Pack it / Know it

What I'm going to do here today is different because I have a need and not a way of solving it, maybe some loose notions of how it should go, but not really any idea of how it could work. That and it is two things.

Packing is a pain. Like packing to move. Real pain. First it is tough getting stuff in the right places and second it is tough remember what is where on the other end when you're unpacking. Now, as I warned above I really don't know how to resolve this. But basically I want you to be able to just sort of shove things into boxes, really like scooping them up and shoving them and then I want something (probably a computer) to tell you which box all your stuff is in. Like there could be a computer program that has picture of 20 boxes and you could find a manifest for what is exactly in each box.

One thought I had was putting all of your stuff on a conveyor belt and having some sort of sorting machine judge their size and fragility and wrap and box accordingly while simultaneously recording what is going to end up where. But this of course intuits a fairly large and complex machine that probably couldn't be portable and would require you to go to it instead of it coming to you. And probably this isn't such a big problem for people that they need to go out of the way to do any of this.

I was also thinking tho that, for the cataloging side of things, maybe there could be just something simply like the isight camera on the mac and you could hold an item in front of it as you drop it into a box and then the item would be recorded as property of that box. And of course representing this graphically could be really cool too.

And I guess my only other thought on the 'being able to box shit up willy-nilly' issue would be something like a box full of some crazy packing substance--yet to be invented either--that would allow you just to sort of fling your wares into it and it would like respond to their density or something and let the heaviest objects move towards the bottom and the lighter nearer the top and all of it would be some sort of dry yet gelatinous mass that was perfectly cushioning for everything from glassware to electronics.

Right. At least it was a fun through experiment right?