In my darker and more evil days before I was doing so well building on these corvettes I had to do harsh things to get by. One of the things I used to do was open xbox 360 consoles, remove the optical drive, open it, and reflash the firmware in the optical drive so it would read burnt games. I also used to open Motorola surfboard 5100 and 5101 modems and solder in a male 10 pin header to the board so I could connect a cable and flash new firmware to that and get free internet using a dns number that the cable company uses for their techs. From doing that I have a bunch of these..



You can use one of these to connect 2 or as many lengths of your ribbon together as you like. cut 2 pins off one end so it is an 8 pin header and then slide the black plastic to the middle of the pins. This is a 10 pin male header. dirt cheap on ebay.