← All Workshop Notes

June 2026

Making great progress on the World Geography and History of Rome projects. The curation and card addition flows for both are refined to a point where adding new cards is rather straightforward.

World Geography

Added a whole new deck: World Countries covering 194 sovereign states, each card showing the highlighted country polygon on a map, flipping to reveal flag, capital, largest city, population, area, languages, and currency.

  • Notable quality improvements to the Notable World Cities deck:
    • Anki tags - cards tagged by Tier, Continent, Country, plus Capital/UNESCO/GaWC flags for easy filtering.
    • Dedicated sort order - cards ordered by continent then country rather than letting Anki decide arbitrarily.
    • Pixel-based label offsets - Labels at high latitudes no longer float away from their markers.
    • Master CSV corrections - fixed city name discrepancies with Wikipedia, corrected coordinates and metadata.
  • Majorly increased the scope of the Natural Earth Features deck. Now includes rivers, lakes and notable peaks as context, all using Natural Earth data. Improved the curation workflow a little bit to offset this.
  • Immediately decreased the scope of the Natural Earth Features deck to just cover mountain ranges and created a prototype deck for it. Still many issues to iron out here before re-expanding scope to include everything else.
  • Overhauled the pipeline generation script to use an interactive command line interface. No more memorising which flags to combine, just answer the prompts.

The History of Rome

Getting through about 6 episodes of The History of Rome podcast a week. Covered 50 out of 193 episodes so far. Roughly half a year to go.

  • Added Roman History content up to the fall of Alesia.
  • Coverage now spans from the founding of Rome (753 BC) up to 52 BC.
  • Improved validation so card quality is a bit more consistent.
  • Added a proper suite of unit tests since the generation scripts have gotten pretty complicated.
  • Added a belligerents and outcome header to battle and war cards.
  • The generated timeline now shows what events fall under a war much more cleanly.
  • Did a full deck review pass to tighten card quality across all episodes added so far.
  • Refined the importance scale to be clearer and more consistently applied across cards.

Untitled Writing Project

  • Continued writing and worldbuilding.

~ The Amateur Perfectionist