Computer update and a walk through the infinite drawer of cables

Parents’ new iMac set up and humming. New 10.7.3 update un-downloadable on my cpu or theirs so another time. Clicked the “apply to all” button to make all appleworks files open in pages. Let the good times roll.

As reported earlier, while working on their computer this morning cleaned my desk, set up the cat cam and diddled around with cables and old ipods and such. Why exactly do I have a USB to VGA cable? Where would it have come from and what the heck could it have pretended to do? Very odd. Maybe it’s VGA to USB? I don’t think that’s any better.

Maybe this would be a good time to get rid of all the older ethernet cables, some of which I know to be crossover cables and some I’m not sure of. I have a brand new, very long, just in case, ethernet cable. And I have more firewire cables than a body can bear and one, count it one, new hdmi to hdmi cable.

Anyone want a USB to ethernet cable? I kid you not.

And I found some {gasp} phone cables. One is apple-issue white new-in-package. Several USB camera type cables. One standard power cable for anything known to mankind. And OMG a SmartDisk FW CDRW drive. Oh oh, does it need a power transformer? (You’ll remember I pitched a bagful of those recently). Plug it in with a single 400-800FW cable, pop in a commercial audio CD and voilá! iTunes pops up and asks do I want to import it. Holy cow. Who would have guessed?

Way down at the bottom, some audio cables including some very very nice Monster gold-plated stuff. They used to force that on us and we took it because it was free.

I’m afraid to put my hand in any deeper. Maybe it will magically resort itself.

[update] I brought the USB-VGA cable to work today for grins and the first fellow looked at it closer than I had and exclaimed: “it’s a USB to Serial adapter! Do you know what you could do with this???” Then I looked closer and realized it was not 15 pins in the plug but only two rows and fewer. My bad. Thanks Rich for the ID.