(no subject)

[hartmans]

I'm continuing to look forward to moving into the new apartment. Last week I got cable (and of course net installed. I also had a desk delivered to replace the one that is falling apart. I have movers scheduled for next Wednesday. I guess I should start packing; I have little enough stuff that I'll be fine so long as I start this weekend. The first phase, which I have started, is throwing away stuff not worth moving.

I'm going through looking at a new solution for dealing with clothes. Currently I have braille labels sewn into most clothes. This provides a serial number and an indication of light/medium/dark for washing. Unfortunatly the label tape I've been using is no longer sold. That's not surprising; normal braille labelers and braillers both fail to deal with it. You end up needing to have a soft metal sheet to hold it in position with the brailler to actually label the tape. Also, it is relatively hard to sew, and generally sucks. So it is unsurprising that it is no longer marketed. I think I'm mostly going to give up on having serial numbers for clothes; I don't own much that doesn't match with jeans, which is the only reason I'd need serial numbers. I'll have to be careful about dress clothes. It's surprising how few solutions have come along in the last 10 years for blind people dealing with clothes and that none of them actually seem to work. The most promising solution seems to be scanning UPC codes or other bar codes attached to the clothes. Even that is not quite ready for prime time yet.

As usual when looking at assistive products I found some amazingly useless and poorly marketed items. My favorite from this time around was a series of tactile dots you could attach to things. The product is probably useful but the description was perhaps overly imaginative. They proposed these dots would be ideal for labeling furnature. "Yep, that's a chair." I guess there are situations where furnature is identical accept for color, but they seem rare and for the most part avoidable.

Comments

[dariaphoebe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same thing, and make the same snide comment:-\

[hartmans]

I don't think RFID is there yet for this use case. I think it will be in a few years. My understanding is that it works for crates of stuff but not so much individual stuff so much. Also, software and hardware pricing is targeted at well the world's largest retailer not at me.