51–60 of 175 posts
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.
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 p…
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 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…
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?
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 mo…
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 work…
> 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 act…
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.
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.
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…
> 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.