A Crummy Commercial

Part of the problem with the demise of stores or catalogs is that if you don't know what something is called it can be hard to find.   example: those clothespins with a hook on the end for a shower curtain rod or towel rack If you search clothespins on ebay there are over 5000 results in multiple categories.  Ebay doesn't have it but one thing I use more and more on both Bing and Google is the picture search, just by clicking the little camera icon on the search box allows a wordless search: So now I've got some extra terms like laundry hooks and drip dry, plugging them into ebay I find this: But $22 for something marked 23 cents ?  I don't think so.  BTW, the problem with these hanger clothespins is that they break quite easily. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

Some one uploaded (to archive.org) Digi-key's last catalog from 2011 as a 137 MB pdf file:  https://web.archive.org/web/20120629032030/http://pdfcatalog.digikey.com/US2011/digikey.pdf   It's nice to be able to page through a catalog, even a pdf, to find something.  Searching is wonderful but only if you know the exact name of what you want .  Also it's nice to be able to see not only the vendor you usually use but also other vendors of similar items.   One example: cable ties with mounting hole.  Searching Mouser.com for cable tie mounting hole provides 167  possibilities none were what I envisioned.  So changed the search to just cable ties.  Then drilled down by specifying nylon material, cable ties with mounts, screw mount and finally got what I wanted.  I am sure that just looking at the cable tie section of a paper or even pdf catalog would have been easier. Who knew there was a connector vendor called:  ASSMANN ?  Not me ...