Slashdot Mirror
Inventorying Miscellaneous Computer Junk?
drewhearle continues "Ideally I'd like an open-source solution with the following features:
A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers
Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf" :)
A way to attach one or more photos to each item
Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.
A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information
Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.
I'm probably asking too much, but if there isn't [widely available] software out there like this, maybe somebody has developed something similar for themselves and would be willing to share."
Not to sound snide or anything... It's just, if you are a geek, then you should know how to work one of those thing-a-mabobs.
my wife.
:)
explaining it like "a green thing, with metal on one end, and little things sticking out of the green part" would gets me close to a nic/video/sound card, i can do the rest myself
I use filing cabinets. Each drawer has a label on the front (drives, cables, fans, etc...). Each item goes in the designated drawer when I receive it. Cases go somewhere else.
Throw it all out. You aren't going to use those 256MB hard drives, or the 1MB SIMMs, or that ISA SCSI card that only works with the HP SCSI scanner that only works with that card.
Now I have only to take my own advice. Anyone need a hundred ISA cards? v.32bis modems, AUI NICs, coax repeaters? How about power cords? I have about 50. Phone cords? 10 year old LaserJets with some toner? No?
The latest Slashdot meme.
Why must you use modern technology when you have the ancient pen and paper that obviously wasn't enough for a lot of people in the 20th century? Not only are they cheap, but they're y2k compliant and they even work when the power is out! You can't do sorting like you can with a spreadsheet, and formulas would have to be done by hand, but it's a tried and true technology!
*Here's hopin the mods have a sense of humor today.*
"Derp de derp."
I've recently come across a great piece of software that lets you organize your old junk.
TrashCan[tm], made by DumpsterCorp(r), enables you to quickly and easily file away each and every one of those things you think might have some use in the future, but never actually do. Retrieval, unfortunately, is a little bit difficult, but I hear they are working on that.
Marriage[tm], from your friendly neighborhood software house, "Wife, Inc.", also helps you sort your old stuff by using a rule-based decision support system with natural language support:
" IF (you havent needed it for the past 5-10 years)
AND (you dont want me to file for divorce)
THEN (you must get rid of your silly junk)
AND (make room for sissy, pastel-colored baby gear)"
I have found that after using these two great pieces of software to help organize my inventory, I have recovered such an amazing amount of space, it's as if I never had an inventory to begin with!
Why oh why is everyone's first reaction a spreadsheet?
Spreadsheets == handling of numbers
Databases == handling of data
Spreadsheets are not originally designed for searching or indexing. Spreadsheets have no good concept of interrelations.
Use the right tool for the job, for a change.
Upon searching SourceForge for "inventory", 4 out of the top 5 matches appear to do what you want. I didn't check them all real close, but none of them appear to have the ease of use that they should, but here's what I'm thinking:
This wouldn't be all that hard to put together with PHP and MySQL, and I've got a lot of code laying around that could be reused to put this together pretty quickly. Anyone want to help with development? Contact "chris at efinke dot com" to pitch in.
While this sounds like an interesting project, I feel this is one of those things where a filing cabinet or a chest of drawers or any other combination of cupboards, carboard boxes or cheap plastic containers, a bit of masking tape and a marker pen would probably do a better job.
I'd say most hardware types, myself included because I have this problem, would only keep enough stuff that a bit of organisation would do wonders for.
Get all your ISA cards and put them in one drawer, and label it "ISA Cards". Same for the stack of old IDE hard drives. Repeat until done. What I find handy is to also label each drive with a set of parameters in one uniform place (don't cover the little airhole thingy).
Neaten up the cables you want to keep and wrap them in masking tape. Write the specifications on the tape if you like - "CAT-5, 5M". Put them all into the one drawer/bucket/cupboard.
Making a database or using an application to handle the database sounds like a pretty complex operation, I think it would just be one more thing to worry about. Better to keep your stuff organised logically, which in turn would make you more organised. Adding a database into the equation will just complicate things even more.
Sometimes the low tech fix is the best fix.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
... a spreadsheet is a lousy way to keep track of this stuff.
It's ok if you are going to do a pure text data entry, but don't store it as a workbook, export it to a cvs file that you can import into a database that you build to handle the things that do not work well in a spreadsheet. You know, things like the photos of the equipment in question.
Spreadsheets also do not handle web access very well. There's two big requirements that are unmet by the spreadsheet method.
You could probably throw together a quick gui in glade or qt to access a posgres, mSQL, mysql, or other database for stuff like this, or throw together a vb interface as well. Nothing wrong with any of that except that on their own they do not meet the web accesability requirement. For that you are probably going to want to use either perl or php.
Nothing radical here, at the same time, nothing really generic enough to be a large enough project for most people to want to use.
Questions to ask are do you want to keep track of purchase date, serial number and prices for warrenty information? Are you going to keep the receipt filed someplace else? What are you going to say when your SO reads that your webcam is stashed under your last girlfriend's bed? Are you going to code remote locations some way different from the closet? How about a storage container, or garrage?
How easy will it be to update? The nic you pulled out of that system you retired a year ago was in the garage under the workbench until you installed it in that system you built for your neighbor last week. Is the database updated with it's new location? Or will you be looking under the workbench next month?
But then you are probably aware of all those questions, so forget I ever asked...
-Rusty
You never know...
the mate with a really big, empty garage.
If a bunch of us could cart all our crap over to this hypothetical garage, and we had a gentlemen's agreement between all of us that we were all free to dip in to the big pile at any time for any reason, that would be ideal. I wouldn't particularly mind if someone nabbed one of my 14.4k modems, as long as I was free to nab one of their Soundblaster AWE-64 cards in exchange.
We may need to get a bunch of big boxes and label them "modems", "LAN cards", "memory chips", "sound cards", "power cords" and so on, but that's the limit of the management that would be required.
I'm selling a lot of my old junk on ebay, you should buy it!
it's a sig, wtf?
You could write a nice little product for the Plone web-system, using the 'Archetypes' framework, to do this.
:)
* A web-browser-based system (or something else with LAN connectivity) that would allow me to access the inventory from multiple computers
- plone works through the web, so thats no prob.
* Something to indicate where each part is, i.e. "under bed" or "behind bookshelf"
- you just define your Archetype with 'location' as a field - it can either be a free text field or you could make it a choice of items.
* A way to attach one or more photos to each item
- that's just an Image field in the Archetype.
* Category organization, like "hard drives," "memory," or "cables". Subcategories would be nice too.
- that's another simple 'choice' type field.
* A "notes" field for each item, to save misc. information.
- a text field - do you want structured text, plain html, ReStructured text, or uploaded files? Easy.
* Search functionality, so I could search by category or text-search any field.
- plone catalogs the content and there's a search box.
With Plone and Archetypes, all the forms for editing and adding content are built for you. You can use the default view, or write your own view templates.
www.plone.org for all your plone needs. Python skills useful.
Baz
While a lot of folk might suggest a database, structuring data is difficult, especially when you're spanning the gamut from "bits of green wire" to "Cray XMP, Serial no 700l33t4u", with and without photos, etc.
A simpler, scalable solution is to see all of this stuff as semistructured or even unstructured data - and point a search engine at it. (lots of people are heading this way - see eg ReiserFS, WinFS.
To create your data, just make web pages and get the search engine to index them. You can even make the whole process very simple by using a Wiki with built in full text search like MoinMoin, or just go for a proper search engine like lucene/
There are disadvantages. In the most basic setup you will not be able to search for "green things" because until you move from unstructured to semistructured data, there are no properties for the search engine to pick on. Even once you do add properties, you won't be able to ask "add up the cost of all my junk" which is easy in SQL. But the speed at which you can add stuff to your inventory is some compensation.
This isn't your wife you're talking to. We're all geeks here and we know that 3/4 of that stuff you're keeping 'just in case'.
;-)
The first step is admitting you have a problem.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Get married. She'll tell you what to do with it all.