
thinkgeek - binary people - mens black - extra large
The first and last sections are standardised. So you always know where it was bought and what size it was. The central two parts are self managed by the producer. They get to name the design, and use whatever code suits them for the item.
One spin off I can foresee is a subtle sleeve or back of neck print of the producer code on the shirt. So that when I see a shirt on the street I can just glance at the sleeve and note “right, he got that shirt from GYOI! - must check them out”. Benefits the shop, benefits me in finding a new shirt, clutters up my sleeve a little.
Some central area, nothing more complicated than a wiki, could allow producers to claim a producer code and then optionally maintain a list of design codes on that site. This would have promotional advantages, and would help them to show they were first with a design when they get ripped off on cafepress forty times.
Adding structure to the chaotic world of t-shirts. Hardly an earth shattering global innovation, but would be cool. Comment if you want to reserve a cool 4 letter acronym!
The sketch
(May I apologise for the quality of photography. I seriously need a new flash!)
Popularity: 13% [?]
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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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