Cable of Unknown Origin.
On the bottom of the round capped end, there is unpeeled 3-m sticky tape (not shown).
It is a mystery to me as to what this is for, but perhaps if I peel the tape it will be revealed.
It was a tiny bit of an internal struggle to remove the wire holding it all together. It was so perfectly wound up.
As it unfolds, it springs to life.
Status: There is no going back and getting it to fold up all tidily, so doing an animated gif of the unfolding (which came to me as an idea later) is out. Although I do have quite a few images of this. So… Peel and Reveal.
Discarded Layers
p.s. Been thinking a lot of the concept of a kill-ratio, where you kill most of the ideas/concepts/whatever that come to the table first and then you’re left with the “one”, or the few. With project Obso, I end up shooting (the luxury of digital photography) dozens or gadzillions of images, and then the task at hand is to get a good kill-ratio. The out of focus ones are the easiest to murder of course, as are the not so well lit, and the ones with little bits of stuff in the background I didn’t notice are also fairly easy to discard. Then the task becomes more harder. Obso is helping me get better at this, but it’s still a challenge..
What is your kill-ratio like?
Obsolescence Project 
It could also be a Cable cable. Our local cable tv station has very small cable boxes that sit behind the TV, and a cord much like this one receives the signals from the IR remote control and relays them behind the TV to the box.
A cable cable. That does make me pause:)
I think u may be right. I have one and it picks up the ir signal when plugged into my old sony beta that still works.
This cable looks like a microphone pickup. You stuck it to your phone receiver and plugged it into a tape recorder. I think you can still find them at radio shack / circuit city.
Thanks Ross – never heard of a microphone pickup. good to know.
These are great. Particularly like one and two. Interesting idea: my ratio can be as bad as 200:1 🙂
Thanks Richard. 200:1 – that’s pretty tight. I’ve been there sometimes, but I suppose I’m averaging 50:1 -Perhaps I’ll start keeping track and do a massive collage of discards:)