The SM-2 Algorithm Actually Is Too Aggressive on Substantially Overdue Cards
I did an informal study on my 13 years of Anki spaced-repetition history to settle a team question at RemNote: is our “Anki SM-2” algorithm (and Anki’s SM-2 ...
Posts by Category
- memory 20
- efficiency 11
- simplicity 11
- announcements 11
- sabbatical-updates 11
- filesystem 10
- debugging 10
- psychology 8
- design 8
- prevention 4
- notes 4
- math 2
- information 2
- scripting 1
- documentation 1
- books 1
- world 1
memory
Tweaking the Scheduler
Anki’s default scheduling settings are good enough in most cases. But sometimes they don’t work optimally with certain types of material or study pattern...
An Introduction to Mnemonics
Mnemonics is the art of reversibly substituting easy-to-remember things for difficult-to-remember ones.
Partnering with Anki
Less experienced and less successful spaced-repetition users tend to treat their SRS as a magic box: put information in, and knowledge comes out. In ...
When to Learn with Anki
After you’ve determined what to learn and how much to learn, you might wonder when you should do your study. In one sense, it doesn’t matter at all; ...
Case Studies in Writing Cards
In this post, we’ll look at three case studies of real things I added to my Anki collection recently and how I selected and wrote the cards.
Catching Up On Your Anki Reviews
Everyone gets behind on their reviews occasionally. Here are some strategies for getting back in Anki’s good graces when that happens.
Maintaining Your Collection
Maintenance might not be fun, but if you think doing maintenance isn’t fun, try not doing maintenance. Here’s a plan for keeping your collection neat...
What to Learn with Anki
If you start a spaced-repetition collection and diligently study every day, you might soon face an unusual question: what should you learn? Sometimes...
Organizing Your Cards
If you start seriously using spaced repetition and add material from all areas of your life, it can get tricky to keep track of all your cards. Maybe...
How Much to Learn with Anki
When you’re starting out with Anki or another SRS, you might wonder how much you can expect to learn with this newly efficient method of studying. Be...
Dealing with Leeches
One of the foundational principles of spaced repetition is separating easy cards from hard cards. We can then review the easy cards rarely and the hard c...
Rules for Designing Precise Anki Cards
Reviewing in Anki is easy: all you have to do is answer the question and press a button to indicate how well you remembered it. Creating the cards to...
Spaced Repetition Glossary
Spaced repetition has a bit of a learning curve of its own, but too much of it comes from not understanding a few relatively straightforward terms an...
Getting Started with Anki
By popular demand, the memory series is back! Thanks to all those who wrote to and asked me if I was going to write more. Over the next few weeks, we’ll ...
Spaced Repetition From The Ground Up
Last week we looked at three principles that combine to create an extraordinarily effective, scientific study method called spaced repetition. You ce...
Spaced Repetition
In today’s fast-paced, information-driven world, everyone must constantly learn new things. While learning itself can be challenging at times, rememb...
Human Memory by Example: Weaknesses
This is part two of “Human Memory By Example.” Last week we focused on strengths of human memory; this week we’ll look at weaknesses with an eye towards how ...
Human Memory by Example: Strengths
In my introduction to this series, I suggested:
Why You Still Need To Know Things
It’s hard to learn things, and it’s even harder to remember them after you learn them if you’re not using them constantly. Humanity has had this problem sinc...
efficiency
Fix it Forever
The pursuit of “lifehacks,” or solutions to small annoyances, seems to have recently caught a lot of flak. And there is good reason for some of the disli...
Time Assets and Debts
Time is the scarcest resource for many people in industrialized countries, and no matter what, it’s the only resource we can’t directly get more of. ...
Reverse Polish Notation
Reverse Polish Notation is a curious way of writing arithmetic operations. Instead of writing the operations between the numbers they apply to (called in...
Fix Your Control Key
Here’s a keyboard trick: although you may never have noticed it, the Control key on most keyboards isn’t in an effective position. If you have a desk...
The Control-Alt-Backspace Upgrade Strategy: Software
This is part two of a two-part series on my strategy for when and how to upgrade hardware and software for maximum effectiveness and minimum bother. ...
The Control-Alt-Backspace Upgrade Strategy: Hardware
This is part one of a two-part series on my strategy for when and how to upgrade hardware and software for maximum effectiveness and minimum bother. ...
Do It Right the First Time
There’s never time to do it right but always time to do it over. Meskimen’s Law
Just Get Started
If you like reading Control-Alt-Backspace, I expect there’s a decent chance that you also like doing things right. Maybe you’re not a perfectionist, but you ...
Why I Hate Texting
Except perhaps for the fax machine, texting is my least favorite extant form of communication. (Come to think of it, fax machines seem kind of cool and r...
Less-Quantifiable Benefits of Automation and Process Improvement
An engineer is someone who will spend three hours figuring out how to do a two-hour job in one hour. Anonymous
An Introduction to Keyboard Shortcuts
The computer mouse is a fabulous invention. It makes many things that would be extraordinarily frustrating without one (editing images and videos, finding op...
simplicity
The Inconvenience of Convenience: On Being Unreachable
There was a time, not so very long ago, when walking out your door meant you were no longer reachable by anyone who wasn’t physically next to you. At...
Book Review: Digital Minimalism
Every once in a while, I run into an article or book or website that eerily matches what I’ve been thinking about, and sometimes even writing abo...
Everything’s Broken, Everything’s Too Complicated
Today I took (and thankfully, given everything else that happened, passed) a Microsoft Azure certification exam. Of course I’m under an NDA on the exam, ...
A Complete Definition of Badness
One of the classics of The Onion’s video series is entitled “Sony Releases Stupid Piece of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work.” The segment discusses how...
On Scales, Skills, and Leaky Abstractions
Imagine for a moment one of the old-style balance-beam scales at a doctor’s office. You get on the scale and the nurse slides the weights across the beam...
Slow Pumpkin Bread
After last week’s post on slowing down and given the season, I figured this would be a good time to share my recipe for pumpkin bread, titled “No...
In Defense of Chalkboards
How many cruddy whiteboards have you used in your life? We have a bunch of them at my workplace. You draw on them and your marker squeals and skips. Then whe...
Buying Duplicate Items
People today need a lot of items to go about their daily life, and sometimes dealing with them can get annoying. I’ve rarely seen this discussed anywhere...
On Answering Nine Questions to Pay for Groceries
Last night, I went to get some groceries, as most of us do from time to time. Buying groceries seems like it should be simple: you go into the store,...
Why I Don’t Worry About Most Health Advice
Take one look at the news nowadays and you’re likely to see a heap of headlines proclaiming that you should or should not do or eat some thing be...
Why and How to Follow Websites with RSS
How do you get most of the news and other material you read nowadays? If you’re like most people, a lot of it comes from social media of one type or anot...
announcements
Short Posts and Short URLs
Two quick announcements this week.
Upcoming Sabbatical
I’m reaching the end of my stint as a developer and DevOps engineer at Federated Insurance. It’s been an excellent four years working with a lot of great...
Updates on Grok TiddlyWiki
Since several people have started to write to make sure I’m OK after seeing that I haven’t updated since my COVID-19 post, I figured it would be a go...
Another Victim of the Plague
Unfortunately I have somehow managed to come down with COVID-19, despite having 0 CDC-defined close contacts in the past two weeks and going nowhere ...
A Brief Pause
I neglected to mention last week that I was planning to take two weeks off from Control-Alt-Backspace posts due to a particularly busy period in my m...
Updated Likable Software Catalog
This week, I added several new entries to the Likable Software Catalog, which is based on my article about likable software. Each application in the...
No More Google Analytics
Since the beginning, Control-Alt-Backspace has been using Google Analytics, the most popular analytics service for websites. You likely visit dozens ...
Introducing the Likable Software Catalog
This week I am introducing the Control-Alt-Backspace Catalog, which will gather together content and tools of various types that align with the philo...
Edit Week 2
This is the second Edit Week in Control-Alt-Backspace history (see here for an explanation of Edit Week).
Selections from The Technical Geekery Archives
This week I have been busy finishing up a project to clean up and reformat the archives of The Technical Geekery, a blog and website I maintained...
Edit Week 1
This is the first occurrence of an institution on this blog that I’m going to call Edit Week and hope to repeat every few months. As you might have f...
sabbatical-updates
Sabbatical Update, Week 23: Final Reflections
In the final weeks of my sabbatical, I settled into my new home, finished up a variety of projects, and got ready to start a new job.
Sabbatical Update, Week 18: Moving
This was an action-packed couple of weeks mostly characterized by moving.
Sabbatical Update, Week 14: A Bunch of Stuff I Didn’t Plan On
Looks like it has been 6 weeks since I posted here! Things have not been going quite how I expected, but they should be back on track about now.
Sabbatical Update, Week 8: tzk and TiddlyRemember
This has been a whirlwind week and quite productive! I finished up with tzk for now and spent a lot of time working on TiddlyRemember, among other things.
Sabbatical Update, Week 7: Camping, Reading, and Writing
I wrote this on Saturday, but apparently forgot to publish it for 4 days. Whoops. Here’s what I was saying I was up to then.
Sabbatical Update, Week 6: Miscellaneous Weirdness
This week was an odd mixture of a lot of different things, and next week will likely be the same. Regardless, I am still greatly enjoying this whole sabbatic...
Sabbatical Update, Week 5: Three Cleanup Projects
A whirlwind week, as expected, and my work didn’t go the way I expected, but it was still good! I was visiting family from Friday to Monday 9/6.
Sabbatical Update, Week 4: Beginnings of tzk
A relatively quiet week. It was rainy almost the whole week, so I spent most of it inside reading and hacking on the Zettelkasten stuff.
Sabbatical Update, Week 3: Grok TiddlyWiki Updates
I can hardly believe it has only been 3 weeks since I left my job at Federated Insurance. These weeks have been packed full and felt very long – which is gre...
Sabbatical Update, Week 2: Neatening Up
This week felt really long and was unexpectedly tiring. I think that’s pretty normal after a big routine change, though – for me it usually takes about two w...
Sabbatical Update, Week 1: Camping
Welcome to my first sabbatical update post! I’ll be publishing one of these every Friday or Saturday (yeah, I know my first one is on Monday) which gathers t...
filesystem
Dealing With Duplicate Files
In the physical world, we encounter much difficulty because it’s hard to create copies of things: objects use finite resources and are expensive to produce, ...
When to Delete Files
By now we’ve studied a variety of organizational questions relating to filesystems in detail. But here’s a seemingly foundational one we haven’t touched ...
Managing Temporary Files
So you’ve followed the tips in the design section of this series, and you have a nicely laid out, organized filesystem. That’s great when you know where ...
The Art of Naming Files: Naming Conventions
In the previous post, we focused on the mechanics of naming, things like what characters we should be using and how we can make files sort appropriat...
The Art of Naming Files: Mechanical Considerations
There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Anonymous
Filesystem Links: Practical Advice for Design
In the previous post in this series, we discussed what links are, why you would want to use them, and what kinds of links are available. This wee...
Filesystem Links: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
In a recent post, we discussed why hierarchies are a problematic way of organizing files and how we can squash our files into a hierarchy when we hav...
Getting Your Filesystem Hierarchy Less Wrong
All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less. motto of the Mutt email client
Starting Off with a Backup
What would happen to your digital life if your house suddenly burned down tomorrow? Would you be all right, or would you have yet another nasty problem piled...
Why Keep a Local Filesystem?
I like to start out my series here on Control-Alt-Backspace by discussing why you should care about the topic. After all, if I can’t convincingly answer that...
debugging
Six Simple Solutions to Perplexing Tech Problems
Over the years, I’ve encountered quite a lot of tech problems, as someone who knows a lot about computers, writes software for a living, and has ...
One Big Problem
When I help family and friends with computer problems that get thorny, they often apologize for making me frustrated or causing trouble. The thing is, ...
Two Problems
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. Jamie Zawinski
It’s Probably Me
Back in my introduction to debugging, I observed that debugging often causes enormous frustration:
Take a Break
Debugging involves minutes or even hours of trial and error – and we tend to focus on the error part and get frustrated. Presented with error after error...
Scientific Method
Imagine for a moment that you’re an auto mechanic with a knack for attracting eccentric customers with unusual problems. Which of these scenarios would y...
Minimal Working Example
When we encounter a problem with a complex system, it’s easy to misidentify the problem. In other words, we can seize on some small piece of the syst...
Gather Information
It is impossible to solve a problem without some kind of information about the problem.
Talking to Ducks
Have you ever called or gone to bother a friend or coworker for some information you can’t think of, only to remember the answer the moment you ask? ...
Debugging in Real Life: An Introduction to Debugging
One of the most critical and least popular activities when developing and maintaining software is debugging – fixing code that has been written incor...
psychology
In What Sense Is AI Poetry Indistinguishable from Human Poetry? (Not the One You Think)
I “distinguished” 84 out of 87 poems. Inability to distinguish is likely reliable only temporarily and under lab conditions.
Don’t Measure the Quality of Your Life Using the Temperature of Your Nachos
A few years back, I read an anecdote somewhere on the web by a guy whose boss had won an all-expenses-paid trip to see an NFL game with amazing seats. The fo...
It’s the Commodification of Attention, Stupid
One of my Big Serious Goals for 2023 is to become more socially connected and make more really good friends in my new city, where I hope to be f...
Totally Enclosed Luminary: On Being Wrong Well
Last week, my hallway light burned out. As one does, I got up on my footstool in the dark, unscrewed the set screws carefully to avoid dropping the g...
Redesigning Motivation, or the Unexpected Benefit of Dishwashers
I bought a small countertop dishwasher for my apartment a few weeks ago. This is a box about eighteen inches on each side that fits on a counter or side ...
How to Slow Down
Reading and thinking lately, it’s becoming more and more clear to me that we all feel the world is moving too fast. I don’t pretend this feeling is u...
The Power of Names
I have found people have a tendency to discount or ignore the important role of having names for things in human thinking. This can lead to neglecting or...
The 2018 Concentration Project: A Review
Over the course of 2018, I’ve been undertaking an extended project which I’ve titled the 2018 Concentration Project. The goal was to improve my ability to co...
design
Two Takes on the Eternal September
September, and with it the start of classes at most educational institutions in the United States, is almost upon us. In honor of this, I’d like to l...
Yes, I Do Mind Reviewing Your App
Do you have a bunch of apps that constantly nag you to review them? The nicer ones have a “never ask me again” button or give up after one or two times, ...
On Welcome and Inclusion in Online Communities
The StackOverflow community is going through some interesting times right now. I’ve been following in great detail both because the community is an e...
The Art of the Sign
Ever since smartphone cameras became commonplace and you could quickly and conveniently grab a picture of anything anywhere, I’ve been taking pic...
A Design-Centered View of Digital Piracy
While the rage has died down in recent years, many of my readers will remember a time in the 2000s when big media companies were screeching nonstop p...
Against Deadlines
I just counted: I have 205 tasks in my task manager – without my reading list, purchases list, or blog ideas list. And that’s only counting my pe...
Dreamdir and the Unix Philosophy, or Likable Software
This weekend I released version 2.0.0 of my open-source Dreamdir file format and associated application, termed dr. Dreamdir is one of my tools for keepi...
Why and How to Focus on Requirements
I got in an argument at work during a meeting last week. It was one of those annoying arguments where you’re sure you actually agree with your opponent, ...
prevention
Supplement on Emergency Contraception Effectiveness
In my post on contraception, I mentioned emergency contraception only in passing, as something that was out of scope, but it’s come to my attention t...
Understanding the Long-Term Risks of Contraceptive Failure
Our data on contraceptive failure is terrible, and our education is worse. How can we as individuals improve our chances of avoiding unintended pregnancies?
A Blizzard Postmortem, Part 2: Analysis
As the title suggests, this is part 2 of a two-part post which began last week with my story of getting stranded in a blizzard. As discussed more ful...
A Blizzard Postmortem, Part 1: The Story
You may have noticed, if you read Control-Alt-Backspace regularly or if you pay close attention to the dates on my posts, that there was no scheduled...
notes
The Fortunes File
Some months ago we talked about commonplacing, a technique for recording quotations and other random ideas you come across. In this rather short post, ...
How and Why to Create a Commonplace
Commonplacing is an ancient technique for recording passages and ideas you run across while studying or living your life. The technique was developed...
Better Indexes Through Semantic Modeling: A Sketch
Over the past year or so, I’ve been sporadic with my daily journaling practice owing to a number of new note-taking and memory systems consuming my t...
Why Keep Notes?
Nearly every literate person has written notes for herself at some point in her life. However, most people haven’t spent much time thinking about all...
math
Understanding Percentages
Figures expressed in percentages are ubiquitous, and interpreting and doing calculations with them is an important part of the basic mathematical lit...
Does Speeding Make Sense?
Most Americans exceed the speed limit almost every time they drive, to the point that we rarely even think about it. The conventional wisdom is that we’r...
information
Free Speech: A Credo
I hesitate to write about politics on a blog that is rarely overtly political. But this is a special kind of politics. It is a kind of politics that tran...
The Magic of Index Cards
I find that nowadays the humble three-by-five index card is extremely underappreciated. True, some of the former roles of index cards are much better...
scripting
Scripting as Effective Communication
Take a moment right now to recognize how amazing a device a computer is. That little hunk of metal on your desk or in your pocket or in a vast se...
documentation
The Paradox of Documentation
When you buy a new consumer product, do you usually read through the manual? What if a small warning on the product says “read manual before using”? (I once ...
books
Best Books of 2021
I read about 30 books in 2021. Here were the ones that stood out the most; I highly recommend all of these.
world
How to Quickly Learn Your Way Around A New Place
I’m naturally pretty average at navigation. I’m not bad – at least since my teens, I’ve always been able to use a map (GPS-enabled or not) or listen ...
