Episode: 4385
Title: HPR4385: Cable un-managment lol
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4385/hpr4385.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:03:22

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4385 for Friday the 23rd of May 2025.
Today's show is entitled Cable Unmanagment Law.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Operator Talks about Cable Unmanagment or the lack of.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
Today we're going to be talking about charge master 9000 in GX Pro Enterprise Edition and Cable Management Service Loops, all that stuff.
I'm not good at it at all.
I will try to remember to provide pictures of my fire hazards.
But you're going to give me some tips that I use for Cable Management keeping track of stuff, all that I could think.
Now I have a label printer that I don't use properly.
I print it out the label on both sides so this one says wheel and it's a label printer.
And I print out wheel, wheel and then I fold it in half and then I sometimes cut edges off and that's how I use my tags.
Now they do have special tape for tagging cables.
But it has to be a very small number of words.
So I didn't quite figure it out and I realized the tape is very expensive too.
So I didn't go down the wrap hole with the different times of the tape.
I just had the regular tape and I used that to do label my wires and stuff.
So I'll use color coding, color coded electric tape for general purpose stuff.
So I have green downstairs on my charge master which is a big thing.
So I got tired of having to charge stuff everywhere around the house.
You have the kitchen table and then your spouse unplugged whatever you're charging or you have something to charge and you bring it over here and you put it on the table.
And then you move it to the living room and then you go to charge something and you can't ever find, there's nowhere to charge your shit.
So I finally gave up and built the charge master 9000 which sits in a drawer of an old Chester drawer or whatever that we have downstairs.
I couldn't sit last night.
So anyways, this drawer is got a path for a wire to come into the back of it.
So the power cord comes in through the bottom of the furniture and then up through the bottom of the furniture behind all of the drawers and then into the top drawer of this thing.
Now in this thing is another one or two power strips.
Each one of those power strips has varying charging devices in it, everything.
Everything you could ever possibly want to charge that we have at this house is in that multiple even is in that thing.
So we have low voltage USB micro chargers, we have higher voltage to the light or I'm sorry to have charging through what it's supposed to be.
The USB is like a 16 port USB thing because what happens is you get these little widgets that do that and things and dumps and dits and dumps.
And it's like a 24 port or like a 16 port USB charging hub thing.
I don't know how accurate, how many amps it pushes, there's no way it pushes all that much.
I actually had to go check it but I'll lose connection with the whatever, lose connection with the phone.
Let me see if something just went off.
I have to go do some stuff eventually.
So anyways, just hit my head.
The charge master has like a 16 port grid matrix of USB and I have a kind of color coded.
So USB micro has got like a yellow tag on it.
And USB mini has a grid and you know the different other type has blue and I'll bundle other certain adapters together.
So the ones for mine, I've got like three, I have a lightsaber problem.
So I have three lightsabers and they're all tied together.
They're all tied together with a different color tape.
So I've got blue, green, red, yellow, and white electric tape that I use to color code stuff.
And I don't necessarily know what color each color means.
I do know the green means USB micro but I do know that like what I'm looking for is in there somewhere.
Because the problem is you have a dark area and then you have a dark drawer and in that dark drawer is dark cables.
Or all black cables literally everything one of them is black cable.
You can't tell what's what and I'm old and I don't want to spend 20 minutes fishing for cables.
So I labeled at least colored them so I could tell this is the group for this type of cable or connection.
This is the group for this type of cable or device.
That seems to help.
Now the whole thing is kind of fire hazard, right?
So I took an old smoke detector.
We bought new all-new smoke detectors.
I took one of the old ones and threw it in that drawer just in case I only leave it on when I'm charging.
So and it makes a lot of noise because it has a fan for one of the faster charger for the drill.
Hammer drill is a got a fan in there.
And I think the port, the 16 port charging thingy also has a drill but I don't know how many, again I don't know how many amps it is.
It's probably not that much Chinese even, whatever.
So that kind of charges everything and I use that you know once or twice every other day that pretty much charges everything.
Not like for cable management, I collect Velcro.
Like if I get something with Velcro I'll keep it and I keep it in my toolbox and I'll keep it a little bit here and there.
I use that mostly.
I will use electric tape sometimes.
I will use zip ties when I know it's a semi permanent fix.
So this standing desk is, let's see.
Standing desk has some zip ties but I would say it's half zip ties have Velcro because Velcro still is semi permanent.
If you're not going to be jumping on it like a monkey.
So most of this setup is actually Velcro because I do not like zip ties.
Now I'll wrap wires of course in electric tape and that seems to help.
But you know under my desk is kind of a mess but it's not terrible.
It's manageable.
It doesn't look too terrifying up here but then once you get up onto the desk the story unfolds as I'm looking at steering wheel.
Monitor, speaker wire, steering wheels wire, shifter wire for the video game shifter.
I've got a docking station with keyboard mouse that goes to a USB hub that USB hub goes to the computer or the docking station.
So I have the desktop and a laptop, work laptop plugged into USB switch, USB hub.
And it's all just kind of laying back here.
It's not great. It is managed. I can look at it and tell I can pretty much look and tell where recable is coming from.
And the whole thing goes up and down, up to whatever it is for feet.
I will also use these old zip ties, we're not zip ties but twist ties for temporary stuff.
So if I'm doing recording I have certain wires that need to be certain places and I'll use the twist ties to kind of make a easy wrap for that.
Now also I've been using a lot of these, what are these things called the death clips, little pinchy pinches, little triangle alligator clips, binder clips, varying sizes.
I've got tiny ones, a year of alarms going off, supposed to be dick and meds. I've got big ones and I can use these along with strings to place my green screen around.
But I've been using these binder clips for a lot of stuff. We have a bunch of them that I stole from my wife and I've been using them to hold things that are remarkable at holding things in place.
So I have one of these helping hand things and if I need to take the cables and wrap it around and hold it in a certain way, I'll use these binder clips to temporarily hold stuff as a little like hand.
And kind of off topic on topic, I have tweezers that are reverse, I don't even know what to call them, the reverse tweezers and when you squeeze them they open up.
And when you let them go they close and this is I fix it but the I fix it came with plastic tips.
So I had to buy ceramic because what happens when you take a soldering iron to plastic, reverse pliers, needle nose pliers.
But these I fix it are very strong. I mean it almost hurts my pinky to put it on the tip of the ceramic.
But the ceramic extended ceramic tips, it didn't actually, something didn't 100% fit exactly.
I mean it looks fine now but I feel like I had to use the original screws I think that came with it to screw it in and not the screws that came with the replacement tips.
But I think I have like it looks like one two three two sets of two two more sets of tips for this thing and it's awesome.
It's wonderful to not have to you know you can hold wires without holding wires.
That's a little little good hack and a lot of price stuff and that's all something else completely different.
We're doing trying to focus on cable management.
Now this whole staining desk goes up and all the only thing going to this scanning desk is the pedals and power and ethernet.
Yeah, pedals power and ethernet.
Pedals of course have to be touched touching the ground they're not wireless.
Of course the base acres that are attached to the pedals so when you're sliding or whatever.
Those are speaker wires and those go up to a small amp, little tiny amp here.
I don't know the brand, not something.
There's a kit online to buy.
Base shakers for your simmering rig.
And then the power comes in through just a single power strip and there's enough power there.
I have it split on a three way.
So that's like a six port which ends up being a six minus one plus two.
So eight port and that is completely full.
I think I have one more maybe.
So somehow I'm charging eight devices on this stupid bench.
Let's see.
Yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
And I have one extra.
So somehow there's seven devices that need power on this thing.
So anyways, you know there's not a whole lot you can do.
Without cable management I could make it look better but then I'll have to move something and then it becomes a mess again.
Now the service loop thing is when you're working on something you're running cables, whatever.
You always give yourself extra room to cap it off.
Something happens. You do a bad crimp.
You know, you rip it out of the wall or you accidentally cut it or whatever.
You leave that service loop hidden behind the wall or inside of the wall or whatever.
It's supposed to be hidden.
My service loop is on the outside.
Customers facing.
So the picture else in you is like three different service loops for network and the speaker wires and like another network loop and the cable.
So I think the huge like six foot loops because you never know you're going to oh look I got to move, you know, I got to move my TV over six feet.
Guess what? You're done.
You got to run the whole thing again and if you're in the middle of a project and it's a one way project and you don't have the ability to run that cable.
So you can easily sometimes you're lucky.
You can attach a string to it or attach, you know, a gaffer's tape, another wire to that wire and pull it through.
I've had stuff get stuck so now I do these giant service loops and it doesn't look great but it means I can move my TV or I can move my entertainment system or I can move something at some point in time and I don't have to worry about it.
So there's a thing with network cable over here.
I did a service loop and that service loop now has moved.
I want to say six feet and I don't really have a service loop anymore.
It goes diagonally across the bed under the bed and in this corner of the room where it used to be more from the center of the room or farther closer to the entry point.
If I hadn't created that service loop then you know I would be having to manually repatch, rerun the line, run a network cable.
So service loops I use other than that, there's not a whole lot else I can tell you if I could think of something.
I mean the only thing I'll say is I religiously label my cables for this reason.
I want to be able to look at a cable and tell what the other end goes to.
If I can look at a cable and tell what the other end goes to it doesn't need to be labeled.
But if I can grab a cable, grab the end of a cable and not know the other end then we have a problem.
So for example USB cables. I'm grabbing this cable, I have no idea what it is.
But I've labeled the Dell end five volts and then the actual wire itself if it gets unplugged is labeled five volts.
So I know this goes down to the power strip to give, or actually this five volts comes out of the Dell docking station.
That five volts goes to the power, the USB switch, to give it five volts so that it can run the sound card for the USB switch.
There's only so much amps that can run across the USB.
So I give it an extra five volts. So the USB sound doesn't flickle on and off randomly.
But I really just label almost both ends so if I can't tell.
So back on the back of the switch, every single cable on the back of the switch is labeled.
On the back of the HDMI, everything is labeled.
On the back of the USB UPS, everything is labeled.
So if I can't, if I don't know what the other end of the cable is, then it has to be labeled.
That's pretty much it. I hope some of that helped you out and record an episode.
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