What’s MemShot?

It’s a Spaced Repetition system built on flashcards.

Spaced Repetition is a memory system developed to help memorize things as efficiently as possible.

There are a number of flashcard systems out there, but here are a few features of MemShot that most of the others don’t have:

Email Reminders

We all need a little help with the motivation sometimes, but it only takes a few minutes each day to keep your memory sharp.

MemShot can remind you to practice daily and let you know what needs work.

Weekly Progress

Each week, MemShot sends you a progress report so you can bask in the glory of your path to mastery.

Daily Tracking

MemShot is now integrated with Supernifty’s goal tracker.

This tool helps you track what you are doing every day and form new habits. Learn more about goal tracker.

Timed Challenges

Having as long as you like to answer a question is not the same as the pressure of a real life situation of needing to be able to recall something immediately. For example, when you are speaking a foreign language, the other person is unlikely to have infinite patience.

Enter timed challenges.

Once a certain level of proficiency is reached, time limits are introduced.

Many people find the pressure of a time limit confronting – great practice for real life situations which typically include pressure to perform.

Shared Sets with Updates

Share your set by clicking the pencil next to “Private”.

Find public sets by clicking more learning sets.

MemShot now supports notifications – if an imported set has new items added to it you’ll get an icon next to that set to import the updates.

Want to learn more?

• Try MemShot
• Further details about MemShot
• Questions? Contact us

If you have existing decks in Anki and would like to try them in MemShot, you can now import your Anki decks into MemShot.

What’s MemShot?

A free web-based learning system built on Flashcards and Spaced Repetition to make learning things like a new language fun and efficient. More about MemShot.

How to import your Anki decks into MemShot:

1. Start up Anki. You need to be using at least version 2 of Anki;
2. Choose File->Export. You can either export all decks or choose a specific one. Note that when you import into MemShot it will be imported as a single learning set;
3. Visit MemShot Importer and login if required;
4. Choose a set name for the imported deck along with any other required options;
5. Next to the Import from Anki option, select your exported Anki file. This file should have the .apkg extension;
6. Click Add Items; and
7. You’re done! Start learning with MemShot!

Public Anki decks

Anki has many publicly available learning sets that can now easily be imported and used in MemShot.

Why MemShot?

There are a number of Spaced Repetition Flashcard based learning systems available.

MemShot is free, fun and easy to use. It is actively being developed with new features regularly added. In fact, if you’d like to see a feature, suggest it!

Limitations

The Anki import feature currently has some limitations:

• Images and sounds are currently not imported. Support for media files is in progress.
• Special formatting of text e.g. colours, fonts is currently not supported.

We hope you try out your Anki decks with MemShot. If you do, let us know how it goes!

Here’s a screenshot:

Playalong helps you learn new songs on your guitar, ukulele or banjo with chords, lyrics, a beat and strumming sounds. Each song’s timing matches that of the original song.

It’s the easiest way to learn a new song, or play along to an old favourite.

There’s over 50 songs to choose from, with new songs regularly being added.

More cool features:

• Easily transpose the song into any key
• Speed up or slow down the song to suit
• Easy to use chord finder for guitar, ukulele and banjo

Wanna learn more? Check it out on the app store.

Don’t have an iPad or iPhone? Have a look at Playalong Online. It’s pretty fun, too.

Memory masters like Dominic O’Brien use spaced repetition to memorize incredible amounts of information efficiently – now you can too.

Create your own set of flashcards, then MemShot tracks your progress and ensures that you work only on items that most need practice – much more efficient than traditional learning systems.

To get started, go to MemShot and start adding facts. Then click “Practice” to start learning.

The software includes many features to help you on your path to mastery; for instance:

Progress Reports! MemShot keeps track of your progress so you can see how well you are learning – are you progressing well or do you need to up the ante?

Trouble Spots! MemShot keeps detailed records of your progress on every fact and you can easily see which items are causing you the most trouble.

Reminders! MemShot can keep your motivation ticking over by reminding you when it is time to practice.

Sharing! Although experts suggest that creating your own sets helps with the learning process, you can also share learning sets. If you create a set that may interest others, click the “share” button.

With just a few minutes each day with MemShot, you can look forward to memorizing an impressive amount of information.

Did you know – Jeopardy winner Roger Craig used Spaced Repetition as part of his training?

Feedback is welcome. We have many ideas for improving MemShot. If you have one, let us know.

What now?

• Start your path to an incredible memory with MemShot
• Learn more about MemShot

Also covered in less depth are some other components in Python’s data analysis ecosystem. There are chapters on iPython and NumPy. A chapter on plotting and visualization provides a great rundown of matplotlib, along with mention of alternatives like chaco and mayavi.

Pandas is then presented in significant depth, with sections on data storage, data transformation, data aggregation and time series analysis. This forms the bulk of the book.

This is a well-written book that provides a good summary of Python’s data analysis capabilities, however, it will not teach you how to do data analysis. This book will show you how to use the Pandas library.

Note: This book was provided by O’Reilly Media as part of their blogger review program.

Topics covered include:

• Basic image handling and processing in Python
• Image descriptors and points of interest
• Image mapping and homographies
• Augmented reality
• 3D scene reconstruction
• Clustering, searching and classifying images
• Image segmentation and
• Interfacing to OpenCV

Python forms an integral part of this book and is used throughout the book. It is an ideal language for this purpose, being easy to understand and with excellent libraries. The scientific library numpy is used extensively.

This book is well-written, easy to understand and a lot of fun. There was a heavy emphasis on practicality which I appreciated.

Typically the theory would first be explained in text, then implemented in code. Finally a practical example would demonstrate how to apply the theory.

There are some great examples. This is where the book shines.

For instance, in the chapter on image classification, we are given an image of a Sudoku. The grid location is first determined, then the contents of each cell in the grid are classified into digits.

It was great to see some machine learning algorithms applied to real problems. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) is used extensively. SVM (Support Vector Machines) and the Naive Bayes Classifier are also used to solve real computer vision problems.

The author clearly knows his stuff, often pointing out pitfalls and demonstrating many handy tricks.

A very enjoyable and recommended introduction to the world of computer vision.

Note: This book was provided by O’Reilly Media as part of their blogger review program.

Their study suggests that by far the most important factor in acquiring a skill is the time spent deliberately practicing the desired skill.

“Deliberate practice” simply means “no goofing around”.

The authors of the paper studied a bunch of different domains such as music, chess and the scientific endeavour. They found that roughly 10000 hours of deliberate practice is required to become the expert.

This is a lot of hours. For instance, at 20 hours a week this will take 10 years.

However, the great thing about this is that you are master of your own destiny. If you put your mind to it and put in the effort, the world is your oyster. Pursue your passion!

To help calculate your path to mastery, Supernifty has included a tool to figure out when you will be the next chess grandmaster or tennis world number one. Simply fill in the fields below:

If you are serious about mastering a skill, consider trying the Hourly Time Tracker to see how you are really spending your time. A “mastery” column predicts which activities you are becoming an expert at.

You might be a little sad to discover that you are rapidly becoming an expert at “work” or “TV”. Think about the incredible human body that you have been blessed with. Is this truly what you want to spend your life getting good at?

Supernifty se complace en anunciar que ahora es compatible con la velocidad de Scrabble en español.

Si tu eres un nativo hablante de español, o si quiere practicar el idioma español, juega con velocidad Scrabble en españole!

To play Speed Scrabble using the Spanish dictionary:

• Visit Speed Scrabble
• Login
• Click “Play”
• Click the pencil next to “English”, to change it to “Spanish”
• Click “Start game”
• Make words in Spanish! ¡Excelente!

This is a new feature so if you encounter any problems, please
contact us.

Thanks Brunina for the Spanish translation

Things like:

• exercising daily,
• learning a new language and
• finishing my masterpiece.

A bad way to learn a new skill or form a new habit is to have a short-lived exuberance of enthusiasm before returning to the old you. This has been my usual strategy.

This boom-bust cycle is deflating and makes the next effort even harder.

The solution!

Doing a little each day and tracking progress appears to be quite successful at maintaining motivation.

Supernifty’s habit-forming tool can help out with this.

Set your goals, then click in the appropriate day when you complete a goal. Simple.

If you’re like me, or Jerry Seinfeld, then you are well on your way to cementing some valuable habits.

Stars and Streaks and Jerry Seinfeld

The story goes that Jerry Seinfeld needed a way to keep himself motivated when writing, so came up with the “Don’t break the chain” method. Each day he would draw a line on his calendar to indicate that he had done a little comedy writing that day.

After a short time, the motivation became to keep the chain going.
Soon after, Jerry Seinfeld had created one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

Supernifty’s goal tracking tool shows a “streak” statistic to emulate this idea. Keep the streak going! Be like Jerry!

Long Term Progress

One motivating factor in the habit-forming game is to try to maintain or improve my performance compared to previous weeks.

Click on “All weeks” to see how your habit-forming is progressing. It’s also easy to filter on a specific habit.

Finally…

If you’ve had trouble forming new habits in the past, then this goal tracking tool could be the ticket.

This same web page includes a tool to track how you spend your time – just hide this if you are only interested in the goal tracker.

Feedback is always welcome. If you have ideas or thoughts, or it has helped you out, let us know!

The book includes sections on nutrition, eating habits, exercise, sleeping and other lifestyle decisions.

Many of the principles advocated in this book mirror those of the “paleo” movement, which is based on the diet and exercise patterns of humans from the paleolithic age. The theory is that the human body hasn’t had time to adapt to the modern life.

The author begins by describing why the human body is not well suited to the modern life. Sitting around all day eating a diet high in saturated fat is less than optimal. Makes sense.

The next section covers nutrition. This section of the book is informative and well written, first covering the “macronutrients” – carbohydrates, protein and fat, before moving onto vitamins and micronutrients. All very interesting and useful. Many useful resources are provided for analyzing what you eat and assessing your diet.

Next is a chapter promoting an idea not heard too often – the health benefits of fasting for significant periods. It’s an interesting idea – usual dietary advice is to have a good breakfast; this chapter advocates skipping breakfast.

The book progresses to exercise and the author recommends intense, short workouts – he cites the Tabata workout. Also recommended is variety in exercise regimes by using systems like crossfit.

The section on resistance training was good, however much of the fitness advice is simply the preference of the author and doesn’t seem to be based on any particular best practice.

This book reminded me of “The Four Hour Body“, which was primarily a book of ideas to investigate further, rather than advice provided by an expert in the field. Both books lack the scientific rigour to back up much of the supplied “wisdom”.

The connection to “geeks” was tenuous. For example in the section on sleep, there was, inexplicably, a page of source code to connect to the Zeo sleep monitor. A variety of gadgets for health tracking were reviewed in the book.

Overall, the sections on nutrition and resistance training were great, sometimes the rest felt a little patchy.

Note: This book was provided by O’Reilly Media as part of their blogger review program.