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Comment by moonlighter | Hacker News Reader

I can very much relate to this; my motto is "you don't own stuff; the stuff owns you". And every time I've moved, I was amazed at just how much stuff one (even unwillingly) accumulates, and how liberating it feels to get rid of it. I also prefer to own just a few high quality and/or useful things over having a 'ton of crap'.

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> "you don't own stuff; the stuff owns you"

Reminds me of the George Carlin bit on "stuff". Brilliant commentary on the American way, as always:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

I've recently started building an actual database of my physical inventory, and have already found multiple items which I needlessly own twice because when I bought the second one, I didn't realize I had one already.

That's awesome. You just have a sql database of your physical possessions?

One time I took square photos of all my things and put them in CouchDB with just a label. It was pretty fun to see an alphabetical list of photos of nearly everything I owned. Like an RPG inventory.

This is an amazing idea. First thing that comes to mind is a process to automate labeling like with google images. Is there anything open source that fits this?

That would be pretty neat, but I just spent like fifteen minutes going through the photos and typing a word for each one... toothbrush, Zippo, shoes, plectrum, document... kind of fun, actually!

That seems like it would take longer than just manually labeling the things to begin with, especially with edge cases (what happens when there are 2 items in the picture? how do you handle mislabeling?).

It's much easier than that. Just a text file that I keep in a git repo (so I can sync it between systems).

First, I assign string IDs to storage locations following a simple hierarchical pattern. For example, `H` might be the hallway. `Hc` might be the cupboard on the hallway. `Hc3` might be the third drawer in that cupboard, and so on.

Now if I put my old external harddrive into that drawer, I write into the inventory text file: "Hc3 external harddrive". It's the storage location, followed by the asset name. If the thing might have many names, I just chain all of them together.

Now all the queries come down to simple grepping, for example:

- "grep '^H' inventory" gives me all the items I have stored in the hallway.

- "grep Windows inventory" shows me where I put that old Windows 7 DVD.

My system also includes optional "intents" to be appended to the storage location. There's "#s" (sale), "#o" (offer = give away for free), "#g" (garbage), and "#e" (evict = move to a less accessible storage location if space is needed).

So I can just show the output of "grep '#o' inventory" to my friends, and they can see at a glance what stuff I have to give away.

Yup. Which is why as I said elsewhere:

Give me the gift of recognizing my preference for no material gifts.

Or toilet paper. I'll eventually make use of and need TP. (It helps remove crap! ;)

I remember that message very well from a funny commercial [1].

"To achieve full freedom in life, you must never own more than seven things, or else they'll own you!"

I won't spoil the rest.

[1] Thorn - Freedom in Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBcLtOaYvPI

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