Anki addon: maintained progress

Thanks for the work! I appreciate any effort that towards Anki integration into Beeminder. :blush:

I like the metric you’re tracking. Nice documentation, too! Personally (and right now), I track time spent studying since that is much easier to understand and to control for me than “backlog” or similar metrics. And as a consequence, it’s also effective in me not getting overwhelmed. But maybe my approach changes at some point, so it’s good to know of this (your) clever metric. :blush:

P. S. Still hoping there will be an integration that works on mobile, too. Would probably have to be an official one/through Beeminder folks since I don’t think add-ons work on mobile.

4 Likes

The moment people can write plugins for ankiweb, rather than a client, I will start setting up a Beeminder integration, either official or unofficial.

There is a third party ankiweb sync server. It appears to maybe be unmaintained. If it works well, or is maintained, the main downside (for me, at least) of using it would be not being able to share decks through the ankiweb interface. Advantage though: we could integrate with that, and we wouldn’t need special client plugins.

8 Likes

I do all my reviews on mobile. The reason I added the precise pessimistic projection feature is so that there’s something to make me sync on the computer.

4 Likes

I do most of my reviews on mobile, too (and sync religiously). But when traveling without my laptop I just have no way to sync Anki with Beeminder automatically (via the desktop app) so I put the data in manually. That’s easy for time studied as it shows in the mobile app.

4 Likes

Just uploaded new bugfix. No longer causes errors with placeholder data in the config.

3 Likes

Coming back to this topic after I got a message that Anki 2.0 will stop being synced to AnkiWeb as of January 1, 2020. The only reason I’m still using Anki 2.0 is the other Anki plugin which allows me to track studied time instead of progress.

So far any plans for implementing raw counts (cards/day or minutes/day) for your plugin, @bluetulip? :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Nope. I am very happy with my metric and I have more things I want to do than time to do them.

But I would gladly accept pull requests if someone doesn’t want to do that.

2 Likes

Cool, just wanted to double-check. Thanks for the plugin anyway! :wink:

I might have a look into that myself but realistically I don’t think this will happen any time soon either (“more things I want to do than time to do them” :D).

1 Like

The plugin keeps trying to add pessimistic presumptions to the goal. The only way to turn them was was to set “days_ahead” : 0. If I delete it as in the manual, it keeps reappearing as “days_ahead” : 7.

1 Like

Thanks for letting me know; I’ll update the manual next time I make a release. In the meantime, thanks for sharing the workaround.

1 Like

Bug report: the addon makes negative progress when switching between devices.

I use Anki desktop and Ankidroid, with the client installed on the desktop. Expected behavior is: I sync both devices, the desktop plugin should report the cumulative total reviews back to beeminder. That is, I can study on the phone and have it count toward what the desktop reports to beeminder.

Actual behavior: When I study on the phone, sync, and then open up Anki desktop, it reports a cumulative total much lower than before studying on the phone. I.e. progress made on the phone has somehow become negative.

2 Likes

This addon doesn’t track reviews - it tracks a metric which is less intuitive to understand at first but better represents what you’re actually trying to achieve with SRS.

This is expected behavior if you had more that came due in the intervening days than the reviews that you did - is this the case?

1 Like

I didn’t open desktop Anki on those missing days, but I did study some of the cards due on the phone.

It’s totally not what I expected. IMHO, if you set a flat spot in Beeminder (vacation etc), you should never derail. Could you please elaborate what the Anki-Bee plugin actually does?

1 Like

I explain the metric on the addon page. I like it, but if you don’t that’s a perfectly reasonable preference, and unfortunately I don’t believe there’s an addon that tracks review counts.

1 Like

I’ll try to explain it how I understood it, in end-user oriented terms. Please feel free to include this in your addon page.

"The Beeminder addon tracks the number of flashcards in good standing, so that Beeminder can force you to stay on top of reviews. Use cases are both studying new cards and gradually catching up on a backlog of due cards, but not cramming for a test.

If flashcards come due and you don’t review them, the number goes down and Beeminder will nag you and ride your ass. If you do your reviews, or if you add new cards and study them, the number goes up.

If you study on your phone or Ankiweb, you need to sync your progress to Anki desktop every day, so that the addon can see it. It tracks your total studying.

To use this goal:

  1. Create an odometer goal at Beeminder.
  2. Set the goal’s progress to the rate of new cards you will be adding.
  3. Your blurb how to set up addon config. Don’t bother with the username - the auth token is enough for the addon.
  4. If you want a safeguard against being too lazy to fire up Anki, skip this step. Otherwise, set days=0 (“pessimistic reports”)

Your Blurb why this is the right metric"

2 Likes

This add-on really wants to add pessimistic reports (estimated future datapoints) every time it syncs.

To stop that happening, you need to explicitly specify that you want zero days_ahead of reports, like this:

Also worth noting that although this add-on uses the Beeminder API, it’s got nothing to do with us… so your best route for support is probably via this forum post and @bluetulip

2 Likes

I’m making a note to make it default to no pessimistic reports in the next release. Not quite sure when that will be though.

2 Likes

Hey @bluetulip,

just checking in to share my experiences with your add-on (and encourage other maybe-a-bit-sceptics like me) to just try it out. I have come around to your add-on and I kind of love it! :star_struck: I was a bit reluctant at first having used the old plugin to track cards studied.

I think what kept me from trying your plugin was that I didn’t really understand the metric intuitively. You explain it well and I think I know what it tracks but it’s hard to grasp what that means for my day-to-day studying. However, once I installed it and used it it feels very natural. I prefer your metric to cards/minutes studied now(*). Thanks for the add-on! :clap:

(* Beeminder users just need to know this is not really a typical Beeminder odometer and even with a flat road you will derail after a while; but the discussion in this thread helps make users aware of that.)

4 Likes

Thanks. It makes me happy to hear that. And I’ve added a note to the addon page that if you want to schedule a break you need to give it a negative slope at least as big as the number of cards that become due.

3 Likes

Done.

3 Likes