I'm concerned about a few of my tools. See, I had the basic set of tools one would need to do woodworking and various other fabrication tasks when we lived in the Foster City place. I know where a lot of them are. The router is in the storage unit, along with the router table. The dremel is in the closet in the new place. But I have a bad feeling that I packed some tools in a storage locker in my apartment building, figuring I'd use them, and they were taken. I knew the Dremel was up there. But I'm coming up short some power tools -- most notably my circular saw and my handheld saber "band" saw.

I've got the geekroom laid out about right now, with the shelves where I want them to be. I've got two shelves in the closet and room for a wheeled cart. there, plus a stack of bins. It's quite a large closet, but the door is fairly small, so I have the stuff I won't need very often stuffed in the corners and the stuff I'll use more frequently towards the middle where I don't need to remove another box to get at things.

I've already decided that this time, I'm going to have all of my electronics working stuff on a wheeled cart that I can just plug power and the computer in when I'm using it and then leave it in the closet the rest of the time. Because you can't deny that an electronics workbench is always going to look messy.

I'm also working on making things more compact in other ways. See, I started out figuring that those little parts bins designed to hold nails and screws and other stuff were the way to go, with 40 odd bins per unit:

But that restricts the numbers of parts that I can have before I need to combine multiple things per bin. So that got old. I got some Jameco bug trays and I use those to store most of my chips:

The other day, I went to Fry's and picked up some little plastic tackle boxes. One stores all adapters, one stores switches and connectors, one stores all the oscillators, sorted by speed, and one stores LEDs. And then I made a little paper guide for which LEDs are in which slots in the LED bin since it's not always easy to sort a bunch of random LEDs correctly into piles. This way, I've still got a good number of bins free for the stuff that really does fit best in bins.

I finally got myself a replacement soldering iron. See, the old iron was a Radio Shack firestarter, with no on/off switch and without a good holder. The new iron is ESD safe and has a switch and a temperture control and a nice little holder with a sponge. So I'm kinda feeling like the Staple Gun XKCD, except with soldering instead of staples: