Today I want to talk a bit about my PKM setup. This is mostly because the main thing I did today was study biology and prepare flashcards, so I might as well write about it.

I've been listening in the last month and a half to lectures from "the great courses" biology course. If you're net familiar with them, they offer university courses in an audio format. Obviously, I wouldn't study math like that, but biology lends itself quite well. It's an introductory course, and I like the way it is organized and that it emphasizes principles over details, as that is something I always found daunting in biology, as opposed to math, which in the end is quite compressible.

Even though the lectures are in this format, they are not dumbed down, and actual studying is required, and when self-studying, it's not so clear cut how to do it. If I were in university I would take notes which I would review regulary and I would have external pressure of exams to force me to study. Even then I would expect that unless I use that knowledge in later courses, must will be forgotten in a few months. This method also doesn't easily transfer to studying alone: it requires a lot of commitment and diligence to take notes and review them, it interferes with the ability to listen on the go, and self-mandated exams never worked for me.

The solution I settled for was flashcards, and I think the system I have setup, while involved, is quite satisfying. The program I use for flashcards is Anki, which works well and offers everything I need. You can create decks of cards in the app and it schedules review sessions for you using spaced repetition (they actually changed the scheduling algorithm recently, which I think was an improvement). The one thing that always irked me is the duplication of knowledge: the cards are separated from your notes, however you keep them.

Now, I use logseq for my notes, and there's actually a really elegant plugin that lets you organically define cards within your notes. That solves one problem but introduces another: it's not so easy to access logseq from several devices, so now I was limited to inputing cards from the computer. I was still not satisfied.

Then I watched a video where Andy Matuschak (a known proponent of flashcards) did a livestream of a study session. He was studying a quantum mechanics book, and using a custom software he built to insert cards as highlights on the pdf, which I also found very cool. This then gave me the idea to try and recreate this in logseq. The app actually has nice pdf integration which allows you to highlight and then reference it from your notes. Now I was using the pdf of the lecture notes to create flashcards. And I was happy. Even though I was still tied to my computer, I had this really nifty way to contextualize my cards without needing to rewrite notes myself.

The last piece of the puzzle fell in a couple days later. I serendipitiously ran across an app and service called Omnivore, which is a read-it-later app with the ability to take highlights and notes, synced to the cloud, for free and open-source. It also has integration with logseq, so you can pull your highlights into your graph. That was it: I uploaded the pdf to the service, did some fiddling and tweaking, and new I could create flashcards as notes on the pdf through the app on whatever device I choose. It is then synced to logseq, which is synced to Anki, and hallelujah.

I feel a mix of pride and shame as I write this. I'm proud of this system, but it also borderlines on "programmer's demise", and thinking about was a bit obsessive for a while. whatever. it works pretty well and it's cool.

Oh, and about biology. I mostly do cloze deletion cards where it hides a part of a sentence from the notes. It's a pretty natural way to test for names, definitions, important points etc. It still takes around 45 minutes to an hour to create the cards for a 30 minutes lecture, but I see it as part of the learning, ie, there's not much friction in the system. It is also paying dividends already, as I find myself learning organically, and not worried of taking breaks, since I know I'll remember what I've already learned.

So that's that. Today I finished the first third of the course. I still have to revisit some of the old lectures which I skipped flashcarding, but I can't wait to see what I'll learn going forward.oh, and no programming today.