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Cheap and simple laptop cord management bag

All > Tech > Hacks/Mods > Cheap and simple laptop cord management bag by natetrue

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Here's a quick solution to a problem I've had many a time.

I need a lot of cables with me in my laptop bag when I travel, mostly to connect up portable hard drives and other miscellaneous gadgets.

The problem I was having was that all the cables would tangle together, so I'd have to pick up a big wad of cable and extract the one I needed every time.

To some degree, rolling up the cables in wide loops (as you can see inside the bags here) helped. But they still got tangled every once in a while, and my bag did not have enough pockets to give each cable its own.

So finally I got fed up with it all, and decided to make some more pockets. Since the backpack pockets were made of cloth I figured that it might be good to use cloth.

But sewing is tedious without a sewing machine. So I looked around my room and behold, a pinkish anti-static bag was lying there from a shipment of PICs I had just received. It's a thin-ish plastic that still feels somewhat strong. I would say it's the same material you can buy at a hardware store to put down on your floor while you're painting.

Bonding this stuff into pockets is easy. Just fold an edge, put it under something metal (I used a metal file) like so:

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Then take your favorite torch lighter and run it along so it melts (but does not burn) the plastic into a pretty wave:

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Here I use the Bernz-o-matic windproof lighter which is a fantastic lighter for all of your firey purposes. It's about $5 at your local grocery store and totally worth it.

Once you have melted yourself a nice string of pockets, load them up with cables! Each cable gets its own pocket because you can make as many as you want, whatever size you need.

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And the whole thing folds up into a mass just as big as the cable mass was before, only this time it's way more organized!

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Now looking into your bag, you can see all the cables still, and can just grab any one and pull it out with no tangles or anything.

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Download source videoAnd of course it's impressive when you fold out your panoply of beautifully organized cables for all to see. But when you do it, try not to use pink. It's kind of girly. I would recommend a milky white, as that's pretty much the only other color it comes in.

I hope you enjoyed that. It makes an excellent 10-minute project that will save you hours and hours of frustration, especially if you're a chronically frustrated person.

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