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The Art of Cable Folding
Mudzy writes "Nothing is worst than a bunch of dangling cables inside your computer case. The Tech Zone has a cool article up showing how to do Voodoo PC style cable folds. "
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voodoo'd that ass right out of commission. Mirrors?
Zero replies and slashdotted. Well done, Tech Zone. That must be some hot server setup you have their. ;)
Uh are we missing an 'of' here or am I just not l337 trendy?
Come on, I've been doing this for years without even thinking about it, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Like, wooow, you can actually fold the cables! :-)
Martin
Voodoo causes webserver to fold.
Film at 11.
Besides, folding IDE cables an art? Ptoii! Terminating SCSI cables is an art, this is just the locals peddling handicraft to tourists. What is this, national "Bend a cable, get on Slashdot"-day?
Money for nothing, pix for free
Well sometimes they fold behind my desk when the desk gets smashed up against them... but seriously... what's wrong with just tossing your cables behind the desk and just let em be!?
That's too bad about the Art Cable. Does anyone know why they're folding? Lack of funding, perhaps?
Sounds like a lack load balancing to me.
"Don't waste your time or time will waste you" -MUSE
More like server fold!
5 sec's and the site is /.'ed
I kind of like my dangling cable stuff ;)
It's good to see that Slashdot hasn't abandoned it's roots as an online hard technical journal for us geeks and nerds who can appreciate a good article on electrical engineering, computing or science. Which such high quality articles like this one, devoted to folding cables inside your computer case I..
Hang on.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? ARE YOU ALL FUCKING SIMPLETONS?!
do you mean "The Art Of Cable Folding"???
99% of my cables are round, 1% are flat. My cable management tasks are going to concentrate on the round ones that I see and in some case trip over.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
I got about 6-8 meters of cable behind my computer. This may not be much for some hardcore geeks but it's enough to give me problems. But all problems aside, the sight of all those cables at a workplace seems amazing to me :-)
PS:- That damn site already got slashdotted. Someone mirrored?
well, on a more serious note, and as it is probably covered by the article, I set up quite some server boxes and countless PCs, and never had problems or issues with cables.
I however, had some problems to "loose" cables installed by previous techies.
I only experienced PCs with SCSI disks (or cables, for that matter) creating a somewhat noise airflow.
Or, worse, they stalled the air so the heat dissipation wasnt fully functional.
But I dont expect this to be a problem for "normal" PCs.
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
The Art of Cable Folding? You don't know how long I've been waiting for Knuth to shed light on this difficult problem! I'm off to buy the first couple of volumes...
The Art Using The Word "Of".
But why is the rum gone?
But it's a bit lossy.
I've seen worse... like bad grammar.
Fold your cable wrong and you get nasty reflections from the corners. Careful there!
Cables are living organisms. I fold them neatly and put them in a box. The next time I open the box its a complete mess.
The first thing that sprang to mind when I saw the picture was 'did they use glue for this?' And what kind of glue or ductape would work without dissolving the cables or turning them to a permanent sticky mess?
Does anyone else have experience with this?
Nothing is worst than missing an 'of' in your headline.
to see the fabled folding of the "art cable"!!
Meh.
They were /.'ed before I got to see the pretty swans.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
or enjoy the pleasures of cables hanging around inside your pc.
It never bothered me.
If I have to fold/unfold cables every time I had something to my pc (or get rid of it) I would spend my days folding cables.....no thank you
There are a few options here:
1) Use SATA/SAS/Fiber connectors
2) Buy rounded versions of the parralel cables
3) - Carefully shred the normal cables,
- Wrap them in foil if you want
- Wrap them in some pipe/heat shrink.
Then all you do is bend the things and run them around the case with cable ties.
How on earth is this news?
Thats like saying use cables of only the length you need to make less clutter in your case.
I'll tell you what's worse. What's worse is having three gige switches with 24 cables randomly being switched between the same number of servers over the course of 6 months in an r&d lab. That is the worst cabling nightmare that I can imagine.
I can think of a lot of things that are worst (or even worse) than dangling cables. Being put through a mincing machine while someone was playing a scratched George Fornby record, for example.
... cablegami. Or w1r3zF|_|
oh well, I'll check it tomorrow, want to see the purty pics and stuff. I have a contender for the bash.org desk like area mess, but inside the box I like *neat n clean*. Why the two philsophies and practice dichotomy I do not know, just is comfy for me.
Of course, by tomorrow we might be in the midst of a good old fashioned rest of the world styled massive revolution, so it might not matter!
I am thinking of eliminating the middleman and just writing in "Mr. Diebold" in all the races, then..my guy wins!
...it seems the article is about folding of dangling cables inside your computer case...
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Maybe the editor meant "The Art: Cable Folding", or "The Art Cable, Folding". It would have been nice if the editor had taken some more time proofing, then the poor bastard who runs the linked site could have finished his coffee before having to extinguish the remains of his server.
The Art Cable Folding!? "Nothing is worst"!? Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh, my eyes!!!!!! This is PATHETIC, and I'm not even that great at spelling and grammar!
Nothing is worst than a bunch of dangling cables inside your computer case.
...except maybe your spelling?
I kid, I kid...
the coolest club on
Here are some tricks I use to fold and hide cable in my pc.
First, any ribbon cables usually go from motherboard to drive, and not a very long distance. This leaves a lot of slack ribbon. Fold up the slack and tuck it into a space in-between drives or in an emtpy 3.5" drive bay.
Circle around back. Most modern cases have a pull out try with the motherboard on it. Then there is a metal frame and then there is another piece of metal which is the right side panel of the case. There are many things that need to go from the top of the case to the bottom Such as power cables for your front intake fan and such. Route these wires in-between the metal frame and the right side panel. Nobody can see them back there unless it is an all acrylic case.
The emtpy 5.25" drive bays, if any, are a great place to put extra wiring. My PSU has many many more wires than I use, so far. So I take them all and just put them in the empty space under my dvd burner. The ribbon cable for the burner also travels into this space and then out of it again just a couple inches from the ide plug on the motherboard. Think of it as a bucket to put unused wires in where nobody can see them.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Alas... if only there was a way to check the bandwidth of a website before posting an article on /. with a link to it. Now I'm gonna spend all afternoon trying to pry open the page.
-- rxMx --
Love all, Trust few, Follow one.
You got to know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em, know when to walk away and know when to run.
and why would you fold it?
Do you buy the art cable with fur or shiny things glued on it, or was it painted in strange colors?
After you investment in the Art Cable why would you fold it? It seems that folding it would reduce its artistic value.
(The whole meaning is changed without the "of")
Get a free ipod.
Today, computer building is dominated by "tech" articles about... folded cables.
THIS ISN'T PROGRESS, PEOPLE!
The server has been slashdotted, so maybe someone who got to it early can tell me:
"Do Voodoo Cable Folds involve a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle?"
I don't need to worry about the cabling inside my computers, it's all round. Who still uses those flat ribbon cables anyway?
Meh.
Here I was thinking the japanese only folded paper into little animals. Now they are using cable? Can they make little bunnies out of cables too?
neat!
i'd be more interedted in a guide on how to flawlessly shorten all your cables so you never need to fold them... and how about one on washing cables... and properly packing cables...
All the torrents you could want.
Since I always compile everything with -funroll-loops I can't roll and fold my wires. Electrons do miss the curve if cables are bent too much you know !!!!
Then, my office near the stairs, and I see NO point in preventing natural accidents like an IT manager falling down.
BOFH
back in the 90's when I was building PCs, we tried to be as neat as possible, folding cables to keep them flat, running them under mainboards to hide them, etc. When someone came up with a nice fold pattern, we'd call them the cablegami master for the day.
"Nothing is worst than a bunch of dangling cables inside your computer case."
I have cancer you insensitive clod.
An expert recently sent a half-jest letter to the editor of a journal suggesting that Bushisms were an indicator of early-onset senility. Probably just too many youthful indiscretions but you never know.
As for the flaring error in this story's title, you heard it here first. Taco's seemingly-trollish typos are in fact an early sign of his early mental demise.
Since when was bending wires in your PC an Art? It's more of a skill- one that even monkeys could be trained to do.
Do the people who submit these things proof their stuff? Perhaps the word "of" in the title would be appropriate.
Between dupes and bad english sometimes we get news for nerds.
It means that more than 0.01% of people can put a computer together.
It means that people have time for doing something more productive than toggling dip-switches in order to get the OS into RAM.
I mean, sure, folding cable doesn't excite me at all, but I want computers to be easier to use, not go back to the days of punch-cards.
My Journal
Say, I wonder what Neal Stephenson has written about this!
I'm folding?
Mirror dot only shows the first page
Grr
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Not a perfect mirror, but you can at least read the text on the first page of the article and see a pic1 a78a32880232a7e/index.html
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/a662ce777aff4472
I always though brat was worst
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
This story could be the ultimate Slashdot troll, think about it:
1. Put a worthless story up on the front page.
2. Add grammatical mistakes.
2. Turn the server off once it makes it to the front page.
Watch as the worthless, pointless discussion racks up posts 99.9% of which are on the 3 subjects above.
Philip
Signatures are broken
If slashdot is stale, no doubt the new hangout place is kept secret to keep the wannabes that supposedly infect slashdot from following.
:-)
Wonder why no-one told me...
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Are you sympathy-whoring? Are you going to die? If you are, why are you spending your last moments in front of a computer instead of sharing the time left with loved ones?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Look! I folded my floppy drive cable into a dinosaur!
Chip H.
I hope all you Liberal weiners and Conservative no-brains remember to vote WHIG this election.
I've wanted it for years...
..and why are we folding him?
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Then, I could have seen this link, for the 30 seconds or so I'm assuming it was up before it died, and still come away wishing I had my minute back.
Your points are duly noted (and mostly agreed with). However cable folding, while ho hum for the technical elite, is important from an asthetic standpoint. We make the outsides look good. Why shouldn't the insides look good? And last if someone cares enough about their computer to make things look good, they may care about all the other things that result in a good computing experience.
than cables dangling in the case, like smoke
i'm guessing they're not talking about serial ata cables :(
Get your torrents...
Nothing is more frustrating than spending a bunch of time neatly folding your cables to only have then unravelthemselves later.
Just use a iron to put a little bit of perm press into them. It helps if its on HIGH, full-steam, and you spray on a little starch as well. For really peskey cables it helps to let the iron sit on them for a few minutes and let the weight do the job for you.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
...uh, well... maybe not.
Didn't think we'd slashdot a mirror that's supposed to protect against this kind thing. Art Cable Folding must be the sh1t.
My indecisivenessism has reimpacted my career-action-path to include a short-timeness as a PHB.
In the world of roadies and pro audio nerds, there's a method for cable folding/wrapping that I learned years ago. It's popularly called the "over/under method".
The idea is to wrap the cable in such a way that, when thrown, it will unravel perfectly without any knots or tangles; but it's still useful for smaller cables because it trains the shielding in such a way that promotes flexibility and prevents twists, curves, and tangles.
Stagecraft has a video demonstration of how to do it (QuickTime, AVI, RealMedia), and the Internet Sound Institute has a tutorial with diagrams.
That annoying Mac-guy who will tell you why Apple is better. Good design means less cables dangling around. Even my old Powermac G4 feels downright spacious inside. I've helped to install hard drives and cd burners into my friends' computers, sometimes the cables we had hardly reached its goal. Gets kinda spiderwebby after a while.
You say that like it's funny.
Oh...yeah.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Fancy dancy cable folding is all well and good.
60 seconds later, I want to fiddle with something and am reaching for the sidecutters to clip the cable ties.
Eventually, the side of the box is left off and a hard drive has been hanging by a cable for several months.
So, in conclusion, elegant cable folding is the equivalent of folding your underwear.
by Rosa Books
Nothing is worst than a bunch of dangling cables inside your computer case.
Are you sure there aren't maybe at least a few things worst[sic] than a bunch of dangling cables? Fire? Flood? Prostate cancer?
Are dangling cables really such a travesty? Do we need to hold a telethon or something?
Proverbs 21:19
Nothing is best than a good Slashdotting.
-- dR.fuZZo
Has anyone used the new HP KVM RJ-45 based cables? You still need an adapter at the server end to convert the RJ-45 to DB15&PS/2, but I think it would be a lot nicer to have thin RJ-45 cables draping down the back of your server rack than the old bulky KVM cables. Plus, you can access this KVM via the network with a Java based front end. Anyone know if they are any good? I think at $100 a cable, they are probably WAY overpriced, but hopefully that will come down soon.
Homer no function beer well without.
In the world of roadies and pro audio nerds, there's a method for cable folding/wrapping that I learned years ago. It's popularly called the "over/under method".
The idea is to wrap the cable in such a way that, when thrown, it will unravel perfectly without any knots or tangles; but it's still useful for smaller cables because it trains the shielding in such a way that promotes flexibility and prevents twists, curves, and tangles.
I'm a part-time audio nerd, but I manage a fairly good-sized PA system (24ch/4buss mixer, 800w mains, 250w monitors, for those who care)
The trick is, I was trained by a leftie. I'm right handed, but I learned to coil cables left-handed.
A musician friend once "helped" me by coiling all the mic cables. He's a climber, so he knows the over-under method, but when I tossed a cable it came out a completely twisted mess.
When I complained, he pointed out that he's also a volunteer firefighter, and there's a method he knows for coiling ropes such that, when thrown, they have a knot every 12 inches. "If you prefer, I can coil 'em up that way."
He's not allowed to help me anymore.
--
I would think that a techie like you would know how to spell 'serial'!
aQazaQa
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
I'd say you've got it made if that's the worst thing in your life.
There's no need at all to fold them. Just keep them from grinding in the fans and all will be well. Instead of wasting 20 minutes folding your cables, go take a walk or something.
What the heck is up with the lack of quality of this submission? Inane article, and all the grammar errors? C'mon, Taco? Are you guys making so much money off hosting this site that you are losing touch with the juicy intellectual tidbits that the geek-tech world really needs to discuss? When's the last time any of you guys who run Slashdot worked in the IT department of a large corporation?
This reminds me of the phenomenon of comedians getting so popular that they lose the source of most of their material (i.e. "normal everyday life" that non-famous people live)
When you work in television they actually teach you the proper way to fold one of their typically 500+ foot cables. This is because if someone doesn't do it properly, you've got 500 feet of rat's next to untangle at your next shoot.
The biggest trick is, you don't simply coil it. That puts a twist in the cable over time and makes it hell to unwrap. Instead, every other coil is forwards or backwards.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
The whole rounded cable thing is a scam to sell inferior cables at inflated prices.
Rounded cables exist for a real reason.
They are not intended for intra-chassis cabling. They are meant for cabling between boxes or cabinets.
Intra-chassis cabling does not require shielding but inter-chassis cabling does because of EMI concerns.
Flat cable can be shielded but shielded flat cable is not conducive to folding, so bends in the cable require a broad radius. Thus a 90-degree turn in the plane of the cable is difficult to achieve. Round cables can bend in any direction so even though they also require a wide radius they can be routed much more easily in less space.
So it may be a scam if someone is selling rounded cables for intra-chassis cabling while falsely claiming electrical superiority, but it's not true that rounded cables in general are a scam.
Disclaimer: I'm a volunteer firefighter, left-handed, and an entertainment industry veteran (we don't use the "R"-word) of 18 years.
Having said that, there is only one proper way to coil any cable (except 4/0 feeder cable, that is): OVER-UNDER.
Not only does this method ensure tangle-free deployment, it is topologically identical to storing the cable in a straight line.
Consider that for every loop of cable there is a half twist. Alternating the direction of the half-twist eliminates the tendency of "rolling" or twisting.
I'm not telling what I heard, I'm sharing what I know.
...round IDE cables?
(TFA site still inaccessible.)
I've tried several "respectable" brands, both floppy and HD, and they're all worthless -- cause hangs, missed interrupts, device not found, etc.
Your experiences? (Name the brand. please.)
Detail: Twisted pair cable e.g. Category-5 has each pair twisted slightly differently, usually 11-14 twists per foot. This keeps the pairs from being packed in a way that increases coupling.
Ribbon cable is made the way it is because the configuration is inexpensive to make and put on connectors, while doing a really good job of keeping the impedence constant and minimizing coupling of signals. If alternating wires are grounded, the electric field from near-by signals is essentially blocked (the wire can't "see" any other signal wires), while keeping the ground plane (and thus impedence) at a constant distance.
With a round cable a signal wire "sees" a bunch of other signal wires, and the distance between the wires (and thus the impedence) varies over the length of the cable.
A "better" cable would wrap each signal with a grounded shield, but that increases the capacitance (and thus the drive power requirements) and would be very expensive to make and terminate.
"A "better" cable would wrap each signal with a grounded shield,"
Btw, for those not familiar with cables, this would essentially be the same thing as the coaxial (coaxial meaning that the signal wire and the grounded shield would both be circles with the same center; obviously the hollow grounded shield would be bigger than the signal wire plus some insulation inside it) cable used to deliver a television signal. Note that older network cables (back in the days of terminators at the end of each cable) were in fact coaxial cable.
"Hey, isn't that the Art Cable?"
"Yeah, it's been up there for awhile now... Looks like it's about to start folding."
"Really? Wow!"
The article posted at 8:19am. The first post, telling us the server was toast, came in at 8:21am. What are they running over there, DIALUP?
;)
Seriously, now... why can't the editors immediately "Coralize" these stories when they are posted, so that we can at least have a reliable, working mirror?
I guess they were too busy trying out their origami skills on their cables.
Willie...
Apple has been doing this for years... Look inside a powermac case, you wont see cables. Damn rip offs.
It's not a different method, it's the same method...
The only difference is if you accidentally route the end you're holding on to THROUGH the center of the cables, those alternating twists tie themselves into a series of half-hitch knots every two twists.
When I was working as a professional sound engineer, I used to have to train stagehands how to coild cables properly. I'd demonstrate, then I'd have them coil theirs and all throw their cables at the same time, side by side.
What I didn't tell them was that I had bets going with the other audio guys as to how many cables would untwist with all those knots in them.
This was literally the first thing I learned on my first ridiculously underpaid "for-the-experience" TV shoot. It was an audition for a reality show for NBC.
Since then, I've probably wrapped tens of miles of cable. You get to appreciate over/under, especially when someone who doesn't know it wraps up a 500 foot triax or DT-12 cable the wrong way and you have to untangle it at the next shoot, when he's not there to face your wrath, of course. For the uninitiated, triax is like coax with another layer in it, used for camera cables. DT-12 is 12 channels of balanced audio in one snake which terminates in a medusa-like tangle of XLR connectors on each end.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Oh by the way, it breaks cables unless you put something between the sharp motherboard and the cables.
Tried it at work (make PCs sometimes), and the bios couldn't see the harddrive; it has mashed the cable.
Also, you have to take the motherboard out to replace the cable.
A blog I run for the wealth