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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.

i have lots of boxes like these filled with various hobby stuff. I keep two boxes on my desk though, one labeled 'A' and one labeled 'B'. Any time I use something like a tool or microprocessor or cable it goes in the A box, when the A box gets too full i pour some of it into the B box. When the B box gets too full i put the contents away where they belong. It's basically like a 2 stage MRU cache of my hobbies, all the stuff i'm currently messing with is right there in the A box or, if it's been a while, in the B box. If i'm doing something new i have to get up and go get what i need from the shelf or other boxes.

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

Thanks for the Really Useful Boxes referral. I've been using made in the UK Wham Plastics organizers and IKEA boxes, but front-loading is what I really need.

Second that. Our garage is full of their 50L boxes with the XL lid, perfectly fitting those industrial shelves. Very versatile and long lasting. Even after nearly ten years, they look pretty much the same, and we live in harsh climate near the coast.

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.

Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's slightly higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger crate, but it's nice to pack things just about level and not worry about one annoying part poking up.

I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.

There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.

I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.

As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).

I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.

(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)

> 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.

Sometimes the marginalia are more interesting than the work itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia

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, I end up using a cable that I hadn't even seen in 2 years, and I had to hunt pretty hard for it. And it's a $10+ cable.

The article sounds like it's going to address these issues with the dots, but then just doesn't. I'm actually not even sure what the point of the dots is other than to convince the author that they're doing something about their problem, when they're really just putting stickers on things and buying more bins.

> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?

The extreme form of this causes:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding#Anxiety

For ice cream specifically, America's Test Kitchen has you covered with "How to Make Homemade Ice Cream Without A Machine":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Ml3U39xqs

And their video on some of the science behind making good ice cream:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-8kZ7vmfI

Something freeing to me that my wife said:

"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."

You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.

I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)

He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.

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

5 years isn't really that long though. I have things that I haven't touched in 25 years that I'm still worried I might need.

> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?

I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.

I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.

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.

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.

I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.

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

Keep it. Go up the list to the next thing that you don't use that you can throw away.

This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison and a distraction from the substance of life.

Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.

You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.

Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.

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.

Imo NFC tags could be the easiest way of doing the same thing for bigger items, scan it when you use it, log it.

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.

I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.

The point is you don't have to. You instead just look at the boxes a few years latter and if at a glance you see one box with few/no dots you know it is safe so you spend just a few seconds thinking about only that box - then you move on to something else. Sure there might be more boxes you can get rid of, but you only need to do one box at a time when you have a few seconds. (or you look at the box and decide you are not ready to get rid of that so you put a dot on it making it less likely this one will come up next time you have a few seconds)

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.

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.

The second sentence should read “is” not “isn’t?”

Well, what is the hard part, then?

+1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.

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.

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.

shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.

And the haphazard bin stacking (see photograph) is a knolling knightmare

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.

Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a candidate for getting rid of.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

I was just disappointed that they didn't include a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:... joke (or maybe that's also a tell...)

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.

> 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.

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.

Learn how to skim?

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.

> 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.

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.

https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor

Kind of an IRL heatmap.

since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?

I see what you did there

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.

Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that will clean up.