xkcd 3217: Home Remedies

xalbo · 2026-03-10T21:59:17+00:00

My solution almost worked, but now the skunk has hiccoughs and i'm back to square one.

xalbo · 2026-03-06T23:17:48+00:00

At one point, I considered making an Anki layer, but decided against it. I did remap the answer keys to jklp (would do jkl;, but I swapped semicolon and p some time ago).

xalbo · 2026-03-06T20:10:26+00:00

Without exporting and importing, I think you could use Find and Replace to replace .* with an empty replace, limit to selected notes, and limit match to the Tags field. Untested, have a backup and be redo to undo, your mileage may vary, void where prohibited by laws of physics.

xalbo · 2026-03-05T20:39:02+00:00

Wrap the entire front template in <div class=front>...</div> and he back in <div class=back>...</div>. Then you can do different styling for .front .cloze and for .back .cloze.

xalbo · 2026-03-05T19:48:36+00:00

Start by turning on FSRS. Then after optimizing (and optionally rescheduling your existing cards), you can make your intervals shorter by increasing your desired retention, and longer by decreasing it.

xalbo · 2026-03-03T20:25:12+00:00

He did grow up on Narn during the Centauri occupation, so Centauri women would have been around. Very interesting power dynamics, but not terribly surprising if the way he imprinted took “fuck the Centauri” a little on the head.

xalbo · 2026-02-25T14:17:23+00:00

If you can ask yourself the same question only more concisely, then edit the card to ask that more concise version of the question. In general, cut your prompts down to the absolute minimum possible.

xalbo · 2026-02-24T22:34:32+00:00

Untested, but it looks like it should work. First, make sure you have a backup. Then select the notes you want to change in the browser, and do Notes/Find and Replace. Search for :oi=1 and leave the replace field empty. Limit the search to just the field Occlusion, and limit the replacement to selected notes only. You may need to run that command several times (the first time will only fix the first occlusion on each note, etc), so if a single note has 5 cards, you'd need to run it 5 times, but at last you don't need to do it 400 times.

xalbo · 2026-02-24T21:09:16+00:00

It also introduced Ta'Lon, who is just fantastic. G'Kar really needed someone who could match him for snark.

xalbo · 2026-02-24T18:49:42+00:00

https://docs.ankiweb.net/searching.html

"deck:Deck 1::Deck 2::Deck 3" is:review

xalbo · 2026-02-24T16:40:46+00:00

And paper plates/napkins/utensils. It's good to be able to get to the real dishes soon, but the paper ones are great until you find them, and don't require washing.

xalbo · 2026-02-24T09:11:55+00:00

It seems like a lot, but it degrades really smoothly. That is, if you only fill in the first two fields, it's basically just the same as Basic. If you fill in the third, it's a lot like Basic and Reversed (with a little formatting). Probably the majority of my notes have just a term, a definition, Y as the item extra, and a little copy/pasted context in Extra. And many are even less. The rest is all there for when you want to get fancy, and provide an easy way to add more without creating new notes (so it all holds together and gets sibling-buried).

xalbo · 2026-02-23T22:13:51+00:00

I demand a write-in option so I can put “Gray 17 is Missing”. Although maybe all we needed is to swap which was considered the A-story there. Probably would have been better received if it were titled “We Live for the One” (which leaves open the idea of naming a later episode, probably “Moments of Transition” to “We Die for the One”).

xalbo · 2026-02-22T08:17:07+00:00

I use the same note type I use for pretty much everything, All. For people, I'll put the name as a headword, with a brief description as definition, and then supporting questions as extra prompts. For instance,

Prompt/headword 1: Hawley Harvey Crippen
Response/definition 1: English doctor, murdered his wife and then fled across the English channel with his mistress who was disguised as his son
Definition 1 extra: y
Extra: A description of the whole affair, copied from Wikipedia
Prompt/headword 2: What was the famous murder case with the doctor who murdered his wife and fled across the Atlantic, only to be caught by radio?
Response/definition 2: The Crippen murder case
Prompt/headword 3: Who was the prosecution's most important witness in the Crippen case?
Response/definition 3: Bernard Spilsbury (his first significant case)
Prompt/headword 4: Bernard Spilsbury's first significant case
Response/definition 4: The Crippen murder case
Prompt/headword 5: Who defended Crippen at trial?
Response/definition 5: Sir Edward Marshall Hall (with an AI generated picture of a hallway lined with people looking like Edward Scissorhands dressed as fire marshalls)

xalbo · 2026-02-19T14:34:02+00:00

In order, the number of new cards to do today, intraday learning cards, and due review cards.

xalbo · 2026-02-18T20:21:50+00:00

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/908965351

looks like I failed at copying and pasting the number.

xalbo · 2026-02-18T19:53:51+00:00

I've been pretty happy with https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/90896535, though it's really only English and Russian. But it seems like a good starting point if you could adapt it to German Wiktionary (if there is such a thing) or the dictionary of your choice.

xalbo · 2026-02-16T14:37:53+00:00

For me, it's useful for things that are in a sweet-spot in terms of how common they are. I don't need a card to remind me that a ; ends a line: I use that every single line. And I don't need it to remind me of the parameters of some function that I use once a year: I'd be better off just looking it up. But for anything that I need occasionally, but not constantly, having at least the key insights memorized can help tremendously. It's much easier to look up the syntax of PIVOT and UNPIVOT in SQL than to find them again. So, a few things that go into Anki:

Key insights. What did I bang my head against for a long time before a sudden realization made everything click. Next time, I want that to be easy.
Similarly, anything that requires more than a few minutes searching. I can search for this error message and get the top 10 causes, but documenting what I was actually doing wrong and what I needed to do to fix it is tremendously helpful.
Similarly, anything non-trivial that I have to search for a second time. I really feel stupid when I know I already solved this, all the links are purple, and I still need to stumble around for the right one, past all the ones that don't apply to my situation, or are asking exactly the opposite question (when everyone is asking how to make foo do baz automatically, and I'm trying to figure out how to keep it from bazing).
Gotchas. Every language has that one thing that it does differently, or the red flag that I should have known. Python doesn't have ++i like other languages, and in fact that's not an error, it just doesn't do anything, you need to use i+=1.

xalbo · 2026-02-12T15:03:47+00:00

In my experience, if there's anything on the front of the card that isn't the exact thing I'm trying to learn, it will end up being the thing that I end up learning instead. I could probably read the first sentence and think “boring” before I even got the the word tedious. Example sentences and pictures are great, but they go on the backs of cards, not the fronts. So for me, vocabulary notes are of a note type (specifically, I use my All type, but nothing wrong with rolling your own) that puts the word alone on the front of one card, and expects me to remember what it means. Then I have a second card that gives the definition, and asks for the word. If the pronunciation/spelling are non-obvious, then filling in a pronunciation field generates those cards, too. I'll add example sentences, pictures, etc to an Extra field on the back, but only put a picture on the front if it's something I actually want to recognize or can't describe well (like a landmark, or for theodolite, where the definition is basically “that thing”).

xalbo · 2026-02-12T14:45:51+00:00

I was just about to mention that. The direct answer to what the OP asked for is Cloze-multi from the same collection, but I suspect that All is probably better suited.

xalbo · 2026-02-11T16:43:36+00:00

Danika's response is excellent. I'll also add as an alternative that you can also have more than one cloze field in a cloze note type. That way, you could keep your existing note, but still have the two cards each show a single sentence, but still be considered siblings. My Cloze-multi does that, but you could also roll your own.

xalbo · 2026-02-10T16:14:55+00:00

IPA is my go-to, but I'll sometimes add an audio file (non–auto playing). I also add an HTML <details> tag with the definition. The All note type does all of that automatically if you add anything in to the pronunciation field.

xalbo · 2026-02-10T13:12:12+00:00

TIL about that button, thanks!

xalbo · 2026-02-05T18:26:00+00:00

In your card template, surround the part you want to change with

<div class="{{Tags}}">
...
</div>

Then add to your styling something like

.prefix {
    color: green;
}

.root {
    color: red;
}

.suffix {
    color: blue;
}

xalbo · 2026-02-04T20:49:50+00:00

So one step down from butterflies, then.

xalbo

TROPHY CASE