Adapt(er) or perish

There's a lot of frustration caused by the rapid change and obsolescence of our technology.

It is hard enough keeping up with new things let alone the stuff we already understand being changed on us.

Because the technology changes so often and so much we are frequently presented with new ways to connect to things.

It used to be that Apple seemed to change the plugs on the bottom of their devices every other week. But that seems to have stabilised over the last few years (brace yourself for the next new iPhone socket).

Monitors and screens have been through a lot of connection types; vga, DVI, Display port and now HDMI is the most common. Even these have flavours within flavours.

See my previos posts on USB plug types as an edxample... https://www.ihatemypc.com.au/post/when-usb-isn-t-usb

The good news is that there's an adapter for almost everything.

As long as you know what you are going from and what you are going to you can go to eBay and have a very good chance of finding a cheap adapter that will re-connect your devices.

In the image above, which is of some of the adapters I have on hand "just in case", you can see the following adapters (in no particular order because you can't see their ends anyway):

• Display Port to HDMI,

• VGA to DVI,

• HDMI to Display Port,

• USB to Ethernet,

• USB to Sata (hard drive dock),

• USB to PATA (2 types) and SATA (hard drive adapter),

• M2 (SSD) to SATA and

• Apple Macbook SSD to SATA...

To name just a few.

If you have a really old machine that has Serial and Parallel ports on it you may have been worried about it dying because new machines generally don't have them (unless you / specify very carefully).

But USB to Serial and Parallel adapters exist and work just fine.

You can trick your old gear into thinking it is still plugged into an old computer quite easily.

So before you throw stuff out because you can't find a connection for it, have a skim through eBay to see if an adapter fits the bill.

Have fun.

David