FTDI Programmer for Arduino

When programming a regular arduino board, a USB cable is enough. But when rolling out your own standalone arduino circuits, it soon becomes as hassle to plug the ATmega chip into an Arduino board, or use a breadboard setup for the chip and use the Arduino as a programmer. An easy alternative is to equip your custom circuit with a header for connecting an FTDI cable (i.e. a cable that has USB on end to plug into the host computer, and a serial interface on the other end to connect to the ATmega RX/TX/Reset pins.)

As usual, I tried to find the cheapest option and stumbled upon this tutorial on how to hack a Nokia phone cable into an Arduino FTDI cable: http://letsmakerobots.com/node/23728

Simple enough, and I now have my own FTDI cable for 5$:

EDIT: it is now getting harder to find this Nokia USB cable, but anyway actual FTDI adapters for Arduino are available for about 6$ (e.g. this)