Connector Alignment Chart

My Pixel came with a charging block that had a USB-C input, and a cable that was USB-C on both sides. It did not please me.

Gotta love adapter shenanigans

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Serial is true neutral because it represents the cold merciless indifference of nature to whatever the fuck you want it to be.

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Firewire is lawful good because lawful good is annoying, religiose, belligerent when confronted, and ultimately pathetic in its guaranteed failure.

RCA Connectors are neutral good because if you have to ask why you’ll never know anyway.

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This is actually correct. I might have to update the chart and create an entire new moral matrix chart system to accomodate coax. I’m not sure what else would be on it but the axes would be Hate and Pain

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Isn’t USB-C’s real problem that it is lawful chaotic?

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I’ve seen devices that use a 3.5mm plug for DC power, like 9 or 12 volts. I don’t know if plugging that into an audio port would kill your device, but I’ve never been game to find out.

So is the USB!

No wait, I had it right the first time.

No, hang on, let me try it the other way again. Okay. That time it worked.

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You weren’t alone.

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I reserve several rings of hell for twinax and thin-net.

FYI, 99% of the time, audio inputs are capacitively-coupled, so DC current flow is blocked. Although, the horrible design of the phone connector comes into play here, because when you plug or unplug, the jack grounds the other conductors temporarily. That could potentially damage not the audio device, but the power supply. It can happen, for instance, when a TRS phone connector is used, instead of the more usual XLR, to carry phantom power for a mic.

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Wonder where Craylink sits.

Or maybe I don’t want to know.

Can anyone shed light on the USB-C hate? I’ve had a Pixel for most of this year, and the amount of time I’ve not spent orienting plugs makes it a pretty welcome move, (I know that iDevice users have had this luxury for ages), it feels less fragile than micro-USB too.

It’s closer to a true peer-to-peer architecture, it’s not particular to a vendor and finally it’s a USB capable of data-rates that surpass the bandwidth of firewire circa early 2000’s (sans the $ony-tax) (OK, I guess this is more of a USB3 thing, but as I understand, C is basically the small device form of 3). Designing circuits that do much of anything off of the miserly pre-USB3 power budget was an exercise in frustration, (or more specifically - specification bending; (i.e. with USB2 most laptops can provide more current at their ports than they are technically supposed to be able to, but do because the uses of the bus naturally grew beyond the original vision)). So it’s more powerful, more egalitarian in both device role & and orientation. What’s not to like?

-edit- (just saw that there’s a substantive article and not just an orientation chart…)

… OK, now having RTFA - I mean … yeah, sure I guess - agreed. Within the context of the authors perspective it’s kind of a big crazy mish-mash of poorly identified, vaguely understood and dimly conveyed compatible-ish use-cases and accessories. But isn’t that mostly - in actual practice, the fault of the accessory vendors in only partially implementing or identifying their stuff. Seems like it’s threatening to go the way of the non-specificational anarchy of the lovely and ubiquitous Coaxial Power Connector, (apparently at one point all those inner and outer diameters were supposed to key to meaningful voltage and current levels, who knew?).

The problem is USB-C to USC-C cables may not be compatible with your equipment. Best case, things don’t work. Worst case, magic smoke.

The confusion is in the past, USB was both a connector and interface, always. With USB-C it’s a connector with different interfaces that may or may not be compatible.

I miss firewire. It looks like I’m going to be missing headphone jacks soon, too.

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I should know this, since my family owned a mac from time period-- but supposedly the DB25 port used by apple tended to exacerbate scsi issues.

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Firewire? which version?

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A couple of itty-bitty screwdrivers for just this problem (flat, philips) have been part of my standard carry-around kit for aeons (actually since 1984, which is when I started working on PCs and building them.)

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Props for Rbt Frost…

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I’ve still got some of those cables and adapters. Cant remember off the top of my head which ones were most common with SPARC machines and their peripherals. Used to have drives and scanners with a variety of those terminators

Got plenty of those, no 4 pin currently active but plenty of 6 and 9 pin active. Theres a chain of RAID pairs that might still use some 4 pin on a shelf I need to clear out.

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