Cleanse, Tone, Defrag: Cables, Why Did It Have To Be Cables?
Hello, you. Have you done something with your hair? Love it. Sufficiently sweetened, apologies for my disappearance last week. Between Father’s Day, general hectic-ness and a last minute rabbit-out-of-a-hat from an old friend, my spare writing time suddenly evaporated. I was still here doing back-end stuff, but a round of applause please for Femcard for stepping into give you your tech fix in my place. But hey, a week off is good for the cockles as it were. Plus, it’s afforded me the opportunity to spin this tale while doing a pop-culture turn in way of the title.
If there’s one thing that a techie or gadget fan has to endure it’s the clutter and mangled mess of a crap tonne of cables. They’re a pest at the best of times, but let them tangle and knot and even attempt to decipher what lead belongs to what device, then you’ll soon find yourself descended into a maddened frenzy. Not to mention they’re a bloody eyesore of which we try our best to disguise, but they’re also a right bugger to clean, plus you run the risk of pulling them out with an errant feather-duster slice as you loose yourself in thought of twirling a katana when in actual fact all you’re really doing is your best househusband impression. Oh, and if they get sucked up the nozzle that’s a whole new level of un-fun.
Last week I found myself setting up a soundbar – a pseudo surround sound where digital beams are bounced off walls to angle sound as opposed to placing mini-speakers about the place, thus reducing, yes, the amount of cables – to complete our home-cinema set-up. The amount of wires and cables and leads were insane. I’d tack on an “oh my!” but I won’t. Before I could even begin to get the bar and subwoofer sorted, I had to reorganize and tart up the complete deluge of snaking plastic. So what should have originally taken an hour tops – including unboxing, rigging and calibrating – was multiplied by my getting my male-Monica on, but it was worth it and will pay off in the future.
So until that much coveted day when we finally have a truly wireless back-of-the-TV, we’re stuck with them; but in the interim there are a couple of things we can do to make them a bit more manageable.
- Use twisty-ties to pick up slack and unwanted lengths of cable to reduce them sprawling over your floor. Ensure that there’s still some give, mind, so that you don’t inadvertently create a tripwire that could take out an enquiring cat or see you and your connected device go flying.
- Colour-coding is your friend. If you can, use different coloured twisty-ties, or failing that, coloured sticky-tape or even colouring a bit of paper and then sticking that onto bunches of cable will see you having an easier time remembering what wires are which. For example, I’ve got lime coloured ties around my Xbox 360 cable bundles, and blue for my Blu-Ray player.
- If you can spring for a cable tidy like this, do it. It’ll near completely nullify a trip hazard and also go a long way to eliminating masses of dangling wires. The only problem with this is that if you ever decide to change a cable or move a device, you’d need to remove all the wires to get the one in question out.
- Dust and wires are like the evil equivalent of carrots and peas, so here’s a pro cleaning tip that can applied to TVs, consoles, PC towers, anything techy that gets covered in a blanket of dust: lightly spray some fabric softener onto a dry duster or cloth making sure it’s barely even moist. Then, wipe the cloth over the plastic casing of the cables, never the connective ends. The antistatic properties of the softener will see that the dust keeps off for a good while.
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