Live data from Hacker News

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

scottlawsonbc.com

91–100 of 175 posts

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#91

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?

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#92
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your LAN

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.

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 =)

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#93

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.

Well, what is the hard part, then?

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#94

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.

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#95

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…

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.

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?

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#96
post #88

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 surp…

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#97
post #88

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 surp…

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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: lo…

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".

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#99
post #69

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 t…

> 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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engin…

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.
Post reply on HN