Recently I’ve been wondering how long it would take me to get to 1,000,000 reviews. Right now I’m sitting at between 800,000 and 900,000 reviews and for no other reason than pure ridiculous curiosity I was curious whether I could get SQLite to compute it directly for me. Turns out the answer is “yes, you can.”
CAUTION Before you run anything that accesses the Anki database outside of the Anki application itself, you absolutely should backup your database first.
While working on a project that requires querying the Anki database directly outside of the Anki desktop application, I encountered an interesting issue with sqlite3 collations. This is is just a short post about how I went about registering a collation in order to execute SQL queries against the Anki db.
CAUTION Before you run anything that accesses the Anki database, you absolutely should backup your database first.
Like many Anki users, I keep track of my streaks because it motivates me to do my reviews each day. But since life gets in the way sometimes, I may miss my reviews in one or more decks. It has been years since I’ve neglected to do all of my reviews; but sometimes I will forget to come back later in the day to finish up some of my decks. Since I like to have a clean review heatmap, I will “fix” my streak in a skipped deck.
I use ArchiveBox extensively to save web content that might change or disappear. While a REST API is apparently coming eventually, it doesn’t appear to have been merged into the main fork. So I cobbled together a little application to archive links via a POST request. It takes advantage of the archivebox command line interface. If you are impatient, you can skip to the full source code. Otherwise I’ll describe my setup to provide some context.
So this is a little esoteric, but it meets a need I encountered; and it may meet yours if you use Espial, Keyboard Maestro and are on macOS.
For several years I’ve been using Espial a bookmark manager that looks and feels like Pinboard, but is both self-hosted and drama-free1. Espial is easy to setup, stores its data in a comprehensible sqlite database and has an API, which comes in handy when it came to solving the problem I encountered.
The Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers have always been a favourite for tinkering; and the massive popularity of the Arduino based on the ATmega 168 and 328 MCUs introduced a lot of hobbyists to this series. The companion ATtiny series from Atmel were the poor stepchildren of the ATmega controllers to an extent - useful for small projects but often quite limited. However, the acquisition of Atmel by Microchip Technology in 2016 ushered in a new series of MCUs bearing the same moniker of ATtiny, but much more capable and innovative.
While Apple is slowly coming around to recognizing that some of its users listen to classical music, there is one quirk in the Music app on macOS that betrays its deep bias toward pop music. It’s this: when you create a new playlist, the application defaults to displaying the tracks in its “Playlist” view, which as far as I can tell serves no other function than to consume real-estate in the UI by displaying a thumbnail of the album art.
Some airports in X-Plane have terrain issues that can be quite entertaining.
This Delta 737-800 got lost in the maze of cargo ramps at PANC and was trying to taxi back to the terminal when it encountered a steep icy taxiway. It required 65% N1 just to get up the slope.
Clearly a fix is required. It turns out to be quite simple. In the global airports file apt.
As its name implies, the AwesomeTTS Anki add-on is awesome. It’s nearly indispensable for language learners.
You can use it in one of two ways:
Subscribe on your own to the text-to-speech services that you plan to use and add those credentials to AwesomeTTS. (à la carte) Subscribe to the AwesomeTTS+ service and gain access to these services. (prix fixe) Because I had already subscribed to Google and Azure TTS before AwesomeTTS+ came on the scene, there was no reason for me to pay for the comprehensive prix fixe option.
I make a lot of Anki cards, so I’m on a constant quest to make the process more efficient. Like a lot of language-learners, I use images on my cards where possible in order to make the word or sentence more memorable.
Process When I find an image online that I want to use on the card, I download it to ~/Documents/ankibound. A Hazel rule then grabs the image file and converts it to a .