13 ms·

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 nobod

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!

brcmthrowaway 2y ago
I hope your art installation didnt involve CRT monitors?
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I hope it did
nirav72 2y ago
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.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Goodwill?
ssl-3 2y ago
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?
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    > 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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      It's just hard to get away from the transaction costs associated with exchanging low-value physical goods over distance. A swap meet with a local electronics club? Sure. But selling individual items on eBay? Not so much. There were a bunch of ideas associated with the early Web like sharing tools and so forth that just don't make sense outside an informal neighborhood "economy" (and often not even there).
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        Indeed. I'd give anyone stuff from my cabling and computer parts collection as long as they had a use for it. I'd do this without cost if I could. Except: It isn't usually free to get things from my empire of dirt to anyone else's empire of dirt. By the time I boxed up a widget and sent it on its way, it is likely that more money has been spent than just procuring a new widget to begin with.
II2II 2y ago
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.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > It is one of the few sections of modern thrift stores that feel like thrift stores of old. Also home theater speakers.
rtpg 2y ago
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.
- ikari_pl 2y ago
  not in Poland... :(
  - QVVRP4nYz 2y ago
    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 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.
joseda-hg 2y ago
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
rnewme 2y ago
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 :)
- tcmart14 2y ago
  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.
  - jetti 2y ago
    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
qiqitori 2y ago
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')
HelloImSteven 2y ago
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!
3lit3krew 2y ago
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.
prmoustache 2y ago
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.
rjst01 2y ago
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.
- yrro 2y ago
  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?
  - xp84 2y ago
    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)
- forgotacc240419 2y ago
  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
rbanffy 2y ago
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.
- speedbird 2y ago
  Seem to remember xterm also did tektronix. Haven’t looked at the source for 35 years / x11r5 but should be doable.
thereddaikon 2y ago
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.
jandrese 2y ago
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 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/22/22839
yellowapple 2y ago
I usually source mine from thrift stores.

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

I hope your art installation didnt involve CRT monitors?

dec0dedab0de 2y ago
I hope it did

nirav72 2y ago

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.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Goodwill?

ssl-3 2y ago

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?

ghaff 2y ago
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.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  > 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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    It's just hard to get away from the transaction costs associated with exchanging low-value physical goods over distance. A swap meet with a local electronics club? Sure. But selling individual items on eBay? Not so much. There were a bunch of ideas associated with the early Web like sharing tools and so forth that just don't make sense outside an informal neighborhood "economy" (and often not even there).
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      Indeed. I'd give anyone stuff from my cabling and computer parts collection as long as they had a use for it. I'd do this without cost if I could. Except: It isn't usually free to get things from my empire of dirt to anyone else's empire of dirt. By the time I boxed up a widget and sent it on its way, it is likely that more money has been spent than just procuring a new widget to begin with.

II2II 2y ago

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.

ethbr1 2y ago
> It is one of the few sections of modern thrift stores that feel like thrift stores of old. Also home theater speakers.

rtpg 2y ago

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.

ikari_pl 2y ago
not in Poland... :(
- QVVRP4nYz 2y ago
  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 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.

joseda-hg 2y ago

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

rnewme 2y ago

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 :)

tcmart14 2y ago
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.
- jetti 2y ago
  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

qiqitori 2y ago

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')

HelloImSteven 2y ago

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!

3lit3krew 2y ago

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.

prmoustache 2y ago

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.

rjst01 2y ago

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.

yrro 2y ago
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?
- xp84 2y ago
  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)
forgotacc240419 2y ago
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

rbanffy 2y ago

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.

speedbird 2y ago
Seem to remember xterm also did tektronix. Haven’t looked at the source for 35 years / x11r5 but should be doable.

thereddaikon 2y ago

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.

jandrese 2y ago

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 https://www.govdeals.com/asset/22/22839

yellowapple 2y ago

I usually source mine from thrift stores.