Spent most of Saturday going through a plastic bin marked "CABLES ??" that's been sitting under my desk since we moved in 2019. Seven years. I finally got tired of stepping around it every time I reached for the printer.
What's actually in there: four mini-USB cables for devices I no longer own, a scanner cord for a scanner that died in 2016, two chargers for phones I can't identify, a tangle of Ethernet cable that might be Cat5 or might be Cat6 (there's no way to tell without a label maker I also don't own), and one single, solitary USB-C cable that I kept meaning to use and then just bought a new one instead because I couldn't be bothered to dig for it. That last part is the whole reason the bin existed in the first place. It's a monument to laziness, basically, and I built it myself, one cable at a time, over about a decade.
I threw out probably 80% of it. Kept the Ethernet because you never actually know, and kept a couple of barrel-jack power supplies because I still run an old router as a dumb switch in the closet and I've learned the hard way that losing the right brick means the whole thing is dead weight. Everything else went in a box for the e-waste drop-off at the hardware store, which is a nice thing they started doing a few years back and I wish more places did.
While I was down there I also found an old 2.5" external hard drive, the kind with the separate power cable, from maybe 2012. Plugged it in out of curiosity and it actually spun up, which honestly surprised me. Mostly photos, a folder of MP3s I definitely didn't pay for, and a Word document that turned out to be an early draft of a post from this very blog, something about switching from a BlackBerry to an Android phone that I apparently never finished. Reading it back was a little embarrassing. I used the phrase "cloud computing" like it needed air quotes and an explanation, which, fair, in 2012 maybe it did.
That's the thing about running a blog for this long, almost fifteen years now if you count from November 2011. You accumulate this weird sediment layer of your own opinions. Some of them age fine. Some of them are just wrong in a way that's kind of funny now. I'm not going to go back and fix that BlackBerry post, by the way. It stays as a time capsule, typos and all. I've always thought editing old posts to make past-you look smarter is a little bit of a cheat.
Anyway, the bigger project this weekend wasn't really the cables, it was trying to get my home network down to something I actually understand. I've got a mesh system, the dumb switch mentioned above, a NAS I use mostly for backups, and at some point three different devices ended up assigned static IPs that overlap with the DHCP range, which is exactly the kind of thing that works fine for years until one day it doesn't and you spend forty minutes wondering why the printer fell off the network. Turns out it was the printer's own fault this time, not the IP thing, but I found the IP thing while I was in there and it still needed fixing, so, silver lining I guess.
I keep telling myself I'm going to draw an actual diagram of the network, laminate it, whatever, and I never do. Maybe that's this fall's project. Or maybe it just goes back in a mental bin marked "later," next to the one with the cables in it, and I'll deal with it again in another seven years when I trip over something else.
One small complaint while I'm at it: every device manufacturer insists their app is the best way to manage their one device, and now I've got six apps on my phone that each control exactly one thing in my house and none of them talk to each other. I don't need six apps. I need one dashboard and the discipline to actually use it, and I have neither.
If anyone's got a genuinely simple home network monitoring setup they like, something that isn't a whole second hobby to maintain, I'd take suggestions in the comments. I'm not looking for a project. I already have the cable bin.