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How Do You Organize Your Gear?
truffle writes "Like many geeks, I have acquired a large amount of items and gear over time, including miscellaneous hardware, cables, and such. I have books, papers, Lego, and more. I generally store most things in roughly sorted cardboard boxes, which is neither efficient nor attractive. For the non-messy geeks out there, how do you organize and store your geek stuff? Is it possible to have a clean organized grown-up home, without throwing everything away?"
Throw it all away. The 'it might come in handy one day' never happens, until you throw it that is. And if you do need it, you can go buy a new one, helping the economy and giving yourself a 'retail boost' in one foul swoop.
True organization can only be had with extreme discipline:) That being said...
Maximum PC had a two page dealy on getting a tackle box for your PC needs. It's been working great for me. At the office and at home, I tend to be a bit of a maniac when it comes having things in their place, so here is what I can pass on:
1. Don't loose items sitting out. Just put them away in a place that makes sense. Categorize and place-- even if it means the broadest category ever. At least you'll remember where you put it ("Oh yeah, I put that with the other unrelated
thing because I figured...").
2. Don't let other people touch your stuff. Plain and simple. Get pissed and let them know it's your territory. You didn't spend all of that time organizing to have someone else crap it all up.
3. Buy a couple of cheap plastic file cabinets. The ones that you see at Target are great for this stuff. Use them for parts, parts and more parts!
4. Keep stuff. I use the spindles that CD-R's come on and label them according to their category (OS, UTIL, GAMES).
5. Visit your hardware store. Any gearhead will find a ton of great ways to organize tools, screws, etc. I personally love the vitamin organizer jobbies that you can keep smaller screws, shunts, etc. in.
Actually, the technical term is "Management by Piles", and it's a valid (if not widely accepted) way of organizing things. People with good visual-spatial memories usually do quite well with this technique (It's in this stack, about a third of the way down -- here you go!).
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
1) DEVELOP STORAGE AREAS.
You'll need some place to KEEP the stuff that you want to store. It could be an attic, it could be shelves in the garage, it could be wherever you happen to have room. Here's a couple of quick thoughts - Divide your storage needs into LONG TERM and SHORT TERM useage. LONG TERM gear that needs to be stored can be put in out of the way places, like the attic, garage, under the bed. SHORT TERM usage should be kept close to where you need to work. This is where you'd store crucial stuff - cords, extra batteries for that cordless mouse, whatever.
Once you've identified your STORAGE areas, you'll be better prepared to deal with what kinds of METHODS you'll use to store stuff in those areas. (If you're going to store stuff under your bed, you can't use boxes that are too big to fit!)
2) USE A STAGING AREA.
We see this all the time on Clean Sweep. For those of you who haven't see it, they take all of their stuff that needs to be organized, and RE-PILE it into smaller piles - Keep, Sell, Throw Away. You can do the same kind of thing. Decide what gear goes into LONG term storage, SHORT term storage, whatever.
3) STORAGE METHODS.
Here's where most people jump to - but if they don't consider the first two options of WHERE to store stuff, and WHAT to store, they'll end up wasting a lot of time.
CHEAP options (so you can spend more money on gear):
- if you're going to use cardboard boxes, go to your local grocery store, and get some BANANA boxes. They're large, they're sturdy, they're free, they have handles, and they're all the same size. They're excellent for storing bigger items. You could probably fit an mid-range sized server in one of them!
- if you are looking for good ways to store small items for free in a small space - go to BURGER KING. Ask if you can have a bunch of their PICKLE BUCKETS. Burger King uses 5 gallon plastic buckets to ship their pickles. Get 5 of them. (they shouldn't charge you a cent if you ask nicely) Next, cut off the BOTTOM 4 or 5 inches of 4 of the buckets... and then use some cardboard to make subdivisions inside of each one (like the inside of a wine box). Then, those bucket bottoms will STACK INSIDE of the fifth bucket - and you'll be amazed how much STUFF you can store. Perfect for Legos.
A suggestion: wash those pickle buckets REALLY WELL with bleach - and if you can, let them sit in the sun's UV rays - it will really help get rid of the vinegar smell.
Hope those thoughts help!
G.B.Y.L.B.T., PastorEd
Those of us who have been married for 19 years simply have 19 more years worth of extra sh!t laying around in the basement.
Earlier this month, we (my wife) got fed up with the mess, so we (I) started cleaning out as much of the old crap as I could bear to part with. Old hard drives (anything smaller than 1GB -- gone) an old never-supported parallel port scanner, old computers (Pentium class or older,) an old cassette tape deck, old cordless phones, several dozen ISO-8 bit and ISO-16 bit PC cards, and literally fifty pounds of RS-232 cables. Basically, if it didn't currently work, or was older than about 1995, it went on the rubbish heap.
Recycle
I then started pulling the NiCd batteries out of the old cordless phones, and realized I had a lot more than just batteries that needed recycling. I got two garbage cans: a large one for plastics and metals, and a smaller one for circuit boards or anything with solder. I then spent a few hours with a screwdriver, prybar, hammer, wire cutters, etc., and segregated out the electronic boards, soldered connectors, etc. Anything with lead still on it went in the circuit board bin. The batteries went in a separate battery pail. All the rest of the metals and plastics went in the other bin.
Our recycling center charges for electronics by the pound. (I think it was about $0.60/lb. An old 13" TV set cost me $12.00 to dispose of last month.) I haven't taken the circuit board bin it to the recycling center yet, but I ended up with only about 15 pounds of circutry in it. Much less than the aggregate total of the hardware, cases and frames that had been piled up down there. The rest went with the ordinary recycling or trash. I also haven't gotten rid of the old cabling yet, I am assuming they'll take copper wire at no charge.
Finally, that which I had decided to save went into clear Rubbermaid bins. I kind of groupd them into "internal computer components", "external computer components", "other electronic components", "other electronic gear (telephones, etc.)", "computer cabling", "110 VAC house wiring", and "low voltage house wiring" bins. I also found a surprisingly large number of drill bits, screwdrivers, and other assorted tools piled in with my junk. My toolbox is now full again!
I'm not as "thrilled" as I'd like to be with the new organization of my stuff, but it's a lot better than it was. And I'd like to be able to tell you I found a way to tell my currently-obsolete-but-still-hanging-onto-it stuff from my I-should-save-this-because-I-will-really-use-it-in -the-future stuff. But I didn't find that magic formula.
John
...or at least pretend to. When I was growing up as an Air Force brat, we were allowed to take ONE BOX of stuff when my Dad got transferred. Cut way down on the clutter.
When it comes to being tidy I like to stick to a few simple rules :
/old useless warez (You are NOT gonna install windows 95 my friend) / old books (No, a reference to borland C++ 4 is NOT handy in this day and age).
:>
1) If it's broke don't fix it. Throw the bugger away. If you haven't found time until to to fix that broken xt you never will. It's just there collecting dust.
2) If you have ten of em, throw nine away. I myself had loads of cool (working) xts but let's fact it people : those are TOTALLY useless. You are NEVER going to use them, even if you could find old arcane network card's to hook em up to your network.
3) If it's not new in box and you have at least 2 other computers that supply the same function THROW THEM AWAY. It's not like you're gonna sit there with 4 386's alle used at the same time as serial terminals. 1 is more than enough.
4) Throw away all those crappy cover cds (winzip 5.x anyone ?)
5) Throw away your old print outs. I used to have literally HUNDREDS of these. I used to print everything I came across over the internet for further reading. After a while you know at least 75% of those papers by heart, at least 80% of them are outdated by six months & at least 20% of them are totally useless to you. Dump em. They're history. If you have to keep them store the originals on your server. It shouldn't be more than a couple of 100 MBs.
Do the above and you'll find you have a lot more closet space that can be nicely filled with your current (useful) hardware/books. I know throwing away things is HARD, especially when they're really cool (my wonderful XTs) or have a special personal relevance to you (O that first motherboard I fried) but you HAVE to. These things only hold you back. You'll feel better when you do, TRUST me.
BTW If you have something really cool in prestine condition then (especially if you have the original box/diskettes/manuals) for the love of god DON'T THROW IT AWAY. Give it away to a computer museum or at least sell it to a retro computing store or over ebay. Then at least someone else can enjoy it as much as you did and you'll have a bit of mullah left over so you can soften your sadness by getting that spanking new laptop you've always wanten
Put everything in a closet, attic or other storage space. (Boxing everything works too.) Record the date. Twelve months later, get rid of everthing still sitting in storage. If you have not used it for 12 months, you probably never will. Donate books/journals to the library (so you can still access them if you need to), and donate everything else to GoodWill or a domestic violence shelter or a school or something. Donate porn to Slashdot. For cables that you "must keep," buy a cable rack(s) and hang it in the walk-in closet behind the door. Get rid of that old incomplete 386/486/586. If it's not plugged in, you don't need it. Have a garage sale.