Description du poste
Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you
figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As
someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been
thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is
that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are
some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended
up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often
the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with
what I already had on hand:
• Ethernet cable. Back in 2019 if you'd asked me whether I would
ever use ethernet again, I would have said probably not. WiFi was
good enough for everything I was doing. But then I (like a lot of us)
suddenly started working from home and got frustrated about how poorly
my internet was working for video calls and
ran ethernet to my desk. Having cable on hand already meant I could
just set it up.
• Plexiglass. When I built my accidental
electronic instrument I wanted to protect it, and had plexiglass
left over from when I added an insulating layer to a single-pane
window.
•
Scrap wood. So many things. To give one example, when one of
the stairs in our basement fell apart, I was able to replace it with
extras from past projects that I'd kept around.
Similarly, when Lily came back from visiting a friend enamored of
their prop axe, she had everything she needed to make one already in
the basement:
• Computer mouse. One of my housemates was having wrist
issues, and wanted to try out using a mouse
on the floor. They ended up hating it after a day or so, but
being able to pull one out of the junk electronics pile and try it
made for quick experimentation.
• Plastic sheeting. When we wanted to divide our apartment in
two so we could isolate a
new housemate I had sheeting left over from an earlier project.
• Screen. When I wanted to make a screen door for our kid door I already had wi