Liven Things Up

GTA 6. It’s coming out any day now. Any. Day. Now. Right? Maybe in thirty-ish days, actually?

Who knows, really.

But the point is: when it does come out, you’ll want these. Because you can clip them into your controller and boost their battery life, which means fewer annoying breaks. (Just don’t forget work, picking up your kids from school, and all your other obligations.)

Otherwise, we can think of no use for them. Sure, they can charge phones and devices and stuff. But who needs them for that, when you have…

The drawer of assorted cables.

Ah yes. That mythical place.

Legend has it, every cable of every tip and end that has ever existed goes in there. If you dig deep enough, you can find one of the wide pin chargers from an early-generation iPhone, its cord gnawed open by a cat who’s long been put to rest.

Go even further, and you find yourself in the tech equivalent of the ocean’s dark zone. And there, some say that light of your submersible (or, fine, the flashlight on your smartphone) might catch a glimpse of something prehistoric, like an ancient parallel printer cable, the shine glinting off its side screws.

It’s true. Such a drawer exists. Or, in my case, it did exist.

And, just to be clear, my “drawer” was a basket.

But here’s the thing: I’ve moved within the past few years. And nothing undoes one’s hoarder-adjacent tendencies like two weeks spent packing up everything one owns. Every little settlement you unearth of products or accessories you kept “just in case” is like a paper cut to the psyche, and you end up purging all sorts of things, even items you will regret losing within the month.

Oh, and another thing: the march towards USB-C ubiquity has hastened in the last few years to the point that you rarely need any other cables, which makes the disposal of Lightning cables or micro-USB cables that much easier.

The problem?

‘Rarely’ is not the same thing as ‘never.’

Case in point: I have an ancient Kindle. We’re talking something that was out of date when I bought it over a decade ago. No backlight, tiny screen, tap the sides and wait a whole second to ‘turn the page.’ I use it in two ways. First, I load drafts of friends’ work onto it when they ask for feedback, so I don’t have to read sitting in front of a computer. Second, I will occasionally fire it up when I want to read something old enough to enter the public domain. (Not only is it free, but if I grab it off Project Gutenberg, I can control the formatting; otherwise, I might find myself squinting through some miserably formatted paperback with size 3 font.)

It was the latter case that came up the other day. Which meant I had to track down a micro-USB cable somewhere in my house. And because of the depletion of my cable drawer (basket), this proved more difficult than expected.

But it doesn’t have to be this way next time. I can buy these and always have an easy way to get the Kindle up and running again. And then, I can keep the others in my bag to give my phone a bit of life if it starts running into the red while I’m out and about. They’re small and will attach right to your device without a cable intermediary. Convenient, right?

As long as you keep the tips organized. And you know where the charging cable is to recharge the power bank itself. And–

Okay, fine, there’s still plenty to misplace here. But you get the picture.