[HN Gopher] A dot a day keeps the clutter away
___________________________________________________________________
A dot a day keeps the clutter away
Author : scottlawson
Score : 540 points
Date : 2026-03-31 21:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scottlawsonbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottlawsonbc.com)
| jmward01 wrote:
| First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic
| version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and
| read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this
| system that come to mind immediately:
|
| - The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots
| and, I think the stated reason for the dots.
|
| - The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the
| final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I
| suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you
| consider your environment more.
|
| - But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to
| mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I
| generally don't like that.
|
| So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are
| left with 'can I get the value of the information without the
| cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an
| argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a
| lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting
| stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I
| actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of
| course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but
| when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots,
| is something I definitely would try.
| scottlawson wrote:
| I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think
| it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe
| use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe
| RFID patches that are unobtrusive.
|
| Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a
| lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I
| don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes
| so it works for me.
|
| While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts
| bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a
| small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an
| electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part
| numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much
| closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey
| would use than the dot system.
|
| I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do
| that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts
| I place the most often.
|
| I don't quite know what you mean with your question about
| whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but
| still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and
| comparing across years also helps me identify things that were
| used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and
| magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year
| though.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I'll give you an example of how the process could be valuable
| even without the information. A huge amount of doing
| something is just getting over the initiating energy to start
| doing something. A trick to help with that is to start with a
| really low cost task. The point isn't the task, it is that
| you started which gets you into 'keep doing things' mode. The
| dots may act as a low cost task and help to get passed the
| initiating energy. I think there are other things that this
| could help too. This is a task, although simple, that can
| help define the phases of projects which could help planning
| and execution success. This is all just guessing, I'm not a
| psychologist, but I think there are potentially ways that
| this is helpful beyond just the data it presents which is a
| good thing.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.
|
| Decathlon and Zara both have RFID tags in their products.
|
| https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-
| an... (Decathlon)
|
| https://www.inditex.com/itxcomweb/so/en/press/news-
| detail/7f... (Inditex is the parent company of Zara. Link is
| a press release from 2014.)
|
| So if one were to buy all their clothes at Decathlon (clothes
| for sports and other outdoor activities) and Zara (everyday
| wear as well as fancier clothing), and found a reader that
| can read the RFID tags they use, one would save the time
| needed to add RFID tags to one's clothes ;)
|
| There might be other stores that have RFID tags on all of
| their products too. I only mention these two in particular
| because I have purchased products from both of them using
| their RFID-based self-checkout in their stores and thus seen
| it first-hand.
|
| However, I am not sure if all of the products have the RFID
| label embedded in the actual fabric or if some or most have
| the RFID label attached to paper labels that you'd remove
| before using the clothes. So that would also need to be
| determined before deciding to replace one's whole wardrobe
| with clothes exclusively from these stores.
| kbaker wrote:
| Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like
| with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did
| find one inside a pillow once.
|
| A huge number of items at Walmart, Kohls, Target, Academy,
| Old Navy, and many other stores now (those are just the
| ones I've seen in store.)
|
| Look for the 'EPC' logo, GS1 is the same standards body
| that controls the UPC barcode numbering.
|
| https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid/guidelines
|
| Though - you don't want to use those types for this
| application, they are too long distance / not selective
| enough, and the readers are expensive.
|
| Buy a big pack of NFC stickers instead, or print up some QR
| codes.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like
| with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did
| find one inside a pillow once.
|
| I would say that Decathlon stuff has the RFID inside the
| internal labels (the ones that you should cut off if you
| don't want them to scratch your skin but sometimes you
| don't notice them)
| hencq wrote:
| A friend of mine used to once a year hang all his shirts
| with the open end of the cloth hangers' hooks facing
| forward. After wearing and washing them he'd hang them back
| with the hanger facing the other way. After a year he'd
| toss out any shirts that were still facing the original way
| and had thus not been worn.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've gotten rid of a lot of clothing in the past 18
| months. I bring a very limited amount of specific
| clothing traveling, don't fuss much around the house,
| local hikes, the theater now and then etc. I just have no
| use for a lot of to the office clothing I wore into the
| office every day.
| jofzar wrote:
| Imo NFC tags could be the easiest way of doing the same thing
| for bigger items, scan it when you use it, log it.
| pphysch wrote:
| Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your
| LAN
| deadfece wrote:
| Homebox seems to be a good way to make that happen, FWIW. I
| looked at it for when I was moving house and it had way
| more than I needed. But it does support the QR code
| printouts.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Didn't homebox have some massive drama too? Stopped
| development, started, forked, fork stopped and started
| etc?
|
| At least that was my experience when I was looking for an
| organisation system -and gave up =)
| TGower wrote:
| The easiest way would be to setup some cameras and start
| recording everything. Gemini could already sort that into
| events you could query. If you have privacy concerns, at the
| current pace of progress, local LLMs should be up to the task
| soon if they aren't already.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| Another nice benefit of this would be location tracking. Once
| you had established the database of tools and the CV setup to
| recognize them, you could ask the LLM, "where did I last
| place my Stanley knife"?
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the
| cost, you can mount with noatime.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already
| know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been
| used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice
| cream?
| starvit35 wrote:
| towards the end he talks about this, dots determine how
| frequent it is used, therefore how close in proximity it should
| be to his work area. stuff which was dotted rarely or not at
| all was put into his shed outside, but even then he still had
| it and used it for a project later on.
|
| if you're not going to use your ice cream maker every week, why
| have it on your kitchen counter, or kitchen shelf, put it away
| in a cupboard
| scottlawson wrote:
| sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this
| innate urge to want to hold onto.
|
| One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool
| piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use
| it in a project someday.
|
| but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like
| having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally
| optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality.
|
| the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack
| of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a
| better home
| locao wrote:
| "a better home": probably someone who also thinks it's cool
| and also will never use it :)
| fontain wrote:
| Determine the cost of owning the ice cream maker per year. For
| some people, owning something costs nothing and in fact
| provides value, they find comfort in owning things, used or
| not. For some people, owning things is a burden, a drain, and
| owning something unused is painful.
|
| An ice cream maker costs maybe $200? How would you feel if you
| disposed of the ice cream maker and then a week later realized
| you wanted it?
|
| If you want to soften the blow, don't throw things away: give
| them away to someone who will use them.
|
| I hate owning things, owning an ice cream maker that I never
| use would weigh on me and I would much rather spend $200 on a
| new ice cream maker every 5 years (that I give away after a
| month) than have an unused ice cream maker for 5 years.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Keep it. Go up the list to the next thing that you don't use
| that you can throw away.
| wccrawford wrote:
| This is exactly my problem. It's easy enough to say "give it
| away if you won't use it soon" but _how do you know_? That urge
| might come on any time, and the act of giving it away is likely
| to reignite that passion.
|
| And for small things, like cables you don't often use... You
| never know when you'll need them. I've been telling myself I'm
| just going to throw them away after all, but then within a
| month of deciding that, I end up using a cable that I hadn't
| even _seen_ in 2 years, and I had to hunt pretty hard for it.
| And it 's a $10+ cable.
|
| The article sounds like it's going to address these issues with
| the dots, but then just doesn't. I'm actually not even sure
| what the point of the dots is other than to convince the author
| that they're doing something about their problem, when they're
| really just putting stickers on things and buying more bins.
| ghaff wrote:
| At some point you may need some old cable but you probably
| end up buying one because you can't find it.
|
| I simplified a lot of things when I was moving back in. I'm
| sure I threw out some things I should have kept. For cables
| specifically I need a better system than going through a
| large plastic box. Probably some garage reorganization thing.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Pick a dollar amount and delivery time period you are
| comfortable with. Get rid of everything you haven't used in a
| month that you can get cheaper than that amount and within
| that time period.
|
| Dont justify after the fact just dumbly implement the rule.
| cestith wrote:
| The dollar amount and delivery time is a good rule is a
| good one. This varies quite a bit based on the nature of
| your projects. The month might be flexible. Maybe a quarter
| or half year for some people?
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I can think of two instances from the past year or two
| where this happened: "printer cable" (USB-A to USB-B?), and
| USB-A extension cable (both at separate times). I think I
| spent ~$10 for each of these, so my total bill was $20.
|
| So $20 fee to pay for getting rid of a bunch of other
| cables I didn't need years ago and saving ~500 cubic cm of
| space.
|
| And I gave the printer cable away to a friend when I was
| done with it, happy to repurchase it in a few years in the
| increasingly unlikely scenario that I need it again.
| genthree wrote:
| Yeah, after years and years of hoarding lots of hardware
| and cables that's how I operate now. I have _so much_ less
| tech trash in my house now, LOL.
|
| Keep a few extra cables of sorts I actually use fairly
| often (a few spare HDMI cables, some ethernet cables, and a
| few types of USB cables are no-brainers, for instance).
| Toss all the rest (am I ever, _ever_ going to use a DVI
| cable again in my life? Decent odds, no, and on the off
| chance I do I can just buy another)
|
| Any cable that's more than ~2 spares for a port on some
| device _that is plugged in or otherwise in-use in your
| house_ , or isn't a kind of port you've used in a couple
| years (even if you _could_ ) should at least get some
| serious scrutiny and more often than not be donated or go
| in the trash.
|
| Like, I held on to a couple coax cables more than ten years
| after the last time I plugged _anything_ into a coax jack.
| So stupid, in hindsight.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I solve the problem by not throwing things away unless I
| don't have room for them. As a result, I have electronic
| components that are 30+ years old.
|
| My wife's strategy on clothes I had that she didn't like was
| to hide them in the back of the closet. If I hadn't asked
| where a particular shirt was in a year, that was her signal
| that it was fine to throw out. Must have worked because I
| wasn't aware of it until she told me, years later!
| malfist wrote:
| I hang my clothes from left to right, so clothes on the
| left have been worn recently, things on the far right have
| not. This makes it super simple to once a year, go through
| the close and just clear out things on the right of every
| compartment.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| You give yourself an arbitrary number of years you feel is too
| long to hold onto something without using it, and you stick to
| it.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?_
|
| The extreme form of this causes:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding#Anxiety
|
| For ice cream specifically, America's Test Kitchen has you
| covered with "How to Make Homemade Ice Cream Without A
| Machine":
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Ml3U39xqs
|
| And their video on some of the science behind making good ice
| cream:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-8kZ7vmfI
| ghaff wrote:
| And in my case, if I actually had a summer BBQ which I
| probably will this summer I'll drive 5 minutes to the local
| excellent ice cream stand and pick some up. Fun activity for
| kids though.
| amykhar wrote:
| He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it
| to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he
| needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold
| storage.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 5 years isn't really that long though. I have things that I
| haven't touched in 25 years that I'm still worried I might
| need.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| This is called hoarding.
| toss1 wrote:
| Not at all necessarily. It _could_ be, but it is definitely
| not necessarily true.
|
| It depends _entirely_ on usage patterns and attitudes.
|
| I just used a piece of material that was sitting on the
| shelf for at least ten and probably closer to fifteen
| years. I'd purchased it as an off-cut from a supplier just
| on a thought of "this might be useful, and it's a good
| deal". Carried it through two moves and never got around to
| using it. Suddenly it turned out to be the perfect
| thickness for this one customer project when the expected
| material didn't work -- never could have predicted it. Not
| only that, but when I went to check how much it would cost
| today, I literally cannot find that particular thickness.
| It literally saved by butt on this job.
|
| OTOH, I do have other materials I've used once or twice,
| but the needs have shifted so they're going on Craigslist
| for free.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an
| irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison
| and a distraction from the substance of life.
|
| Consider that it's _just_ an ice cream maker. Few people need
| an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all
| the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their
| houses.
|
| You say you _may_ want to make ice cream one day. So what? That
| 's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in
| light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day
| _want_ to make ice cream? So you don 't make ice cream. So what
| Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual
| burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far
| outweighs some one-off use.
|
| Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all
| the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it
| a social event.
| bluGill wrote:
| You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In
| the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice
| cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.
|
| I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good
| advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I
| look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and
| that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of
| it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me
| joy - she died long before they were born so they have no
| memories of her hobbies)
| purplerabbit wrote:
| Something freeing to me that my wife said:
|
| "If you get rid of clutter, there _will_ be cases where you 'll
| have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not
| about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff
| between cleanliness and functionality."
| malfist wrote:
| Most of us here also work in tech and get paid pretty high
| salaries. It's pretty inconsequential for us to buy a
| replacement when we need it, and donate when we declutter.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage
| service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference
| in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.
| graypegg wrote:
| > The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
|
| I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental
| gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream
| machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be
| willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy
| store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need
| to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about
| the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool
| ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the
| proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes
| in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
|
| I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The
| pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to
| enable a weekend project once a year.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location
| based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top,
| or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without
| the visual clutter.
| dave_universetf wrote:
| This is probably just a difference in how your brain and the
| author's work. A variety of home organizers have told me that
| people mean different things when they say they want an
| organized space. Some people want everything precisely labeled
| and sorted into narrow categories, and hidden away in drawers
| or closets. Others want everything visible and coarser
| categories. Each system looks and feels very distressing to
| brains of the other types.
|
| It's especially a problem for people with ADHD, because the
| "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily
| socialized as the _only_ way to be organized, but it's also the
| exact opposite of how (some) ADHD brains want to operate. OTOH
| the very exposed and "emergent" organization that works for an
| ADHD brain probably is mild torture to an OCD brain :)
|
| For myself, the sorting system in this post looks pretty ideal.
| All the stuff is right there where I can see it and scan for
| what I'm after, it explicitly allows for emergent organization
| where classification happens incrementally over time, and the
| dots thing has near zero activation energy but still gives me
| long-term information I can use. It's much better than an
| electronic or "clean" inventory system precisely because I'll
| never be able to consistently keep using those, whereas
| slapping a dot on a box, even on bad brain days I can manage
| that!
| switchbak wrote:
| > "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily
| socialized as the _only_ way to be organized
|
| In some circles perhaps. I'm more of a fan of Adam Savage's
| First Order Retrievability - an overly fancy term for a
| pretty simple concept. There's certainly large swaths of
| folks that adopt that vs the everything-in-a-drawer approach,
| especially in workplaces where otherwise it would just cause
| entirely too much friction for common operations.
|
| I give myself a lot of grief for a messy workshop, but it is
| nice once you realize there's a lot of ways to be organized
| and it's a very personal process. The important part is to
| devote a bit of time and energy to it, and to slowly pay down
| the organizational debt. And to let go of the perfectionism!
|
| At the end of the day, if someone doesn't like my open
| workspace style, they probably don't value working the way I
| do, and I'm ok with that.
| switchbak wrote:
| That's close to what I do - except I use dust. Every ten years
| I get rid of the ones that have enough dust to make me sneeze.
|
| And I put them in the crawl space :)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use
| shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags
| inside to organize the various groups of items.
|
| They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out
| from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are
| the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used
| much.
|
| On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am
| not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not
| having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five
| shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.
| scottlawson wrote:
| shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother
| you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear
| containers.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| No, I think I prefer it. Less visual noise.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| It does. I have a sizeable ball cap collection, all in
| labeled shoe boxes. I'll be changing them for plastic bins on
| my next Ikea Swedish meatball run.
| heyethan wrote:
| Yeah, frequency and importance are different signals.
|
| This works well for deciding what stays nearby, but not
| necessarily what to get rid of.
|
| Something like a toolbox or a charger you rarely use might only
| get a few dots, but when you need it, you really need it.
| bluGill wrote:
| IT is still a signal because you only need to look at things
| with few dots. Maybe that charger is for something that broke
| years ago and you can get rid of it this time. Meanwhile you
| don't even need to ask about the boxes of things you use
| often but don't think of (nor do you confuse them for the
| boxes of almost the same thing you never use)
| shevy-java wrote:
| Looks like a huge mess really.
| samuelknight wrote:
| This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.
| hecanjog wrote:
| I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas
| here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with
| small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find
| appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger
| boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of
| the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat
| mundane in-between details about your setup the most.
|
| (I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though
| FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
| dave_universetf wrote:
| +1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and
| writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.
| scottlawson wrote:
| thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I
| typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made
| it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I
| wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about
| generic structure and prose.
| hecanjog wrote:
| I understand -- still, FWIW, I would have enjoyed reading
| (and maybe partly skimming in sections) the longer version,
| warts and all. A lot of what I enjoyed most about the article
| were the in-between details, the LLM-assisted sections felt a
| bit like fluff in comparison, even though I could squint and
| imagine the input somewhat?
| brandrick wrote:
| messy, but there is something endearing about the approach
| tayo42 wrote:
| I wouldn't want to clean up the dots when I'm done tracking lol
|
| I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me
| normie3000 wrote:
| Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that
| will clean up.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS,
| aside from naming things and off by one errors.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| I see what you did there
| scottlawson wrote:
| since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that
| make it the hardest?
| samlinnfer wrote:
| I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the
| pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into
| various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and
| have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some
| sticky gum behind.
|
| One product many have at home (if they've got a wife or if
| they're a woman): nail polish remover. This is a magical tool
| for it's ubiquitous. Sure, you can go and buy the proper stuff:
| but this one many already have some at home.
|
| It works also should sticky stuff fall from trees on your car's
| windshield (do not use it on the car paint). It's really
| miracle stuff.
|
| I also "steal" my wife's nail polish itself: I love to put
| marks on components so I know where they should be plugged.
| Even on my guns: there are pins that go one side but the other
| (say the two pins to take apart the lower and upper receiver of
| many rifles), so I mark them with nail polish from different
| colors. Cables on motherboard? Color code with nail polish:
| both on the mobo and on the cable.
|
| Now you don't it to attack the plastic of the box: quickly wipe
| the sticky gum then clean it with some water.
|
| Besides that from TFA:
|
| > The first thing I did was get rid of every opaque container I
| owned. Every toolbox, every parts organizer with little
| pockets, anything I couldn't see through.
|
| I saw a friend of mine doing that 25 years ago and immediately
| adopted that technique.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Goo Gone is the way to go:
|
| https://googone.com/original
| mceachen wrote:
| Yup. No noxious fumes.
| squirtle24 wrote:
| I would add a word of caution before using nail polish
| remover (which is acetone).
|
| Acetone can damage and melt certain plastics. It can cause
| clear plastic to become cloudy. Using a hair dryer to soften
| the adhesive, or a bottle of Goo Gone, is often a better
| alternative for peeling off stickers.
| scottlawson wrote:
| they aren't plastic, but surprisingly, I'm able to remove them
| with fine tweezers and transplant them when needed. They are
| 6mm diameter so pretty small and I've never seen them shred
| like larger labels/stickers.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military
| in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of
| stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to
| American military contractors.
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is
| like - presumably some kind of power law shape.
| deepfriedbits wrote:
| Kind of an IRL heatmap.
| dogscatstrees wrote:
| Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code
| persistent memory system?
| semiquaver wrote:
| Hilarious that the box labeled "dots" has so many dots on it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like this system a lot.
|
| I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a
| used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books
| acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page.
|
| Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of
| books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last
| chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill
| or wherever.
|
| Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and
| cluttered state.
| sudonanohome wrote:
| A lazy wall of AI slop:
|
| > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for
| my scale.
|
| > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale.
|
| > That's not a failure. That's the system working.
|
| I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these.
| Perhaps I should ask Claude
|
| The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use
| transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with
| stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes
|
| We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such
| slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my
| networks
| fgfarben wrote:
| Learn how to skim?
| sudonanohome wrote:
| Skimming thru shit doesn't make the end result taste any
| better. All this terrible "writing" deserves is to be fed to
| another LLM and summarized into 3 sentences. Because that's
| all there is to the whole post. Why would the author choose
| to sloppost in a personal blog is beyond me. Personal blogs
| used to be a place for posting cool stuff you did in your
| basement. Now it's just another "personal brand" promotion
| engine. Hacker news is turning into linkedin, and people are
| turning into algorithmically entertainable slop-fed cattle.
| The end is near, I hope
| twoodfin wrote:
| This is the real apocalypse scenario. Not Skynet, but a
| model trained so well to trigger dopamine hits across the
| bulk of the human population that our creative muscles
| totally atrophy. Then we're the stochastic parrots.
| Karuma wrote:
| Yeah, I've been just slowly blocking all these domains, users,
| etc. But nowadays it's just unbearable. We have already lost
| this war.
|
| And seeing every day this kind of crap at the top of the front
| page of the websites I used to love, with hundreds of comments
| of intelligent people not even noticing all this useless AI
| slop... Very sad future ahead.
| foltik wrote:
| > The habit takes seconds. No database. No server. No app.
|
| > It wasn't the specialized components. It wasn't the sensors I
| had so many of.
|
| > These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure
| that every project shares.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's against the rules as of 2 weeks ago, in the short term,
| you're more likely to get downvoted for complaining than see
| less of it.
|
| And it's astounding. Because this is awful writing.
|
| Author, one year ago: "you replied to an LLM generated comment.
| if you look at the posting history you can confirm it"
|
| Now they can't be bothered to take an edit pass on the most
| rote slop.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Technically it's against the rules to use AI for comments. I
| don't think you have to be 100% sure that AI wasn't used for
| a submission before submitting or upvoting
| wwweston wrote:
| > Because this is awful writing.
|
| Can you describe what you think is awful (beyond rhetorical
| choices that have become LLM markers)?
| gyomu wrote:
| Seriously.
|
| It's such a shame too because the author clearly cares about
| sharing their system, they went to the lengths of taking nice
| photos etc. - but then it's this low quality, meandering,
| repetitive, predictable AI writing.
|
| It's also surprising to see that most people in the comments
| here just do not seem to be affected one bit. Not sure if it's
| because it's become so standard now that everyone's completely
| accepted that this is what content is going to be from now
| on... or if most people just don't care about poor writing.
|
| The second hypothesis seems less likely given how central to
| the ethos of this board pg's old essays about good writing seem
| to be, but maybe that's just a bygone era.
| eichin wrote:
| I was just disappointed that they didn't include a
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:...
| joke (or maybe that's also a tell...)
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard
| material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides.
|
| Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a
| similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on
| the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go
| into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle
| on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I
| choose from the ends, not the middle.
|
| This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more
| fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A
| nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second,
| clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever
| reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the
| stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to
| charity, without a moment's thought.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| > the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I
| guess
|
| More like a FIFO buffer. But you probably don't strictly
| enforce the rotation - you might still pick a preferred garment
| over the one on the end, I am guessing. So kind of like a
| network queue that might prioritize some packets - er, garments
| - over others.
| squirtle24 wrote:
| I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though
| I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel
| tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it's 2 seconds.
| To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn't it be easier
| to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts
| were used in them? It would likely be a close enough
| approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might
| be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system
| doesn't have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies
| on the categories being static. Let's say a box of resistors
| grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories;
| reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult.
|
| Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is
| that you won't need it most of the time... until you do.
| scottlawson wrote:
| it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact,
| I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers.
| Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really
| be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the
| sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I
| don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts
| out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the
| loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I
| notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and
| so the dots weren't really conveying information about those
| migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at
| first.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| This sounds great, except: how do you know if you've already
| labelled a box today or not? How do you prevent double, triple,
| or quadruple labelling?
|
| BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for
| sharing!
| scottlawson wrote:
| short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and
| sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But
| that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is
| still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a
| lot.
| ANarrativeApe wrote:
| This also works for kitchens. What is most interesting is that it
| begins to impact what one buys. It turns out that, after a decade
| or so, one can predict which 'must have' gadget or appliance is
| actually just a very seductive dotless wonder.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| Honestly I think kitchens have way less stuff than a lab like
| this and following Alton Brown's advice of avoiding
| "unitaskers" will basically guarantee you don't get
| overwhelmed.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Chefs tend to be gear addicts in my experience.
|
| The unitasker advice is also a bit difficult for
| inexperienced people to follow, from what I've seen. A stand
| mixer is a great multitasker on paper, whereas a speed peeler
| does exactly one thing. Yet the latter will be used massively
| more often than the former in most kitchens. Probably the
| most used tool in my kitchen (after knives and cutting
| boards) is the kettle, another unitasker.
| ghaff wrote:
| I generally agree with that and there are some small
| kitchen appliances I don't use often but when I need them I
| need them. Funnily an electric drip coffee maker is one of
| the things I somewhat regret replacing after a kitchen fire
| but I think insurance and may be handy for company at some
| point.
| rakeshd wrote:
| I've found that a simple "done" list for tasks each day is
| surprisingly effective for keeping my own digital clutter
| manageable. This post's approach seems like a good visual way to
| track that.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >Time turns out to be a great universal organizer, just like how
| a photo collection is wonderfully organized by date more than by
| any other single dimension.
|
| I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family
| that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info
| on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are
| almost always the most interesting ones.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is brilliant. Upon reading this, I remembered that the
| original kanban system in the 1960s at Japanese car factories
| used physical tags attached to physical parts [1]. Low-tech with
| a _right process_ around it works wonders.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards)
| s0rce wrote:
| I also really like standard size clear boxes. I buy cases of
| smaller ones for my lab at work. They all get used up quick.
| refulgentis wrote:
| "These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that
| every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!
| codazoda wrote:
| I also use clear boxes, called "shoe boxes" at my local big box
| store. I started 8-years ago, when I devoted a closet in a new
| house to them. They're now everywhere. I often answer a lot of
| questions with, "in the box in the closet". Even my guests don't
| need more info than that to find what they're looking for.
|
| I have some I don't think I use. I'm going to adopt this idea.
| Instead of dots, however, I think I'll just use a pen/pencil.
| Maybe I'll print space for the marks on my labels.
|
| I just purchased a cheap thermal sticker printer that I may use
| instead of my label maker. But handwriting labels would be fine
| too.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I use a variant of access tracking by treating things like
| stacks.
|
| My bins are stacked like in the article's photos. When I am done
| with a bin, it goes on the top. Least recently accessed bin is on
| the bottom. I need to get better about cache eviction though.
|
| This also works with clothing on a rack. Put clean clothes on the
| left. Choose what to wear from the right. Eventually, the things
| you don't like wearing will all be on the right. This also
| happens to sort clothes by season.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Genius. I need to try this for organising my endless boxes of
| random parts, some of which I never use. At some point I believed
| that eventually once I accumulated a critical mass of parts
| projects would spontaneously appear, but there's some law of the
| universe that says you always are missing at least one part.
|
| For small common components (diode, resistor, LED) though I
| prefer the traditional wall-mounted array of trays for sorting by
| values. Also, my commonly used tools and supplies (soldering,
| cutting...) live in other wall mounted open top bins (like the
| stereotypical "mechanic's shop" kind that hook on at the rear).
|
| I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the
| "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Clear, robust, and the different
| sizes have lips to stack and tile on each other. Who knew that a
| simple storage box could have an ecosystem.
| Steve44 wrote:
| > I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only
| the "Really Useful" stacking boxes.
|
| Same here. I've been using them at home and work for years and
| they are absolutely fantastic; we've probably got well over 100
| and it's rare for one a year to break and even then it's
| usually just the lid.
|
| I think they've been very clever in how they manage their
| range. I generally use the 12L and 18L boxes, but I don't need
| to remember any dimensions because a different profile box
| would say be 11L or 19L. All you need to do is remember the
| capacity and it'll be the right matching box.
| Dnguyen wrote:
| This is a preview to show HN? I made an app that help me keep
| track of my home inventory. I try to keep it as simple as
| possible so I can stick to the process. The app keeps track of
| containers and items. Just like a file system, containers are
| folders and items are files. Of course you can have containers
| within a container. For example, my house has a garage. In it I
| have a rack of 5 rows by 7 columns of 27 gallon bins
| (https://www.tameru.app/tote-rack-planner). One bin has my power
| tools such as drills, router, bits, etc. To inventory a bin, I
| either scan the barcode of the item if it has one. Ninety nine
| percent of the time the result will fill in the title,
| description, and picture. If there's no barcode, then taking a
| picture and AI will give a pretty good title and description.
| There are other attributes you can have, but just a title and
| description from the scan is all that is needed. Once the items
| are in the system, I can search with keywords based on the title,
| description, notes, etc. If the same items are spread across
| multiple locations, they will show up in the result. Selecting
| one will show me the breadcrumb to the location: Garage->Tote
| Rack->Row4Col2->Corded Drill. I can select certain containers or
| items to share with different groups. My siblings can see my
| mitre saw, my friends can see my camping laterns. The app has a
| check out/check in mechanism. It keeps a historical track of who
| checked out, when, how many, and when they intend to return the
| items. Similarly, when checking in items, who, when, quantity,
| and condition returned. The history report is similar to the dot
| system in the article. I can get a list of what I haven't used
| more than, say two years, and consider selling or donating. The
| side effect is now I know what I have so I'm less likely to buy
| duplicates. There are many other features, but I'll have to wait
| for a show HN when my app is approved in the stores. I just want
| to share how I organize and declutter. Hopefully it resonates
| with others, like this dot system.
| tim-fan wrote:
| Hey me too, I also have a DIY inventory system, maybe yours is
| more developed. But I also had the concept of items for n
| arbitrarily nested containers.
|
| I also track historical movements to see which items are never
| used.
|
| Recently I've moved towards everything being stored in numbered
| bags, which are hung in order on a line for O(N) retrieval. For
| storage it tells you which bag to put it in, for retrieval it
| tells you where it is.
|
| I'm thinking more and more the optimal system will have a
| physical as well as digital component.
|
| Also, I feel this system would be great for shared workshops at
| work places and maker spaces etc. I was just rummaging through
| our lab at work today, there's so many parts in the lab no one
| would know about, if it was inventorised with a good integrated
| (AI?) search function the equipment could be much more
| useful/available.
|
| https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor
| Dnguyen wrote:
| My system has a list mechanism as well. You can create a
| shopping list and add to it. Either scan barcode or AI
| Vision. You can add notes too, such as found at Target for
| $16.99 and Walmart for $19.99. If the items you add exist in
| the inventory, it will have the breadcrumb to the items and
| the quantity. If not, they're added as external. You can also
| create a camping list, and add the things you need. When you
| pack and check things off, they are checked out from the
| system. When you're done, uncheck will check them back into
| the system. Another use for list is for projects. You can
| have a list for your workshops and keep track what is being
| used and what need to be replenished. One more feature I have
| that could be useful for your workshop is related items. For
| example, when you look up soldering iron, you'll also see
| related items such as solder, wick, flux. That way you don't
| forget.
| taftster wrote:
| I need this for the junk in my life. Like, did I even use such-
| and-such thing in the past decade? If not, toss it out (ideally
| to a reuse store).
|
| I'm trying to get to a place where I think of all my purchases as
| rentals. That it's OK, if justified, that a tool served its
| purpose one time, and if it doesn't get used again or goes to the
| donation center, I have received the benefit. Something that can
| be reused is then just bonus. If not reused by me, then at least,
| someone else can benefit from the good.
|
| Switching my mental thinking to "renting" instead of buying items
| has help me be able to get rid of items which I haven't used in
| some time, reducing my footprint. I have a long way to go, but I
| come from a family of clutterbugs and it's just kind of baked in.
|
| Dots would be useful in my scenario just to capture utility of
| everyday things.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Within 24 hours, whatever you threw out and can no longer
| retrieve, you will find a need and its replacement will cost an
| arm and a leg.
| duckmysick wrote:
| That's why you do a "soft delete" and move things from your
| main area to out-of-sight closet/attic/storage unit. A cold
| storage, as the OP called it. Then clean it once a year (or
| when you need more space) and get rid of things you haven't
| used.
|
| I regretted throwing out a thing like that maybe once.
|
| Don't do it to "insurance" items like a fire extinguisher or
| a drain snake.
|
| Now, what happened to me more often was: losing a thing,
| doing an extensive search for it, not finding it, buying a
| replacement, and then finding the original item the day
| after.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| We did this when we were moving. We rented a storage unit,
| took all of our stuff that wasn't immediately in use there.
|
| Then we did the main move (a LOT less stuff to move) and
| kept the storage unit for a bit over a year, going there to
| grab stuff as needed.
|
| After that we sold, donated and/or threw away pretty much
| everything in there. So much useless crap we were bringing
| along "just because".
| tshaddox wrote:
| For me, the hard part isn't remembering how many times I've used
| a container or item in the last month or year. The hard part
| isn't simply dedicating the time to comb through a bunch of stuff
| and get rid of the unused stuff.
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| The second sentence should read "is" not "isn't?"
| ghaff wrote:
| I sorta know the stuff I use and don't use. Had a kitchen fire
| last year and had to get the whole house emptied out for smoke
| damage mitigation. I've thrown out, donated, or recycled the
| better part of two large dumpsters worth of stuff.
|
| For me it's about getting into the mode of going through and
| parting with stuff.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I've found it helps me to take photos of everything I'm
| parting with.
| bubble_instr wrote:
| Well, what is the hard part, then?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| But wouldn't this help?
|
| You have 10 containers, slap a marker on one every time you
| take something out of it.
|
| 12 months later you have 2 containers that haven't been touched
| (zero stickers). -> 80% reduction of the amount of stuff to
| comb through to find unused/useless cruft.
| tshaddox wrote:
| If your decision procedure is so simple that you _always_
| throw out any container with zero dots and _always_ keep any
| container with non-zero dots, then perhaps it saves a small
| amount of time.
|
| But that's a pretty coarse decision procedure, both because
| there might be an item that's very important but gets used
| less than once per year and because there might be a
| container that is 99% full of unused stuff but happens to
| have 1 item that gets used once a year.
| bluGill wrote:
| The point is you don't have to. You instead just look at the
| boxes a few years latter and if at a glance you see one box
| with few/no dots you know it is safe so you spend just a few
| seconds thinking about only that box - then you move on to
| something else. Sure there might be more boxes you can get rid
| of, but you only need to do one box at a time when you have a
| few seconds. (or you look at the box and decide you are not
| ready to get rid of that so you put a dot on it making it less
| likely this one will come up next time you have a few seconds)
| apricot13 wrote:
| in my own organisation quest I found similar results, my "stick
| stuff to other stuff" box (it's real name has more swear words!)
| is the box with glue, tape, scissors, string, glue dots etc
|
| I also keep a pair of scissors in there since there's no reason
| to look in two places at once.
|
| my collection isn't quite the same categories since it's a hash
| of craft, electronics, DIY and just general household stuff so my
| categories are more about size and actions vs likelihood of use.
| I have "very tiny things", "smart devices", "covers, cases and
| stands", "cables modern", "cables ancient", "adaptors &
| extenders".
|
| the best two boxes we've ever implemented: "gribbins: known use"
| "gribbins: unknown use" for the leftover bits at the end of a
| project or the spares for something you bought online all
| labelled in the known box and thrown into three unknown box. if
| your looking for something in our house its in one of these two
| boxes!
|
| sometimes things are sub-bagged and labelled in IKEA sandwich
| bags because free colour coding others it's a free for all
| because we use it often
| Eaglesight02 wrote:
| Wouldn't having multiple dots on the box defeat the purpose of it
| being see through to reveal it's contents? This would be
| especially true if the boxes are stacked and you would need to
| look at them from the side..
| Ajakks wrote:
| Small direction limited NFC Tags and the right NFC Ring might
| render this system effortless - tags maybe placed under the lid
| with a metal back to limit accidental scans.
|
| I like the dots, they are visual, you can see at a glance -
| standing in the lab. You could graph your digital data of box
| usage in the lab over time from home. I understand you've
| attained desired function and have no reason to do that.
|
| I'm not picking on you - I'm seeing this type of content all over
| and I also understand why we are retreating from digital
| spaces... but,
|
| This is a clever "life hack" - partly bc it isn't reliant on any
| technology and that is clearly stated -> very functional but
| almost anti-tech, being such a hit on HN is actually quite
| interesting.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Dots are very common in real professional warehouses. They get
| added every time it is counted on a stocktake. Even with full
| electronic control, ERP, Barcodes etc.
|
| If you are auditing the count you can see everything was counted.
| If you find an old dusty box you know why it is not in the
| system. If you are looking for slow moving stock, find the ones
| with lots of dots. Even with electronic systems it is not
| uncommon to find rotation (First In First Out) is not working.
|
| Now I'm thinking about the boxes of electronic components in my
| own garage. Clear boxes, labelled on the front, bags inside, just
| like the article... and untouched year after year! It just feels
| so good when a psu breaks and you pull a capacitor and replace it
| with one you had already on hand...
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| ... only to discover that the electrolyte dried up a decade ago
| :-)
| flir wrote:
| As the article mentions using standardized clear bins, which
| really do help:
|
| In the UK I settled on Really Useful Boxes. Not their new cheaper
| range, the chunky straight-sided ones.
|
| Transparent, they don't go brittle in a few years (I guess they
| will eventually), the front-opening ones are handy if you're
| racking them, and you've got some guarantee you can go back and
| buy more in a couple of years.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent PS1k on RUBs over the
| years, but they really were worth it. The only problem I've found
| is that they don't have overhanging lips, so you can't build
| floating bin shelving (eg
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ) for them.
| tsak wrote:
| Second that. Our garage is full of their 50L boxes with the XL
| lid, perfectly fitting those industrial shelves. Very versatile
| and long lasting. Even after nearly ten years, they look pretty
| much the same, and we live in harsh climate near the coast.
| flir wrote:
| My oldest ones (about a decade, same as you) are a touch more
| yellow than the ones I bought last year. I still think that,
| kept away from UV, they'll probably outlast me.
| koralatov wrote:
| Same. I have one that's about 15 years old, lived in a
| cupboard its whole life, and it's slightly yellowed but
| still going strong.
| animal531 wrote:
| Although looking at his, several of them are so covered in dots
| as to be opaque anyway.
|
| I'd have maybe used different colored dots, e.g. N blue, then
| remove them and place 1 green etc. as a counter and so on.
| tristramb wrote:
| Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs
| containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies
| (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves. I
| seem to remember that you could buy a rack to hold them but it
| looked too flimsy for what I wanted. The flies are pinned out
| onto plastic foam sheets in small clear plastic presentation
| boxes, 48 of which fit in each 12 litre RUB. I still have to
| properly identify about half of the flies. Photos of the
| presentation boxes and CSV files of the identifications are
| backed up to https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies. RUBs
| have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all
| this.
| papa0101 wrote:
| I initially read "42000 pinned out files" and sat there,
| processing, for a minute. Professional deformation at its
| finest.
| flir wrote:
| Yeah, we have a similar setup for haberdashery - white Ikea
| Billys, a few extra shelves, and a lot of 9l RUBs. They're a
| couple of inches deeper than the shelf, but that's not really
| a problem. Larger projects and long-term storage go in 35l's
| or 64l's. The 84l's tend to be too big for us - we've got
| one, and I hate lugging it around.
|
| That's a hell of a collection. Is there any risk of them
| degrading over time, as they're organic?
| Dathuil wrote:
| I discovered recently that IKEA actually do a deeper Billy
| that you can order online. I've seen them as deep as the
| Kalax. I used to work there and never knew. Might be
| helpful for the overhang
| eichin wrote:
| if they're the ones I'm thinking of (wide, but not very
| tall, good for large flat things - basically map drawers
| but not quite that big) just be forewarned that the
| drawers don't fully extend. (There are mods to fix that
| which involve doing some drilling and grinding on the
| drawer slides...)
| fmajid wrote:
| Thanks for the Really Useful Boxes referral. I've been using
| made in the UK Wham Plastics organizers and IKEA boxes, but
| front-loading is what I really need.
| andreareina wrote:
| Future availability is such an underrated feature. I buy IKEA
| food storage containers exactly because of this.
| wwweston wrote:
| I wonder if how we build/cycle software would change if we
| stopped calling it "backward compatibility" and started
| calling it "future availability."
| joshvm wrote:
| Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is
| that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's
| _slightly_ higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger
| crate, but it 's nice to pack things just about level and not
| worry about one annoying part poking up.
|
| I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I
| even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L
| boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top
| of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby.
| You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an
| afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not
| significantly pricier than Really Useful.
|
| There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of
| interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable
| boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert
| containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids,
| only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
|
| I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam
| Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per
| compartment box.
|
| As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I
| would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in
| a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient.
| You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time
| (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is
| often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you
| really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each
| project. This way is much easier to drop back into something
| you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we
| would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the
| BOM items for a project).
|
| I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was
| working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was
| indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on
| chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed
| signal Picoscope.
|
| (Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time
| in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style
| containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also
| standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for
| baking.)
| chasd00 wrote:
| i have lots of boxes like these filled with various hobby
| stuff. I keep two boxes on my desk though, one labeled 'A' and
| one labeled 'B'. Any time I use something like a tool or
| microprocessor or cable it goes in the A box, when the A box
| gets too full i pour some of it into the B box. When the B box
| gets too full i put the contents away where they belong. It's
| basically like a 2 stage MRU cache of my hobbies, all the stuff
| i'm currently messing with is right there in the A box or, if
| it's been a while, in the B box. If i'm doing something new i
| have to get up and go get what i need from the shelf or other
| boxes.
| randusername wrote:
| I do a similar thing for books. A lone dot on the spine means I
| read it carefully enough to take notes on it.
|
| I like to write commentary in the margins, so the dots help me
| know which books are "devalued" and which are fine to donate or
| loan out to others.
|
| Multiple dots are an indication I return to a book often. Each
| time I re-read I take notes in a different ink color and try to
| record the date in that ink color in the front matter.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I like to write commentary in the margins
|
| Oh man, tangent into one of my favorite library book
| experiences. I checked out a sci-fi book at the library. It was
| good I was enjoying it. Then a few chapters in, I found a
| previous library patron had written nit-picky notes in the
| margin, poking holes in the author's fictional science tech
| explanations. And these weren't little one-word exclamations,
| they were whole sentences written in perfectly legible, almost
| impossibly-tiny pencil handwriting. Some of them even had
| little drawn diagrams! It went through the whole book, every
| hundred pages or so some little margin notes about how such-
| and-such sci-fi babble didn't reflect how space-time actually
| works or whatever. It was a hoot, a little bonus on top of the
| book itself.
| randusername wrote:
| I had a similar experience with a second-hand copy of House
| of Leaves [0].
|
| This was a special treat because the book itself already uses
| copious footnotes and cross-references from fictional
| characters to create a maze. And now a _real_ person added to
| the effect by trying to make sense of it themselves.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| You obviously need to add your own footnotes trying to make
| sense of those footnotes, then anonymously donate it to a
| used bookstore.
| deciduously wrote:
| That's how you get Talmud.
| every wrote:
| Sometimes the marginalia are more interesting than the work
| itself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia
| 0xDEFACED wrote:
| i have a truly marvelous story about interesting marginalia
| which this comment box is too small to contain
| l00sed wrote:
| Reminds me of Yoyoi Kusama's projects
| https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsess...
| Vinnl wrote:
| I think this is the first time I read something online where an
| organised person has a system that works well, but it _doesn 't_
| look good, haha.
| endeavour wrote:
| Brilliant. So now you have no clutter but your office looks like
| it has chicken pox.
| xpe wrote:
| And the haphazard bin stacking (see photograph) is a knolling
| knightmare
| noisy_boy wrote:
| To those saying it doesn't look good, why not make the dots like
| levels?
|
| Say you have only 5 colors: green, blue, orange, purple, red.
| 1st year: green 2nd year: replace the green dot with blue
| 3rd year: replace the blue dot with orange 4th year:
| replace the orange dot with purple 5th year: replace the
| purple dot with red 6th year: red + add green dot
| 7th year: red + replace the green dot with blue
|
| Even if you use a box for 10 years, you will have max two dots.
| Sure, granularity is only yearly. An alternative refinement is to
| continue with the current system but collapse all the 1st year
| dots with a single next year's dot.
| bluGill wrote:
| Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so
| a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the
| green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The
| important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been
| touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a
| candidate for getting rid of.
| sublinear wrote:
| I agree with the clear boxes. I bought a ton of them in bulk from
| amazon a few years ago. I have yet to deploy even half of them.
|
| I don't know about the dots, though. These boxes are so flimsy
| that I immediately know which ones are used most often by how
| beat up they've become in less than a year. :)
| dbgrman wrote:
| Extremely fascinating and a relatable DIY system. I love the
| analogy to dashboards.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| But is he actually throwing anything away, based on the lack of
| dots? Because that is the hard bit!
| scrivna wrote:
| What's the point? Unless you are going to ruthlessly throw stuff
| away you're still just accumulating things, tracking it doesn't
| make the issue of unused clutter go away. Sure you move some
| stuff to a cupboard further away but it's not difficult to intuit
| most of this stuff, and now you have a mess of stickers
| a2dam wrote:
| I do nearly this exact thing with these shoeboxes, so you can
| pull them out from the front and have enough collapsed in storage
| to always have more on hand: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It took every ounce of concentration in my ADHD-riddled head to
| read that without stopping, but I'm glad I did. I have too much
| stuff in my place and need a system to start dealing with it.
| Classifying what actually needs to stay could help.
| kashunstva wrote:
| I feel as if this is solving a problem I don't have, at least not
| yet. My issue is that I'm contemplating building something and
| I'm sitting ordering from DigiKey and I can't recall if I have a
| certain part. For example I have way too many 74xx1G14 in various
| SMD packages because I haven't recalled my inventory. I finally
| spent much of the winter cataloguing everything in PartKeepr.
| Each storage area in the lab has a designated named area. Akro-
| Mils 64 drawer cabinets are named by letter then row and column.
| It ends up being a RAM-like system rather than categorically
| organized. SMD parts are removed from their tapes and go into
| AideTek 144 cell boxes. I never order anything now without
| checking the PartKeepr db.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-01 23:01 UTC)