Controlling the Cable Congestion?

JaytheMover asks: "I've just moved, and my wife won't allow me to set up my desk as I had before. I had a gaggle of cables under my desk which only NOW seems to bother her in the new house. How do you guys keep this mess under control? I Googled 'Cable Organizer' and found this thing called the cable organizer at cable-safe.com which hangs the cords like in a closet or this cable snake thing which binds them all together. What do Slashdot readers use to keep their cable clean and their wives happy?"

Comments

Wire Management

[linuxwrangler]

Probably the cheapest is wire-ties. Simply bundling similarly routed cables (say keyboard, monitor and mouse for a given machine) helps a lot. Then coil and tie excess wire at the end. Use flush-cutting diagonal cutters to trim the ends of the wire ties so there are no scratchy points and you will have a reasonably tidy setup. Unfortunately, this is a PITA if you frequently move things since it requires cutting/replacing lots of wire ties and pretty soon you will be back to a mess.

You can try wire duct of the type that Panduit sells. Run a long channel or two along the back of your desk and you can pop the top and stuff all your extra cable inside the channel and route the wire neatly out the slots where they are needed. More expensive but easier to reconfigure.

Now, as to part two - keeping my wife happy:
I try to hit the toilet when urinating and wipe up if I don't. I do my share of the dishes, cooking, laundry, etc. I take out the trash. I surprise her with flowers when she isn't expecting any. I help fix problems at her mother's house. I stop what I'm doing and give her a hug and kiss when she gets home from work. Somehow, the issue of a couple of stray cables hidden under the back of the desk hasn't concerned her at all.

My method:

[sakusha]

I use gravity to keep my cables in place. It's effective and free, the cables just stay there on the floor with no additional power or hardware necessary. I shove my subwoofer in front of the pile of cables so nobody sees it.

This neat crap bugs me, it reminds me of an incident many many years ago, on the first PC network I ever used. I was a developer and we had an early Corvus OmniNet. It used flat cable, and we bought only 100ft cables, that was the max length and we figured better too much cable than too little, and we planned to move to bigger offices where we would need longer runs. But some of us were within 20 feet of the server, so we had huge piles of ribbon cable bunching up behind our desks. So one day the office manager came in on a weekend and decided to clean up, and coiled the extra 80 feet into a nice coil, put a wire tie around it, and put it back behind our desks. Then on monday we came to work and the network was shot to hell, we couldn't get decent speed or reliable file transfers. I checked cabling and found the coiled cable behind my desk. I uncoiled it and instantly got back to reliable net use. I went to the manager and informed her that you can't coil 80 ft of ribbon cable in a nice neat cylinder, you're just making an induction coil, signals can't pass through it. He didn't believe me, so we had to call Corvus, and they confirmed. They said that if you wanted to neaten up your cable, you had to make a loosely bundled accordion fold about 3 ft long. So he made us all rebundle the cables. Total loss of productive time, about 1 business day. Neatness can be destructive, never let neatness interfere with productivity.

draw the line

[frAme57]

It has been said above, but I am going to emphasize it. This is not a problem of cable storage; this is a problem of territory. You're the guy and she's the wife. In most cases that means it is her house and you are effectively a long term guest there.

You don't believe me? Look at the living room, the kitchen and your bedroom, for example. Are they arranged and decorated as they would be if you lived there alone, or as they would be if she lived there alone? I thought so.

But as you are a long term guest, and because of your various useful functions (getting things off high shelves, opening jars, killing icky things and changing fluids) you should be alloted some small parcels of guy space.

Traditionally, guy space is found in the garage, the basement, the attic or sometimes in a room in the house that the wife can find no other use for. They are filled with things; guy things; things that the wife will not tolerate anywhere else in the house but cannot outright ban. Your power tools, your games , your books , your semi-abandoned projects, your things that are too close to working again to throw away,

This is where your computers should be.

Once you establish that your computers are in your space - where everything is as it should be - let your cables be as they should be. The general condition of the guy space must constantly remind her that here, she is the guest A rat's nest of computer cables on the floor sends that message subtly but strongly.

simple, and cheap/free

[megabyte405]

I must co-habitate as well, and this is what I did. I have a very long (3 monitors fit on the top shelf) desk, which used to have a whole mess of cables behind it. I managed to procure some surplus large-diameter PVC (3-4 inch or so) piping, which I cut in half. Lay cables carefully along baseboard of wall, set piping covering cables, thread cables through gaps between segments, and suddenly, no more cable mess. Sure, you have to move the PVC to rewire stuff, but it's as simple as tilting it back. It also keeps the dust off the cables, and keeps other junk, like wrappers, off the cables too.

Worked for me, could work for you!