Cable management is for the difficult ones. This is what I said to myself until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself again separating the big bottom husband and wrapped in Ethernet cables to vacuum my office.
While wireless connectivity is the norm for movie buffs and even audiophiles, gamers have made life difficult for us. We have called latency as our enemy. So we continue to incorporate our three HDMI inputs from our consoles into our TVs, but we still wind up three ethernet cables from our modems to these three consoles. And of course, we’re still plugging these three consoles into the wall. After a year of staying at home and accumulating both game supplies and office supplies, my apartment looks like the bottom of Strega Nona’s pasta dish.
There are corrections, of course. Look for any video designed to guide players on their cable management journey, and you’ll find a YouTube thumbnail of a standard bleached smile that holds a drill and several finger traps (they’re cable clips): great engagement and great effort “projects” for improvement. Personally, I’m not about to have surgery on my desk. And if I have an extra six hours on my hands, I won’t spend them on my stomach on the floor of my office. I will spend them playing.
It is possible to do cable management lazily. Here are some clever but effortless ways for players to keep their floors and walls tidy.
The cables you have
This doesn’t have to be rude, but you wouldn’t have as many cables to handle if you only bought the right length. If you cannot differentiate the soil from the local forest, the cables are likely to be too long.
If you have the funds, consider the new cables. Measure the length of the wires around a room and add an additional eight inches; better a little too long than too short. Purchasing high quality cables with minimal flexibility will reduce the likelihood of having to reconnect in the future. And because it can be annoying to change cables when hiding behind a wall-mounted cable track, turn it on for a durable, premium HDMI that you’ll probably want anyway for your Xbox One X or PlayStation 5. matters in the long run.
Cable management equipment
What you need depends on your configuration. If your PC lives at the top of the desktop, for example, you may want to mount a surge protector at the bottom of the desktop so that only one cable is connected to the wall. If your TV is wall-mounted and you hate hanging HDMI cables coming out of your Nintendo Switch, you may want to get some paint that matches the color of the cable track with that of your wall.