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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

If somebody wants to make money, consider my problem: under my desk is a rat's nest of wires of every sort, hooking all the crap together.

I'd like my workstation to look like the advertisement photos, where there's no wire in sight.

I cleared a bit of it up by switching to a wireless keyboard and mouse. But there's a long way to go. How about a wireless connection for my monitor? (I know the bandwidth is an issue for the video, but there's an audio cable, too.) How about a wireless USB connection?

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The answer isn't to make everything wireless. It's to go to Home Depot, buy a dollar's worth of cable ties, bend over, and clean it up.

Funny enough, this is a stark lesson for why Quirky failed. They made exactly the sort of thing you asked for and nobody wanted it.

Zip ties still wind up with wires running across my desk, and they have the unfortunate side effect of nailing everything in place with railroad spikes.

I have a similar problem with my stereo. Once you've got all those random pieces of equipment hooked up (Roku, Blu-ray, cable box, VCR, turntable, iPod, preamp) you've got a snarl of epic proportions.

Heck, just the turntable needs 4 cables. It's madness.

Most people use velcro instead of zip ties nowadays, you can some for sale right next to all the A/V wires

I have found that wireless is not as good as it seems because you can't have efficient wireless power at the moment or batteries that last decades.

So you don't have the cable anymore but now your devices randomly stop working until you change the batteries and if you run out of charged batteries it's really annoying.

Proving that it is secure and avoiding interference are also problems that are currently impratical to solve.

Right. What I'd really like is a small wireless system for guitars and mics but don't want to run out of juice mid-song. Existing wireless instrument systems are way too bulky and basically analog to avoid latency. At this point we should be able to build something low-power, low-latency, wireless and rechargeable by plugging into a charger with guitar/XLR jacks. Hmm, maybe I should build that...

Well this guys build a wireless guitar interface, they talk about ~2.5 ms latency, 15 hours operation per charge. But it's expensive 430GBP.

http://www.stageclix.com/images/stories/PDF-Files/Performing...

But they are using basically $2 microcontorllers(from nordic semi) and a bit of analog electronics - so the potential for cost reduction is quite large.

Replacing my workstation with a high-end laptop removed all but the power cord for me ;)

I am no longer able to do dev work on a laptop, because I am used to having a BFM 9000 4k2k monitor which I dearly love :-)

how about screwing hooks into the underside of the desk and hang it all up?

iMac?

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