Spent about three hours yesterday going through the plastic bin in the hall closet that's been labeled "CABLES - SORT LATER" since, I want to say, 2019. It was supposed to be a quick January reset thing. It was not quick.
Here's what I found, roughly in order of excavation: four mini-USB cables (does anything I own still use mini-USB? no), a first-gen Apple TV remote, a USB hub shaped like a hedgehog that I bought at a trade show and have never once used, three separate phone chargers for phones I no longer own, and (this is the one that actually stopped me) a 4GB USB stick with a masking-tape label that just says "techpad backup." Plugged it into an old laptop because of course my current one doesn't even have a USB-A port anymore, and there they were. Draft posts from early 2012. One of them is literally titled "why I think tablets are a fad," which, well. Nobody's perfect.
I'm not going to pretend I remember writing most of that stuff, but it's a weird feeling reading your own writing from fourteen years ago and recognizing the voice a little and not recognizing it a lot. The sentences are shorter. I used way more exclamation points, for some reason. There's a post from that stick complaining about a 27-inch monitor costing $700, which at the time felt like an outrage and now sounds like a rounding error.
Anyway, the actual point of this post, if it has one, is that I threw out probably 80% of what was in that bin and I feel disproportionately good about it. Not in a minimalist-influencer way, I just mean the drawer closes now. The hedgehog hub is gone. I kept exactly one mini-USB cable because some instinct told me I'd regret tossing all of them, and I stand by that instinct even though I can't name a single device it would plug into.
One complaint while I'm at it: recycling this stuff properly is more annoying than it should be in 2026. My town's e-waste drop-off is open two days a month, both weekdays, both during work hours, which feels almost designed to make people just put the cables back in the drawer instead. I ended up driving to a Best Buy that takes small electronics for free, which worked fine, but I shouldn't have had to know that as a specific fact. Most people don't, and I'd bet the actual disposal rate for stuff like this is way lower than anyone wants to admit.
The USB stick itself is going in a drawer that is explicitly the "do not sort, do not touch" drawer, which I recognize is a little hypocritical given what I just did to the cable bin. But there's something in me that doesn't want that thing anywhere near a landfill. Call it sentimental, call it a backup of a backup of a backup — I've moved those files to actual cloud storage twice now and I still don't trust myself to delete the physical copy. Old habits.
It did get me thinking about how much of this blog's history only exists because I happened to keep a random stick in a box for over a decade, not because of any actual archiving discipline on my part. The site itself has been through four different hosts, at least two total redesigns, and one scary week in maybe 2015 where I'm fairly sure I lost about a month of posts to a bad migration script and just never mentioned it because I was embarrassed. If you've been reading since close to the start, first off, hi, and second, some of those gaps in the archive are exactly that: gaps, not me taking a break.
I don't have a tidy lesson to wrap this up with. I found some cables, most of them were trash, one of them turned out to be a small time capsule, and I'm annoyed at my town's recycling schedule. That's the post. If you've got a bin like mine sitting in a closet somewhere, I'd genuinely start there before you touch anything else on your January to-do list — it's a smaller job than it looks and a bigger payoff than it has any right to be.