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.
A dot a day keeps the clutter away
61–70 of 175 posts
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#62I also really like standard size clear boxes. I buy cases of smaller ones for my lab at work. They all get used up quick.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#63"These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#64A 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'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.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#65I 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.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#66First, 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 info…
I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#67I 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.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#68A 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…
Learn how to skim?
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
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#69Genius. 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.
Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away
#70This 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.