First, 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 information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more.

- But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that.

So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.

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scottlawson 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jmward01 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'll give you an example of how the process could be valuable even without the information. A huge amount of doing something is just getting over the initiating energy to start doing something. A trick to help with that is to start with a really low cost task. The point isn't the task, it is that you started which gets you into 'keep doing things' mode. The dots may act as a low cost task and help to get passed the initiating energy. I think there are other things that this could help too. This is a task, although simple, that can help define the phases of projects which could help planning and execution success. This is all just guessing, I'm not a psychologist, but I think there are potentially ways that this is helpful beyond just the data it presents which is a good thing.

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QuantumNomad_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 activities) and Zara (everyday wear as well as fancier clothing), and found a reader that can read the RFID tags they use, one would save the time needed to add RFID tags to one’s clothes ;)

There might be other stores that have RFID tags on all of their products too. I only mention these two in particular because I have purchased products from both of them using their RFID-based self-checkout in their stores and thus seen it first-hand.

However, I am not sure if all of the products have the RFID label embedded in the actual fabric or if some or most have the RFID label attached to paper labels that you’d remove before using the clothes. So that would also need to be determined before deciding to replace one’s whole wardrobe with clothes exclusively from these stores.

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hencq 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

A friend of mine used to once a year hang all his shirts with the open end of the cloth hangers' hooks facing forward. After wearing and washing them he'd hang them back with the hanger facing the other way. After a year he'd toss out any shirts that were still facing the original way and had thus not been worn.

	▲	ghaff 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve gotten rid of a lot of clothing in the past 18 months. I bring a very limited amount of specific clothing traveling, don’t fuss much around the house, local hikes, the theater now and then etc. I just have no use for a lot of to the office clothing I wore into the office every day.

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kbaker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did find one inside a pillow once.

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.

	▲	darkwater 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did find one inside a pillow once. I would say that Decathlon stuff has the RFID inside the internal labels (the ones that you should cut off if you don't want them to scratch your skin but sometimes you don't notice them)

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jofzar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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pphysch 2 days ago | parent [-]

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

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deadfece 2 days ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	theshrike79 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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 =)

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TGower 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	spaceywilly 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Another nice benefit of this would be location tracking. Once you had established the database of tools and the CV setup to recognize them, you could ask the LLM, “where did I last place my Stanley knife”?

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zeckalpha 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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