Flashcard

[frostschutz]

AutoShelf・FlashCard・HyphenDicts・MagicMemory・MiniClock・NickelIcons・ScreenSaver・UsbDebug・WebPortal・(GitHub)

--- FlashCard ---

This is coming from an old thread ( Flashcards app for kobo glo ) and if you're looking for an other alternative I guess this one is worth mentioning too ( What's the vocabulary builder like? (hidden feature) ).

I create a flashcard app ( Wikipedia on Flashcard and Spaced repetition ) for Kobo. It pops up while you read and forces you to study. So you read, study, read, study, read, ... switching between the two modes is kind of seamless, you continue reading right where you left off ( see also user interaction while nickel is running? ).

You can customize how many cards should be shown per session, and how many minutes / pageflips should be between sessions. The only way to get out of a session and continue reading, is to answer all the cards.

Cards are chosen randomly. For each card you can answer whether it was "easy" or "hard", and doing so changes the probability for that card. "easy" cards are half as likely to appear again, whereas "hard" cards will be twice (or four, eight) times as likely.

So unlike a big SRS application like Anki, which has a concept of time and "due cards" there is no time based scheduling here. Any card can appear at any time, it's just more likely to show a card you don't know well.

Cards are image files which you have to create yourself - I used inkscape / imagemagick for that. On the downside that means you can't just put a text file in there, on the upside it gives you total freedom in terms of design and layout of cards. You can also use transparency and use background images shared by all cards, so you don't have to duplicate data and image files stay reasonably small.

To illustrate, here's an animated gif:



I'll provide a sample deck set so you get the idea.



To install, copy KoboRoot-FlashCard-<version>.tgz » .kobo/KoboRoot.tgz

It will create .addons/flashcard/ with a sample config file. You'll have to add a deck too.

To uninstall, set uninstall=1 in .addons/flashcard/flashcard.cfg

[frostschutz]

Here's how I create flashcard images. (this is very specific to the data I exported from my Anki kanji deck, but the idea in general would work for other things, too)

First you write an SVG file and style it up the way you want:

<svg width="1080" height="1440">
  <style>
    .kanji { font-family: "EPSON 教科書体Ｍ";
             font-size: 900px;
    }
    .reading1 { font-family: "EPSON 教科書体Ｍ";
               font-size: 50px;
    }
    .reading2 { font-family: "EPSON 教科書体Ｍ";
               font-size: 50px;
    }
    .meaning1 { font-family: "Linux Libertine Display O";
                font-size: 50px;
                font-style: italic;
    }
    .meaning2 { font-family: "Linux Libertine Display O";
                font-size: 50px;
    }
    .graphem { font-family: "Linux Libertine Display O";
               font-size: 40px;
    }
  </style>
  <text class="kanji" x="50%" y="54%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">KANJI</text>
  <text class="reading1" x="50%" y="66%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">READING1</text>
  <text class="reading2" x="50%" y="71%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">READING2</text>
  <text class="meaning1" x="50%" y="80%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">MEANING1</text>
  <text class="meaning2" x="50%" y="85%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">MEANING2</text>
  <text class="graphem" x="50%" y="95%" alignment-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">GRAPHEM</text>
</svg>

Then you shell script the heck out of it:

#!/bin/bash

while read line
do
    kanji=$(printf "%s" "$line" | cut -f1)
    meaning=$(printf "%s" "$line" | cut -f2)
    reading=$(printf "%s" "$line" | cut -f3)
    graphem=$(printf "%s" "$line" | cut -f4)

    reading1=${reading%'<br>'*}
    reading2=""

    if [ "$reading1" != "$reading" ]
    then
        reading2=${reading#*'<br>'}
    fi

    meaning1=${meaning%'<br>'*}

    if [ "$meaning1" != "$meaning" ]
    then
        meaning2=${meaning#*'<br>'}
    else
        meaning1=""
        meaning2=$meaning
    fi

    echo $kanji , $reading1, $reading2 , $meaning1, $meaning2 , $graphem

    # generate question cards
    sed -r -e "s@KANJI@${kanji}@g" \
           -e 's@(READING[12]|MEANING[12]|GRAPHEM)@@g' \
           kanji.svg > question.svg
    inkscape --export-png=question/"$kanji".png question.svg > /dev/null &

    # generate answer cards
    sed -r -e "s@KANJI@@g" \
           -e "s@READING1@${reading1}@g" \
           -e "s@READING2@${reading2}@g" \
           -e "s@MEANING1@${meaning1}@g" \
           -e "s@MEANING2@${meaning2}@g" \
           -e "s@GRAPHEM@${graphem}@g" \
           kanji.svg > answer.svg
    inkscape --export-png=answer/"$kanji".png answer.svg > /dev/null &

    wait
    rm question.svg answer.svg

    # optimize
    ( convert -flatten question/"$kanji".png +dither -colors 2 png8:question/"$kanji".convert.png
      optipng -quiet question/"$kanji".convert.png
      mv question/"$kanji".convert.png question/"$kanji".png
    ) &

    ( convert answer/"$kanji".png +dither -colors 2 png8:answer/"$kanji".convert.png
      optipng -quiet answer/"$kanji".convert.png
      mv answer/"$kanji".convert.png answer/"$kanji".png
    ) &

    # wait # optimize can go into the next loop
done < kanji.txt

wait

And that's about it.

[frostschutz]

So I see this is sparking an overwhelming amount of interest. Well, it's another vaporware mod, so no wonder.

Anyway, I've been using this on my H2O for, well... two days now. It works well - except busybox segfaults and pickel segfaults as well so I need some workarounds for that.

Right now it's one big shell script, that only runs in one mode (the kind that interrupts your reading). I'd like to re-factor it so it can also be used as a standalone app, like launching it from KSM or whatever.

So this probably isn't entirely fit for release yet, but whatever. Here goes nothing.

[boriar]

Sorry frostschutz! You know how I appretiate your hard work with usefull (at least for me ) mods for Kobo but... I don't cacth the use of this mod
I know what the mod does, but not its practical use

[frostschutz]

Perhaps see Wikipedia on Flashcard and Spaced repetition. That's what this does, just using the ebook reader instead of flashcards.

And it works while you read. Read for 10 minutes (or 30 pages), then go through 25 flashcards, then continue reading for another 10 minutes. (Customizable).

This mod supports 1-sided, 2-sided, 3-sided cards; only problem is you have to create the cards as images for now. While fbink could display text directly, it doesn't work with arbitrary fonts or Japanese or ... for now. I see there is some work on that in the GitHub so maybe in future there will be a text mode too.

I'm using this with 2000 cards and the images (4000 files for question and answer side) are about ~30MB in total.

[boriar]

Thanks for the links. So it's basically a learning method but using the mental state of the reading time for memorize, isn't it?

[frostschutz]

Not sure what you mean by mental state.

For me it's about distractions and lack of discipline. I could study an hour per day using Anki software on PC or Smartphone, but I'm lazy, so instead I browse the web or read books. And when you check the time, somehow hours have passed by.

A flashcard app that (kind of) *forces* me to study has been on my personal wishlist for a long time, and only now I got around to create one. I also want to do this as a browser addon for the same reasons, I waste too much time browsing and too little time studying.

[Mrs_Often]

Thank you for linking to here from the old thread where someone requested a similar feature, otherwise I wouldn't have seen this

I'm quite interested! Except for the making of the flash cards (another time consuming thing that I must ignore because I might enjoy it more than actually using the flash cards and it will distract me from more important things I have to do )... Would it be possible to implement auto-card creation from the "My Words" feature in nickle? I have quite a lot of unknown-to-me words sitting in there and I never get around to looking at them... it would be really good to have them flash up at me whilst reading!

[sherman]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

I see there is some work on that in the GitHub so maybe in future there will be a text mode too.

I'm working on it! Still have some unresolved issues that I'm bashing my head against, but still, progress is being made.

BTW, I have the skeleton of a basic C touchscreen implementation floating around if anyone is interested. It reads events directly from "/dev/input/event1' (or any other event file for that matter).

[frostschutz]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

I'm quite interested!

Thanks

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Except for the making of the flash cards

Yes, I know. It's possible for me because I have ways to automate it, but I understand it's not for everyone. I'll try to add a plaintext based flashcard mode in the future (powered by the wonderful FBink tool), but it's not around the corner... the current code is very image-centric. Actually in some ways more likely someone finds a generic image-generation tool.

There used to be an addon for firefox that would allow you to create screenshots of HTML pages en masse which would allow for HTML-based flashcards (as many programs such as Anki use them) but it no longer works...

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Would it be possible to implement auto-card creation from the "My Words" feature in nickle?

I've never used that feature. It depends if that data is stored in plaintext somewhere - it doesn't sound easy if I have to pull it out of the dictionary myself.

[frostschutz]

I'm currently cobbling together a FlashCard Image Generator written in HTML/JS. So far it only generates a single image, not sure how it will perform on a larger scale, but if it works out, you'll be able to use your web browser to locally generate text-based flashcards from comma/tab-separated files (such as Anki exports). It's a low-priority project for me at the moment, so it may be vaporware for a while.



Anki actually has a similar addon already ( papercards https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2042118948 ) but it didn't work properly for me.

You can also find some printable PDF flashcards out in the wild, which could be used for this addon by converting the PDF flashcard to images, but it's hard to crop the correct regions for front / back.

[frostschutz]

Minor update, I'm not sure if this is a generic issue or something specific to my device, but I noticed that sometimes no matter where you touch, it sometimes registers as touching x=0 y=0

Which, when answering flashcards, would result in the wrong answer... so I made a workaround for regions to start at x=1 y=1 so x=0/y=0 is ignored. Also added a condition that the region must be hit twice in succession to be valid (a single touch usually reports 3-5 coordinate pairs for me so I'm requiring two for now).

Hopefully this will get rid of misdetections.

TODO:
- implement text/csv source deck, to be rendered by fbink's new truetype handling
- finish the half-done javascript flashcard generator anyhow
- re-factor the script to also allow standalone mode
- optimize deck logic, perhaps implement in C

[frostschutz]

...and now I'm working on a piano / sheet music flashcard deck (using some piano openclipart + lilypond sheet music typesetter).

And this is also the reason why I'll keep image support around even after adding support for flashcard textfiles (powered by fbink's truetype font). Some things just can't be done by text alone.

[Mrs_Often]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

I've never used that feature. It depends if that data is stored in plaintext somewhere - it doesn't sound easy if I have to pull it out of the dictionary myself.

Ah hmm yes I think it is just a list of words - clicking on any word brings up the dictionary so yep, probably a huge hassle to pull the words AND their definition into flashcards.

[RandomBoy]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Thank you for linking to here from the old thread where someone requested a similar feature, otherwise I wouldn't have seen this

I'm quite interested! Except for the making of the flash cards (another time consuming thing that I must ignore because I might enjoy it more than actually using the flash cards and it will distract me from more important things I have to do )... Would it be possible to implement auto-card creation from the "My Words" feature in nickle? I have quite a lot of unknown-to-me words sitting in there and I never get around to looking at them... it would be really good to have them flash up at me whilst reading!

I know it's a very old post, but I was wondering if by now someone has figure out how to implement the "My Words" list into flashcards of any sort?

@frostschutz It looks like your application is what comes close to this, so far?