Illustrated guide to computer cables

[mdlbear]

Giz Explains: An Illustrated Guide to Every Stupid Cable You Need

We put up with too many cables. There are at least four different kinds of USB plugs, two kinds of FireWire and like a million different ways to connect something to TV or monitor. Modern gadget life can be kind of retarded in this way. Why not one kind of cable, or just a couple? I don't know. But until everyone gets on the same appendage-to-hole scheme, in the meantime, you can use this: an illustrated guide to pretty much every kind of cable you will see in current gadgets and what it's used for (unless, you know, Sony springs a new one on us overnight, which is honestly possible).

Just in case you were wondering what all that spaghetti at the back of your desk is doing there. Not to mention an image that looks suspiciously like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Comments

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I have ISSUES with some of this. I have 2 macs (a mini and a macbook pro.) I would like to connect them to load info from the mini's hard drive onto the pro. Can't do it with any of the included cables. Did some googling and found someone who recommended using a firewire cable. Went to website for my online mac dealer and found multiple types of firewire cables with different pin configurations. Tried twice to access the site's online help and both times it shut my computer down. Yesterday I stopped at Circuit City, and felt like my jigsaw puzzle was missing a piece looking at the cables. The hired help had no clue what to do and advised me to go to the apple store in Cherry Creek. That being one extra stop on my bus trip home, I did. The clerk there was pretty sure it was a 6-pin to 6-pin, which I bought. When I connected the 2 computers, the mini registered on the pro as an unknown device, and it just didn't work. I have 14 days now to waste 2 hours of my time on the bus going back to the apple store and returning the cable, and I guess I'll just transfer data from mini to separate hard drive and then from hard drive to pro, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Meanwhile my HP color laser printer has apparently cooked itself. LALALALALALALA!

[mdlbear]

In order for a mac to look like a firewire hard drive to another mac, it has to be rebooted, possibly in a special way. By far the easiest way to transfer data from one machine to another is ethernet and file-sharing. That's what networks are all about.

There should also be a way to do networking over firewire, but it will probably require some kind of setup on both ends. Either way, the cable you have will work; I just don't know enough about MacOS to tell you exactly how.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

To give you an idea of the depth of my ineptitude, I replied to your comment as an email, then thought, wait a minute, that's not how you reply to LJ comments. I don't even know where the email replies go. If it comes through twice somehow, apologies. Anyhow, my comment:

That's why nitwits like me buy Macs - they're supposed to be easy. If I
needed to do something else, maybe the people at the Apple store should have told
me about it. Uh-oh - maybe the sales people are as technologically inept as I am.

I'll call them in a bit and see what happens. If that doesn't work, I'll
walk in there with both computers and see if they have someone smart who can get
it going.

Yes, it probably would be a good idea to network the 2. I have an ipod that holds
more music than the hard drive on my computer has capacity for, and there doesn't
seem to be a simple way to add music files to an external drive using itunes and
make them accessible to the program, unless I'm totally missing something, which
I probably am. If the computers were networked, it might solve that problem. Or
not.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

OK - I almost feel stupid. Turns out the answer is you hold the T key down on the computer you're loading from when you start it. I'd feel even stupider if I'd had any way of knowing that before someone told me.

Now I'll be able to print "Shut Off Yer *&^#^* Cell Phone" signs for the hallway at Denvention, but phrased more politely.

[mdlbear]

Knew it was something like that. I vaguely remember seeing it somewhere in the MacBook Pro's user manual, under a heading like "transferring data from an older machine".