Everything you build should be tested somehow. Otherwise you put five things you built together and they don't work, and now you need to test them anyway.

So when I put together a Nixie display board, I needed to make sure the things still lit up according to the pins as expected. I just took the manual Nixie tester and this unbelievably inexpensive and awesome ribbon cable, added an IC test clip, and tested away.

Why not a female 2x6 header? Because they are too tight to quickly put on and remove. When you're testing 50 connectors at a time, you don't want to spend five seconds struggling to pry each connector apart.

The IC clip was made to go on IC's whose rows are 0.3 inches apart, not 0.1 inches like the headers. So, I had to take it apart, dremel out the plastic stop, put it together, and it worked great.