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A dot a day keeps the clutter away

scottlawsonbc.com

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Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#111

Post by andreareina »

flir wrote: 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…

Future availability is such an underrated feature. I buy IKEA food storage containers exactly because of this.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#112

Post by randusername »

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#113

Post by Dathuil »

flir wrote: post #109
tristramb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

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 th…

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

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#114

Post by coldpie »

randusername wrote: post #112

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…

> 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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#117

Post by cestith »

kasey_junk wrote: post #104
wccrawford wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

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?

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#119

Post by gyomu »

sudonanohome wrote: post #38

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…

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.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#120

Post by jonpurdy »

kasey_junk wrote: post #104
wccrawford wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

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.

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