How To: Tame the cord snakepit

Dust-bunny shangri-la.

Also:
Inconvenient.
Unworkable.
Hazardous.
Ugly.

Most of us can 'fess up to harboring a rat's nest of proliferating power strips, cables, connectors and extension cords behind our home offices and media centers. And eLink, Earthlink's newsletter, has something to say about it. They recommend four fix-its:

(pic via Joseph Hall )

1. Switch to a wireless keyboard and mouse.
2. Create a home wireless network.
3. Lift your main power strip up off the ground and velcro it to the back of your desk, the better to ventilate and access your cables.
4. Manage the snake pit with various doo-dads designed for this function.

All good ideas, but let's just skip numbers 1 and 2, since #1 requires some real bucks and #2 might require kidnapping your company's IT person.

We like #3. Raising the power strip seems easy enough, and solves the dust bunny problem to boot. And #4 seems like it could even be fun. Here are some decent-looking products to help with it:

•If you've got just a few wily snakes running amok, try Cable Organizer's turtles or fish.

•If you're a weekend enthusast, try Cable Organizer's wire looms or their cable wraps .

•If you're hardcore, try Cable Safe's Cable Organizer Kit

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Comments (4)

Creating a wireless network is not difficult. All you need is an airport, an airport base station or other router, and your good to go. All four of my computers are happily hooked. The setup was almost instantaneous.

Yup, what ebrown says is absolutely so. WiFi was somewhat complex four years ago, but now it's virtually plug-and-play. Often the ISP will tell you what gear you need and how to sync it all up.

Hint for the technologically wary: Microcenter at Mercado Santa Clara is much less noisy and intimidating than Frye's.

Last I saw, IKEA has some very cool cord-keeping things in their catalog and at their stores - that would be another good way to go.

Installing a wireless network may be easy, but they're not giving it away. Much cheaper to buy a few zip ties for those of us who don't have spare cash laying around.