Today like clockwork my notebooks power cord fell into that void between my desk and the dresser the moment I unplugged it. Swearing like a sea-captain and scraping my arm whilst surely looking like a crazy person performing contortions to get that darned cable back I thought to myself: There must be a better way. After looking around the house for something slightly more elegant than duct tape to keep cables in place, I came across some shipping foam in the trash can.
[step 1] Using a carpet knife I cut the foam into a thick rectangular piece that easily fit under the lip at the back of my desk.
[step 2] Then I made several cuts about half way into the foam (to hold the cables) and glued it directly to the back of my desk using a hot glue gun (the desk is cheap and the glue comes off easily).
[step 3] Next I wedged all my various cables into the slots on the foam and…Voila! Now when I disconnect cables they stay stuck in the foam instead of slipping and falling off my desk, yay!
Comments
2 responses to “Repurpose shipping foam as a cable manager”
Cool…this works pretty well! I like the paperclip cable holder method cuz it looks better, but some of my cables are too thin for those. The foam holds my audio and charger cables.
Quite a cool idea — I’ve been looking for a “soft” hack like this for awhile. Thanks for posting. Will be saving our shipping foam now (for myself, the servers [yup, going to use to sort the jungle of cables we have], and all the PCs we have to work on.
~Lee