The Cable Caddy

I don't quite know when, but at some point in my life I started getting sick of chargers for everything that I buy. Why does everything have to have a special charger?! Why can't they make some kind of standard size for that crap like they did with USB. Why must it all be so different, and such an emormous waste of space. It's like I'm living in a jungle of wires!

My solution: Using scrap laminate wood I had left over from a rack build (for rack gear) I did a while back. Truth be told, I built this quite a while ago. It has saved quite a bit of hastle and really saves space. I'm sure if I spent more than 20 minutes making it, I might've come up with something a little bit nice and intuitive, but I had reached my limit, and what happend happened.
The basic design is based on a power strip underneath a box which consists of 8 plugs for crap to plug into. I some how managed to fit all the semi wall warts of our cell phones and camera chargers and what-not-doo-hickies. The jungle of wires is mostly contained underneath. I had to tie up and tape down some of the wires to prevent them from "afroing" out thus launching my creation into deep space. I added a rack-like layer at the top to create more docking space for big charger things. As you can see, we also use it as a place to keep our nail clippers, so we don't lose track of 'em.

I have to say, though... my wife and I got a DSi recently, and it has a different plug than the DS... what the hell? Who decides that these plugs have to be different for every minor new edition of some hardware. Just make a choice and stick with it. You'll lower everyone's blood pressure that way. It's not like I'm gonna go out and buy your charger again if it breaks on me-- count me out... you can bet I'm gonna be looking for the cheapest Chinese replacement to tide me over until your crappy hardware breaks and I move on from that, too.

To make a long and stagnant story short, this device has saved us some hastle, but I do believe that I will have to make a new one in a year or two to come. The moral of the story is to make one of these guys as big as you can and store it somewhere easily accessible and as unobtrusive a place as possible. Get the biggest honkin power strip you can (with plug space on the side and on the top). Get a switchable unit to turn it off when it's not in use to save a slight amount of power (which may be debatable).

If I still lived in America, I'd feel obligated to write a letter to congress to pass some kind of law to get power cables for electronics to reach some kind of standard. I'm sick to goddamned hell of dealing with so many different power cables and wall warty non-sense. I thought that's what we were partying in 1999 about... getting rid of stupid things like this. So much for the 21st century of Back to the Future II.