gloriouscowMar 20

the adhd organizing experience

  • buy plastic stacking organizers for your electronics stuff
  • realize you want to label said organizers
  • hand-write a few labels, realize it has been a long, long time since you took that drafting class in high school
  • try to find that label maker you bought back during the 2008 housing crisis
  • find it and realize it has a USB-B cable
  • steal the one from your printer
  • try to find the label maker software
  • won't install
  • dig back through the sedimentary layers of the backups of every computer you have ever owned on your NAS
  • find the original installer from 2008
Show thread🔏 Matthias WiesmannMar 20
@gloriouscow in my case I got the label printer as an extra with a printer, and when I tried using it, I could not because I mistakenly switched it to mass storage mode. The part about aliexpress labels is spot on.
Show threadgloriouscowMar 20

@thias

My ultimate solution was to just print "labels" on my laser printer, cut them out and secure them with packing tape. This actually is probably what i should have done from the start since i can make them much bigger and more readable than the label maker could.

I know they make adhesive label sheets for printers, but I have had the pleasure of tweezering bits of mangled label out of the roller guts of a laser printer before, so that's sort of a "never again" thing for me.

Show threadgloriouscowMar 20

@thias

Slowly getting there. Im going to need some larger bins to label 'abandoned projects'

Show threadbitsavers.org

@gloriouscow @thias

You forgot the final step.

Realized the labels should have just been row/column letter number with the contents in a database

I currently have a dozen used acro-mills blue bins for ICs sitting mostly empty because of having to make labels and agonizing over their organization.

I did manage to clean off all of the old paper labels they came with using warm water, soap and wearing down a few finger nails

Mar 20 at 6:53pmWeb
Show threadgloriouscowMar 20

@bitsavers @thias

this is the L1 cache of stuff i want to turn around from my workstation and grab while soldering, so having to look up a code is a non-starter. For more long term, boxed storage i'd definitely consider such a system