World Geography
Continuing on the v3.0 work started last month. Most of what's left to do is photo curation, a relatively slow-going (but interesting!) process, and the Australia deep-dive deck.
- World Countries cards now list each country's land borders.
- About halfway done curating photos for the World Countries deck. The photo picker needed a bit of improvement to try to tackle the very inconsistent tagging across Wikimedia Commons.
- Figured out a theme for the Australia deck around the Red Centre.
- Started planning what categories to include in the Australia deck and how it'll be ordered (by state, probably).
The History of Rome
Covered 128 out of 189 episodes so far. Coverage now spans from the founding of Rome (753 BC) up to AD 272.
- Planning to cover the Crisis of the Third Century. No promises, but I've been moving pretty fast lately, so I might get well into the Tetrarchy or even the Constantinian dynasty.
- Added the reigns of Valerian, Gallienus and Claudius Gothicus, and now working on Aurelian (one of my favourite emperors).
- The pipeline now exports a version of the deck for The Everything App's new Study tab (see below), timeline included.
- Daydreamed up an illustrated edition of the deck, with coins, paintings, ancient art and photos of sites on the backs of cards as context. This nice little dream comes packaged with the nightmare of image licensing, so I'm not dedicating any real effort to it just yet.
- Tidied up some card wording.
- Most battles and events on the timeline that were missing participants have found them.
- Decluttered the growing list of Anki tags to make them more useful.
The Everything App
I'm running out of problems to fix with this app, so I've decided to invent some more by tying my projects together.
- Adding a Study tab: spaced-repetition reviews for my own History of Rome and World Geography decks, using the same algorithm as Anki but without its limitations. There are (nearly) no limits to what I can do in my own app!
- Started with the History of Rome deck, with World Geography to follow. The decks will still work in Anki, but the extras live in The Everything App.
- The morning brief now includes how many cards are due, with a daily reminder on top if that isn't enough.
- Cards can be flagged mid-review, and a Problems view picks out the cards I keep getting wrong, take too long on, or confuse with another card. This lets me catch cards that might need tweaking but slip past me during my own reviews.
- Each deck now opens on a home screen: the deck's entries as a searchable list, coloured by how well the algorithm thinks I'll remember each one a month from now.
- The History of Rome's timeline was going to be its home, but it's a lot to take in on a phone, so it's a tap away from the list instead.
- Any entry can be studied on its own, as a review of its due cards, its next ten new cards, or a cram, narrowed by tier or tag if needed.
- The Cookbook's Recipes list now opens with whatever's planned for today.
- Tidied up the shopping list, and fixed weekly pantry items only ever being added to it once.
- Added a number of improvements to the Fitness Tracker to handle race results, inspired by my 5 km PB at the Corporate Challenge.
- Simplified the Pantry.
- The Budget Tracker now complains if you're not using it.
- Tidied up a whole lot of spoon-feeding text.
Untitled Writing Project
- Still writing.