[scottlawson]

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.

[jmward01]

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.

[QuantumNomad_]

> 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.

[hencq]

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]

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.

[kbaker]

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]

> 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)