If you are like me then you own a computer and other electronic devices, many people across the world fall into this camp. If you are reading this blog, chance are you’re one of us. Being a technology user you probably know what a blight tangled wires can be in your workspace. This blog will give you some quick tips to help with that.
From the anime Serial Experiments Lain
As an aside, I love the anime Lain, it is something I watch whenever I feel like the real world is starting to drop away into fiction and blend in with the digital world. I would say it comforts me, but if anything it is quite the opposite; Lain offers us a mirror of our own world’s future, a possibility of where we are going. Enough on that, back to tangled cords.
1. If you have extra length in a cord bundle it up. Why have excess hanging all over the place if you don’t need it?
2. Try to hide your bundles of excess cord under or behind your computer desk to keep them out of the way and protected.
3. Use the clips from bread-bags to sort your cords. I did not create this one, I merely TumblrdUpon it, but I certainly advocate its use and use it myself to keep things organized. With my set up (pictured below) I color coded my clips, preventing any need to label them. Blue is my monitor because a monitor plug is generally blue. Green is for sound because generally your sound cable is tipped green. Yellow for my clock for no particular reason (alarm clock = yellow like the sun when waking up?). The large white one is from a potato sack and is used for my laptop power cord because the others wouldn’t fit on it.
Well Suited For Life 
Good tips, especially the colored bread clips! I had to look up who invented bread clips and found out it was a MacGyver solution to reclosing airplane peanut bags using a credit card. I think this was back in the day when you could take cutting devices on the plane. Had he done it post TSA, he’d be in a federal prison.
From Wikipedia: The bread clip was invented by Floyd G. Paxton and manufactured by the Kwik Lok Corporation, based in Yakima, Washington with manufacturing plants in Yakima and New Haven, Indiana. Kwik Lok Corporation’s clips are eponymously called “Kwik Lok closures”.
Floyd Paxton was known for repeatedly telling the story about how he came up with the idea of the bread clip. As he told it, he was flying home on an airliner in 1952 and opened a bag of peanuts, whereupon he realized he had no way to reclose it. He rummaged through his wallet and found an expired credit card and hand-carved his first bag clip with his small pen knife. When a fruit packer, Pacific Fruit, wanted to replace rubber bands with a better bag closure for its new plastic bags, Paxton remembered his bag of peanuts. He hand-whittled another clip from a small sheet of Plexiglas. With an order in hand for a million clips, Paxton designed a die-cut machine to produce the clips at high speed. Despite repeated attempts, Paxton never won a United States patent for his clips. He did win numerous patents for the high-speed “bag closing apparatus” that made the clips, inserted bread into bags and applied the clips for the finished product.
The bread clip was developed in the early 1950s, because there was a growing need to close plastic bags on the packaging line very efficiently. Manufacturers, using more and more automation in the manufacture and packaging of food, needed methods to allow them to raise production volumes and reduce costs. At the same time a hurried population of consumers wanted a fast and easy way to open and effectively seal food bags—originally bread hence the name. The simple bread clip allowed for that. In addition, re-closability became a selling point as smaller families and higher costs slowed consumption, leading to a potential for higher rates of spoilage.
Thank you for sharing. Bundling wires can be helpful, but make sure the little power bricks have airspace to keep cool.
Thanks for dropping that knowledge on us, Anna. I had no idea that the bread clip in itself was originally a lifehack, now this is a lifehack of a lifehack.