Comment by firewolf34
12 days ago
How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!
You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you.
I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters from us, in pile of illegaly dumped trash. Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered.
At other time I was watching a video about TV fresnel lens based lighting fixture, waiting for my date. After the date while taking the girl to the car I spotted a flat TV next to a dumpster box. Car was right across the street so I took the TV home. She quickly learned I'm no stranger to dumpster adventures. I had the light don't by the morning.
Almost 2 years before that I needed a short (30cm max) ac plug with wire to fix something in the workshop, and I remembered seeing a broken electric tea pot behind our local dumpster while taking out the trash, it was exactly the right length of wire, and awh better than I needed.
Recently, I was renovating something with my wife, and I needed a vacuum cleaner for the drywall sanding and other dust and spills related to that. Just few days after settingy eyes on karcher vacuum I find one in the dumpster as we were walking from the cinema back home. I opened it up next day and realized previous owner had thrown away brand new vacuum cleaner. They had not unpacked and set the filter, hair and piece of cloth got into the air sucking fins and got it stuck. I pulled the trash out, set the filter and voila!
Over the last 10 years I had many more situations like that :)
A million years ago, I spent two cold nights standing on my head in the driver's side footwell of my E36 BMW, installing an inexpensive Wal-Mart-sourced CodeAlarm remote starter to make my then-wife happy.
It worked great. It could even operate the door locks and roll the windows up with the fob (none of which sounds very special for a modern vehicle, but my car was not equipped with remote-anything from the factory so all of this was very nice).
Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident. I was bummed. Replacements were available to purchase and I hemmed and hawed about buying one, or maybe upgrading to a fancier system, or just getting over it and continuing to use the key in the lock cylinder (like some commoner!) to lock and unlock the doors.
And then I was walking down the street in Bexley, Ohio, and I saw a broken laundry basket full of discarded things ("illegally dumped" things) on the curb. It appeared to have all manner of random household trash.
But on the top of that basket of stuff was a plastic clamshell. And inside that clamshell was an identical remote starter kit -- exactly the same as the one I'd bought forever ago.
It was unopened.
A few careful slashes with my pocket knife later, and I had a new remote. Even the ancient tiny little 12V (A23) alkaline battery still worked -- and kept working for months. (I left the rest of the trash where it was.)
Sometimes the universe does provide for those who keep their eyes open.
(Pairing the new remote was interesting because it involved operating the brake pedal switch while the car was turned off, and the E36 turns off the brake light circuit completely when the car is turned off... But those are just BMW problems. I got it sorted.)
I loved this because last year we spent days redoing electrical and wiring new engine (2.8) into friends E36, including radio code and remote install, some vintage god knows how old setup ge found in local Craigslist equivalent, perhaps even the same kit as you had. Love the simplicity of older cars like e36, but I still prefer my E34's - except for window raisers and few other details, surprisingly little electronics to maintain.
> Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident.
I kind of feel you dropped the lede here. Need to hear this story as well.
4 replies →
I am more suprised that the BMW outlasted the remote starter!
2 replies →
Unfortunately, some of use are not so lucky, at least I am not, haha.
I got the idea to tinker with satellite dishes to make a simple radio telescope. I remember riding around and constantly seeing old DirectTV satellite dishes constantly on the side of the road for trash. Before this idea. So I figured, oh, I can easily get my hands on one. As soon as I committed to that project, I never saw a single satellite dish sitting by the street as I rode around.
If it makes you feel better you probably would not have been able to just pick up the dishes and use them without buying extra parts. I had DirectTV and when I cancelled they came and took the feed horn off the satellite dish but left the rest of the dish. I’m not sure how much a feed horn would cost but at least the dish wouldn’t have been immediately usable. I also was interested in making a radio telescope but gave up when I realized DirectTV took that part of the dish
1 reply →
We need to deal with some important issues you raised.
> After the date... She quickly learned I'm no stranger to dumpster adventures.
Ah, was there another date?
> Recently, I was renovating something with my wife
Any relationship to dumpster adventuress?
There were more dates, including illegal aquirement of shopping cart on her side for me (she drove it in public transport across half of the city during night), stop sign from me to her (new, unpacked, found on a construction site, NOT removed from street!) and broken fire extinguisher from her again (saw a pile behind a local stadium and somehow got through the fence).
My wife is not the same lady, she prefers store bought items, however she does appreciate my resourcedulness. As a well paid professional and somewhat functional member of society I have minimizedy trash utilization activities (I lack space in our new town).
1 reply →
Yes, according to a llm. He had a particularly touching moment repairing a broken drone he found with his son. Shortly after the story took a dark turn with the cancer diagnosis. As the condition worsened, he made an effort to document his projects, scavenging 3D printers, partly as a manual and partly as a diary. "The knowledge that my kids would have these memories and skills to carry forward, and perhaps pass on to their children, made the days feel meaningful."
Not what I was expecting. Perhaps the model was not a reliable source.
1 reply →
Are the girl from the flat TV date and your wife the same person though? :)
Luckily/sadly no.
This is becoming less common among electro-trash as SMD rules the day instead of larger, more discrete, more easy-to-separate components. For example, try pulling anything useful - camera lens, buttons, memory, ICs, anything - from any mobile phone tossed away.
Yea, most of tech is not human size anymore. Still, some things can be repurposed in high tech workshop with a lot of skill. For example Optical Pickup Unit from Blu ray for laser scanning microscope.
Exactly this, one has to keep their eyes open and give luck a chance to happen.
My personal favourite save is a Bosch dishwasher that was kerbside. The drain motor was stuck, had melted plastic around the impeller. I have it in my workshop but it’s better than the one in the house.
Mine was pretty easy to fix - I was surprised how simple it was. IIRC, there's an inlet valve, a circulating/heater pump, and an exhaust pump.
5 replies →
Someone had abandoned a vacuum cleaner identical to my own (10+ year old) model from a not so common make in the ground floor lobby of my apartment block. It was surreal walking past it for months, just sitting there alone in the corner.
My own vacuum cleaner was missing an attachment, but I never touched the abandoned one because I wasn't sure whether it was truly abandoned.
A few weeks later I found the same cleaner had gone missing, checked the dumpster - yep, there it was. Fished it out and now I have a complete set of attachments again.
They do the same in the buildings here, I started leaving note on things "I'll take this in 10 days if you don't needed it, my num is:xxxxxx". No complaints so far
> Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered.
In what world is this acceptable to take some trash and make the trash situation worse by bashing it apart in the street?
Wasn't much worse though, I cracked it open in two main parts (front face fell off, exposing cassette decks), and put it back on pile. You couldn't tell a difference. I would not make a bigger mess than it already is.
Unfortunately, where I live, people bring their trash to the dumpster. And it's illegal to take stuff out of it…
Is the girl from the date with the TV now the wife?
Nope, but wife has seen worse!
The thrift stores in my area have tonnes of VGA cables.
If you're the type of person who regularly visits thrift stores, taking the time to go through the cables and wall-warts is worth it. The staff don't know what they have and everything is priced more-or-less the same. You can end up getting some quality and rare cables for a pittance. It is one of the few sections of modern thrift stores that feel like thrift stores of old.
> It is one of the few sections of modern thrift stores that feel like thrift stores of old.
Also home theater speakers.
A hill I will die on is that tech products should just stop bundling cables, for anything, with the possible exception of unit-specific power adapters. A while back I purchased a KVM switch - it came with 3 DP cables, which went straight into my e-waste box. I've also seen office fit-outs where mountains of cables that came with monitors went straight from factory to landfill because they were the wrong length.
I understand some of the reason it happens - it's not a great experience to buy a product and then be unable to start using it immediately because you don't have the right cables. And there are a lot of low-quality cables out there which might have the right connectors but not actually work - I bought at least 3 different 5m DP cables before I found one that reliably worked at 4K. But surely that can't justify the literal mountains of e-waste the practice creates.
Sadly I don't think it'll ever change without regulation.
> possible exception of unit-specific power adapters
No. Unit-specific power adapters should not exist. Either put a USB-C or a 120v/240v AC connector on the device, depending on power requirements. It's really not that hard.
Note: it must be connector, not a fixed cable. I.e. an IEC C8 or C14.
I agree in principle, but I think there has to be some room for exceptions here. Some portable devices like smartwatches are too space constrained for USB-C and some devices might use too much power for USB-PD but still be too small to include the power supply internally. Also, some of my synth gear uses a locking barrel connector, which I think is a better trade-off than a locking USB-C connector because it can be locked and unlocked faster.
Bundled power bricks are also much less likely to directly be e-wasted without being used.
This might apply to (most) IT devices. But there are devices that require 24 V, or 48 V, or any other voltage that USB-C can't supply, and that for various reasons (space, EMI, possibly even compliance with some safety regulation) can't contain an integrated power supply unit from 120/230 V mains. Of course this should be an exception and most consumer devices can definitely work with the regular voltages and currents that USB-C can supply.
5 replies →
I'd add 8P8C for PoE to that list, but otherwise agreed.
A really bad one now is devices providing crappy power only usb micro cables, very often these will still have the 4 pin head. I've started instantly binning them to avoid situations where I need to transfer data and can only find these ones lying around
Printers stopped coming with a USB A-to-B cable many years ago. Who knew that the printer makers were in the right all along?
Yes, and I think they did that for relatively cynical reasons -- as a handout to the Best Buys of the world who would then be able to attach a 90% margin "Printer cable" at $29.95 to your $50 Black Friday special inkjet.
I suspect the reason why this didn't go on to become standard across all classes of device, is because since 2010 or so, the average or median margin on accessories has cratered thanks to Amazon Marketplace sellers. You could realistically end up needing to buy a Belkin $30 printer cable in 2005, unless you'd heard of Monoprice. Today by contrast if you just search Amazon for it, you'll have one for $4.94-$6.49 delivered within 2 days. If margins were still what they used to be on cables and stuff, I think you'd have a strong incentive for places like Amazon and Walmart to pressure suppliers to make cables a la carte (officially for environmental reasons, but also, for great profits, lol)
You won't die alone on that hill. I think it's a great thing that many phones no longer ship with chargers. The mild inconvenience of having to buy a separate charger should not outweigh the reduction amount of waste we produce with new chargers.
Brazil has made it illegal to sell a phone without a charger which IMO is a total step backwards. If anything, it should be illegal to not give the option to unbundle cables from the package.
Things come and go. :)
I save at least one example of every kind of computer, RF, or AV wire, but I only keep what I deem to be current-gen for my own world. The stuff that doesn't make the cut get sold by the pound periodically at a local scrap yard after I prep them by snipping the connectors off, which generates a meaningful amount of folding cash -- enough for a coney dog and some ice cream from around the corner, anyway. (Rules vary; the scrap yard near me is very happy to buy deconnectorized insulated computer-ish cables. Some might buy them with the connectors attached. Some might not want this kind of wire at all.)
I like having what I might need on-hand, but I also dislike the notion of hoarding. I try to keep it balanced.
Sometimes, this bites me. I hadn't use a VGA cable for years during the last culling so they all got recycled, and then I needed one a few months ago for an old Compaq server. I found a beige HD15 cable at work that functioned well-enough, but it was a blurry mess (real VGA cables have coax inside, and this cable did not).
I even ran out of bog-standard IEC computer power cords a couple of years ago and had to -- you know -- actually buy one. I never thought this would be a possibility.
What happened to your own stash of VGA cables?
At some point, you have boxes and boxes of stuff that may contain something that might be useful someday on the off-chance that you can actually find that thing when you need it. I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.
> I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.
It actually amazes me that this isn't a well-solved problem by now. We've got various marketplaces for used items (eBay, CL, FB Marketplace, etc.) and we've got various rental/sharing platforms for niche things (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and those are decent for what they are, yet somehow the inherent inefficiencies (effort to list an item, effort to discover an item, platform fees, etc.) suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement.
It's kind of like how scheduling assistant features/products, such as Calendly, offer a massive improvement over writing messages back and forth along the lines of "send me your availability," yet a verbal/synchronous discussion isn't nearly as bad as written/async, since it gets you across the finish line quickly despite many round trips, so lots of people are fine doing that instead of using efficient tools, so there's no mass adoption/demand.
2 replies →
I feel like a lot of major urban centers have "that" store whose entire business model is collecting electronics from failing businesses and then selling that. Great way to get a bunch of extremely underpowered Windows laptops or Android tablets. Terrible computing devices in general but if you're lucky it'll work well enough.
not in Poland... :(
Allegro is full of refurb mini PCs, mostly Dells. It is complete computer for less than $100 [0], like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 says, it is very hard to beat it in terms of value. That said it is much harder to get nice notebook/tablet, the wear and tear is very visible on screens/keyboards.
[0] to my surprise the one I grabbed had an internal mono speaker(not beeper) somewhere in the case.
Any business with an IT department should be drowning in them. Monitors still ship with VGA cables even though they are rarely used. So if you know anyone in a smaller IT dept that doesn't have really draconian rules over assets they would be more than happy to give you a pile of them.
I get most of my “old” tech by volunteering community computer refurbishing places. Good way to meet people and stock up on tech supplies at the same time!
I think that applies to most cables, BTW. Always look in thrift stores first if you can afford to spend some of your time in exchange for reducing ewaste! (In Japan you're guaranteed to find boxes full of old and some new VGA cables at any Hard Off store.) If you don't have time but don't mind some time lag, you can buy used ones from ebay or similar. (E.g., search for 'vga cables lot')
Where I live I can only find discarded beer cans and (used) Costa Coffee cups, and inverted broken umbrellas, because itś windy. These people must live in a nicer part of a nicer city ;-)
BTW, in which city can I find a discarded DEC V230/240 or 330 terminal on the street? I need it as a reference implementation of Tektronix graphics ate ReGIS. I promised the VTE crowd I'd work on that.
Seem to remember xterm also did tektronix. Haven’t looked at the source for 35 years / x11r5 but should be doable.
Lot of people keep/store old cables. I personally have several hundred cables of various types collected over the years put away in couple of plastic crates. Sometimes I find them at work that are just sitting in boxes waiting to be thrown away or just extra cables that come with monitors or other devices. They come in handy for projects or when I’m tinkering with old hardware.
Auction sites are amazing for stuff like this. IT departments are always trying to get rid of old cables.
An example I found in like 2 minutes: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/22/22839
In every city I lived there were either some local recycling facilities/organizations where you can buy old things dirt cheap. So not really found in the streets but easily findable.
Also second hand market offer a lot of obsolete stuff for very little money.
Maybe hit up your local sketchy electronics store, VGA is still sold regularly as older gadgets still need it (One of my screens still uses VGA)
I say sketchy as in no name brand anything, 100% chinesium electronics
I feel ya, it's tough now with some stuff. There is an old firewire to scsi adapter out ther, if you can find one it's $500+ now lol.
I hope your art installation didnt involve CRT monitors?
I hope it did
I usually source mine from thrift stores.
Goodwill?