Using a wicker basket for cable management

This weekend, I set my sister up with some whole home audio courtesy of her iPhone, iMac, iTunes, and a couple of Airport Expresses (Lifehacker’s how to).  One Airport Express and speaker pair went in the kitchen but the cables were a huge mess:

  • the Airport Express and speakers each needed power
  • there was the cable connecting the speakers together
  • there was the cable connecting the speakers to the Airport Express
  • add to that the existing power cords for a digital photo frame and a cordless phone charger power cord

This is a good time to explain this particular sister of mine: I call her the Indian Martha Stewart (before Martha Stewart went to jail — ie when she was just known for being an freakishly obssessive homemaker). Yup, that’s an accurate description of my sister. So I knew that left alone, the mess of cables wasn’t going to survive more than a few days.

I found a solution in a wicker basket.  Here were the ingredients for my solution:

  • squid power supply (Amazon link)
  • a wicker basket (for some reason, my sister has a cabinet full of these things)
  • some hefty scissors
  • a bunch of cable ties

1. First, this particular wicker basket had a bunch of internal compartments.  I remove most of the walls that created these compartments with the scissors.  

2. Removing the compartments made it so I could rest the squid power supply inside the thing. The tentacles plugs were essential — with them, I could bend the outlets around the inside of the basket.

3. I cut square openings (about 1.5″ by 1.5″) on the left, right and back of the wicker basket.

4. Then I positioned everything inside and outside the basket and cable-tied all the loose cables, plugged everything in, and pushed everything inside the basket as low-down as possible.  Done!

The Container Store should be making and selling this thing!

Photographs of the final product:

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I think it helped that the wicker basket I had stuffed all the cables inside of had this steel frame.  Here’s a shot inside the basket…

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One of the square openings I made on the left side of the basket:

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And the one on the left side of the basket:

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6 thoughts on “Using a wicker basket for cable management”

  1. Dear Prof. Agrawal,

    My name is lynn, I am a Ph.D. candidate with the major of data mining, you are a so famous scholar in this area that I have heard about you for so many years.

    I am in California now as a visiting scholar. And I afraid it’s too rude to ask for a favor, I have read one of your article with the name of ‘Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules’ for many times, unfortunately, I still can not understand the part of 3.3–Generation of Synthetic Data. I feel so frustrated about that because I do need to generate the dataset in your way to testify the algorithm of my own. But I still can not do it yet. I have some question about the generation procedure. Well, I do not think you have enough time to explain to me.

    So, would you please send me the programming code of generating the synthetic dataset ?
    I am afraid I asked too much. But I really really need your help.

    And you are the hero you know, just like the Super Man is Association Rules area. And I am looking forward to your reply. my email address is [email protected]

    Best Regards,

    Lynn Chen

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