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.
jmward01 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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_ 8 hours ago [-]
> Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.
Decathlon and Zara both have RFID tags in their products.
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.
hencq 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kbaker 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
jofzar 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your LAN
deadfece 3 hours ago [-]
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.
TGower 7 hours ago [-]
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.
zeckalpha 5 hours ago [-]
I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.
stickfigure 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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
ambicapter 6 hours ago [-]
Keep it. Go up the list to the next thing that you don't use that you can throw away.
scottlawson 10 hours ago [-]
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
fontain 10 hours ago [-]
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.
tshaddox 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
I've found it helps me to take photos of everything I'm parting with.
_HMCB_ 2 hours ago [-]
The second sentence should read “is” not “isn’t?”
taftster 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
hecanjog 10 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
+1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.
scottlawson 6 hours ago [-]
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.
shermantanktop 10 hours ago [-]
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.
heyethan 6 hours ago [-]
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.
scottlawson 8 hours ago [-]
shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.
shermantanktop 7 hours ago [-]
No, I think I prefer it. Less visual noise.
Liftyee 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ANarrativeApe 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
apricot13 2 hours ago [-]
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
paulmooreparks 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zeckalpha 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Dnguyen 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
ihaveajob 10 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
> "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 9 hours ago [-]
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 :)
nine_k 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
scottlawson 8 hours ago [-]
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.
TacticalCoder 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
codazoda 5 hours ago [-]
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.
squirtle24 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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.
sudonanohome 7 hours ago [-]
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
Karuma 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
fgfarben 7 hours ago [-]
Learn how to skim?
sudonanohome 5 hours ago [-]
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
refulgentis 5 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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
nighthawk454 9 hours ago [-]
Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.
deepfriedbits 8 hours ago [-]
Kind of an IRL heatmap.
jvanderbot 9 hours ago [-]
Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.
scottlawson 8 hours ago [-]
since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?
Dansvidania 9 hours ago [-]
I see what you did there
Eaglesight02 2 hours ago [-]
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..
PopAlongKid 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
JKCalhoun 8 hours ago [-]
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.
semiquaver 8 hours ago [-]
Hilarious that the box labeled “dots” has so many dots on it.
rakeshd 6 hours ago [-]
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.
s0rce 5 hours ago [-]
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.
comrade1234 9 hours ago [-]
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.
dogscatstrees 8 hours ago [-]
Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?
samuelknight 10 hours ago [-]
This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.
refulgentis 5 hours ago [-]
"These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!
brandrick 10 hours ago [-]
messy, but there is something endearing about the approach
tayo42 9 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that will clean up.
shevy-java 10 hours ago [-]
Looks like a huge mess really.
Rendered at 08:42:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
For me it’s about getting into the mode of going through and parting with stuff.
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.
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.
(I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
And I put them in the crawl space :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards)
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.
https://googone.com/original
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.
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.
Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.
BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me