u/BigBalli

I hit a point a couple years ago where I genuinely couldn't remember if I already owned a book when I was browsing a used bookstore. Bought the same paperback twice, three separate times, before I admitted I needed a system.

Curious how folks here do it. Options I've seen or tried:

1. Spreadsheet with ISBN, title, author, shelf location. Reliable but fiddly to maintain.

2. Goodreads. Decent for reading tracking but terrible for physical location, condition, or edition.

3. LibraryThing. More collector-oriented but the UX feels dated.

4. A barcode-scanning app. Fast entry but fragmented across a dozen apps of varying quality.

For folks past 500 books, what actually stuck for you? And do you catalog by shelf / room, or just flat alphabetical? Also curious if anyone tracks condition grade or first editions separately.

I hit a point a couple years ago where I genuinely couldn't remember if I already owned a book when I was browsing a used bookstore. Bought the same paperback twice, three separate times, before I admitted I needed a system.

Curious how folks here do it. Options I've seen or tried:

1. Spreadsheet with ISBN, title, author, shelf location. Reliable but fiddly to maintain.

2. Goodreads. Decent for reading tracking but terrible for physical location, condition, or edition.

3. LibraryThing. More collector-oriented but the UX feels dated.

4. A barcode-scanning app. Fast entry but fragmented across a dozen apps of varying quality.

For folks past 500 books, what actually stuck for you? And do you catalog by shelf / room, or just flat alphabetical? Also curious if anyone tracks condition grade or first editions separately.

https://preview.redd.it/5dqhyr4nz0wg1.png?width=1179&format=png&auto=webp&s=135f234872df805065e81690e6f0530b3fc78977

Three years into trying 52 a year and I still haven't landed on a tracking system that I don't either over-use or under-use.

What I've tried:

1. Goodreads alone. Fine for logging but I never actually looked at my stats mid-year and couldn't tell if I was on pace.

2. Spreadsheet with date started / finished / pages. Accurate, but I kept letting it fall three weeks behind.

3. Handwritten journal. I love the ritual, but zero analytics, so no idea where I stand until December.

4. A notes-app list per month. Easiest to maintain, but again no pace tracking.

What's actually worked for people who've consistently hit 52+? Especially curious how folks handle the slump around books 20 to 30 where every pick feels wrong, and whether any of you do a mid-year rebalance (more audiobooks, shorter books, DNF more aggressively) to hit the count.

The part of collecting I'm worst at is the administrative side. I can remember every book I own when pressed, but edition details (first vs first US, printing number, jacket condition, any inscription) I lose track of fast once the collection crosses a few hundred.

What I've tried:

1. Spreadsheet. Works but tedious, and I can't attach photos easily.

2. LibraryThing. Strong metadata but the UX feels stuck in 2010.

3. A generic notes app with photos per book. Flexible but no search across fields.

4. An iOS app that scans barcode and lets me add condition grade and edition notes. Fast, but not every pre-ISBN book scans.

For folks with actually serious collections (1000+), what finally stuck? And how do you handle books without ISBNs (pre-1970s, most early editions)? Manual entry plus photos, or something more structured?

Background: I design a small BLE peripheral (nRF52-based) and field technicians use iPads to commission it at customer sites. For a long time our support process has been "if anything's weird, send us a screenshot of nRF Connect on an Android phone," which is awful on a deployment where everyone's iOS.

What I've been trying to get to:

1. A tool the FSE can open, point at the device, and capture enough to diagnose without calling me.

2. Characteristic reads and writes with formatted payloads, not raw hex.

3. RSSI trend and advertisement interval so we can sanity-check the radio environment.

4. One-tap export of the whole session so they can email it back.

Curious how other folks handle this. Are you training FSEs on a specific tool, or building a custom companion app per product? Any recommendations for iOS BLE debug software that's worked well for field use?

Doing some BLE security work on commodity IoT devices (smart locks, fitness wearables, industrial sensors) and I'm trying to sharpen my workflow. Pen testing writeups usually focus on the reverse-engineering side (Ghidra, Frida, the protocol break) but gloss over the reconnaissance step, which is where I spend most of my time.

What I'm currently doing:

1. Enumerate nearby devices, grab advertisement data, identify the target by MAC prefix or name pattern.

2. Connect, walk the GATT tree, flag anything without Encryption or Authentication required on characteristic permissions.

3. Track RSSI over time to confirm which device is which when there are multiple of the same product nearby.

4. Export everything to CSV for the report.

Curious what others are using for steps 1 to 4 specifically, especially on mobile. nRF Connect on Android is the default but it's painful on iOS-only engagements. Any iOS tools that don't hide the good stuff behind paid tiers? Also interested in workflows for detecting devices that rotate MAC addresses every few minutes.

Took over as captain of a 4.0 team this spring and I'm shocked at how bad the tooling is. My predecessor ran everything off a group text and a Google Sheet, which was fine for 8 players but falls apart at 14.

Decisions I'm making every match day:

1. Who's actually available (keeping up with 14 text threads).

2. Who should play doubles together given NTRP and recent match results.

3. Whether to stack or balance lines given the opponent's typical lineup.

4. Which court, weather, and travel time.

For captains here, what's your system? Pure gut and one Sheet, a shared doc, or something more structured? Especially curious how people handle the "new player on team who hasn't played a match yet, no UTR, self-rated" case where you're essentially guessing at placement. Also how much weight you put on UTR vs NTRP when the two disagree.

Second-year apprentice here. My JW told me early on "if the calculator breaks you better still know how to bend a 90 with an offset," and it stuck with me.

Most of the apps and tools in my pouch don't actually teach, they just compute. You plug in a rise and get a travel and a mark number, but you have no idea why. So I've been piecing together:

1. Ugly's for the reference tables (shrinkage, multipliers, saddle math).

2. YouTube (Electrician U, Dustin Stelzer) for worked examples.

3. Pen and paper at home to redo calcs manually until I can do them without looking anything up.

For JWs and other apprentices, what actually made the math click for you? Was it a particular book, a particular teacher, or just a lot of bent conduit? And is there any tool you actually recommend that shows the work rather than hiding it behind a final number?

Picked up the evening review habit from Seneca a few months ago and it's been harder to sustain than I expected. On good days it ends up as useful reflection; on bad days it turns into either guilt-accounting or the opposite, a sort of smug "I did well today" that feels very un-Stoic.

What I've landed on for now:

1. Three questions: "what did I do badly, where did I overcome something, what could I have done better." From Seneca directly.

2. Writing, not just thinking. Thinking drifts, writing forces completion.

3. Short entries. 5 minutes max. Longer and I skip it within a week.

4. Not rereading entries for at least a month so I'm not performing for a future me.

For anyone who's kept this going past a year: what actually changed? Did the review start catching patterns that your in-the-moment self couldn't see? Or has it mostly been a rehearsal of what you already know about yourself?

Trying to figure out how much to actually weigh synthetic food dye avoidance when making snack decisions for my kids. The internet has two loud modes:

1. "Dyes cause ADHD and behavior issues, avoid at all costs."

2. "FDA-approved, there's no real evidence, stop being neurotic."

From what I've read of the actual literature (Southampton / McCann et al. 2007, California OEHHA 2021 report, ongoing FDA review of Red 3), the effect size for behavioral changes is real but small and varies a lot by child. The 2021 OEHHA review concluded enough evidence to warrant action at the population level, but at the individual level you'd probably only notice it in a sensitive subgroup.

My current working policy:

1. Default to dye-free when price and convenience are comparable.

2. Don't freak out about an occasional exposure.

3. Actually track what my specific kid reacts to before over-correcting.

Curious how folks here are weighing this, especially parents of sensitive kids or those who've tried elimination-and-challenge protocols. Did you see anything, or was it noise?

Most of the "I tried X supplement for 30 days" posts I read (on Reddit generally) are underpowered to the point of being noise:

1. No washout before starting.

2. No blinding (obviously hard for n=1 but there are tricks).

3. No pre-specified outcome metric.

4. Confounders ignored (sleep, training load, alcohol).

5. Subjective measures logged retrospectively.

For QS folks actually trying to do n=1 right, what's your setup? Some things I've been trying:

1. 4-week ABAB design, 1-week washout between phases.

2. Pre-registered (with a friend) outcome metric before starting.

3. Third-party relabel of capsules so I don't know which phase I'm in (imperfect but better than nothing).

4. Auto-pulled objective metrics (HRV, sleep, resting HR, workout performance) instead of self-rated.

Interested in how other people handle pre-specification and blinding specifically. Has anyone built or found tooling that enforces the protocol rather than just logs?

Been stacking nootropics on and off for ~5 years and I'm genuinely unsure how much of what I've "learned" about what works for me is signal vs placebo vs confounder.

The things I'm fairly confident about:

1. Caffeine + L-theanine helps my focus (easy to blind-swap with plain caffeine).

2. Creatine clearly helps training, less clearly helps cognition at 5g/day.

The things I "feel" but can't actually defend:

1. Rhodiola helping stress response.

2. Lion's Mane doing anything.

3. Racetams affecting memory vs just affecting arousal.

For people who've genuinely tried to run trials on themselves, what's your protocol look like? Specifically:

1. Length of each phase (2 weeks? 4?).

2. Washout length between.

3. Outcome metric (cognitive test, subjective rating, objective task performance).

4. How do you handle the obvious placebo and expectation effects in subjective measures?

Looking to sharpen my own methodology, not find new stack recs.

Started paying actual attention to pigment codes (PR, PB, PY numbers on tubes) maybe 18 months ago and it completely changed how I shop for paint. Turns out "Ultramarine Blue" from three different brands can be three different pigments with wildly different properties, and half the "hue" tubes in the student line are swaps for cheaper pigments that don't behave the same at all.

What I look at before buying now:

1. Single pigment vs convenience mix (single is almost always the right call for palette control).

2. Lightfastness rating (I won't buy ASTM III or worse anymore).

3. Granulation behavior if I want a textured wash.

4. Staining level (affects lifting).

5. Actual pigment code, not marketing name.

Curious how deep other folks go. Is this normal watercolor nerdery, or am I drifting into pigment-chemistry rabbit hole territory? Also curious about anyone's favorite underrated single-pigment paint. Mine is Daniel Smith Phthalo Turquoise (PB16), phenomenal mixer that rarely gets talked about.

Two years into oil painting seriously and I finally started paying real attention to how much drying rate varies by pigment. It's huge:

1. Earth pigments (raw umber, raw sienna) dry fast (1 to 3 days).

2. Cadmiums are slow (5 to 7 days).

3. Titanium white is slow.

4. Zinc white is both slow and structurally problematic long-term (brittle film, cracking), which I didn't know for way too long.

5. Alizarin crimson is slow and lightfastness is iffy.

My current planning:

1. Lay-in uses fast-drying earth and umber mostly.

2. Mid-layers balanced drying rates so I'm not painting on a still-tacky cadmium.

3. Final glazes with whatever slow pigment gives me the hue I want, and I just accept the wait.

4. Dropped zinc white entirely. Lead or titanium only.

Curious how much others think about this. Are people using siccatives (Liquin, Galkyd, cobalt driers) as a workaround, or re-sequencing to work around natural dry times? And does anyone have a good mental model for oil absorption and drying without having to look it up every time?