Category Archives: technology

My first NAS: Mybook Live Duo

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Network-Attached Storage at home: WD MyBook Live Duo

6 terabytes. I love living in the future. I remember when that black box would have filled a room and heated the whole house in midwinter.

There are already various professional reviews out there on the Net, so I thought I would write something a little more personal (but not embarrassingly so, I hope!).

NAS? What’s NAS?  I did not know either as late as last year. It means “Network-Attached Storage.” Basically it is a tiny computer with a big hard disk (or two big disks, in the case of the Duo). You plug it into your home network (or small business, although this is clearly meant for the home). If you don’t have a network, that’s OK too. When you connect it to your Windows, Linux or Mac computer using the enclosed cable, a network should automatically arise.

I actually don’t use a router, just a switch that connects the computers to each other and the NAS, and it works just fine whether there is one or more. The three computers I have tested it with run Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux. The enclosed CD maps the NAS disk up as a network drive in Windows. In Linux, you just find it in Places – Network and start using it. A good thing, since my tiny netbook does not have a CD drive!

Out of the box: The NAS is so lightweight, a man can hold it easily in one hand. I remember back when 6 terabytes (million megabytes) would have filled a room and heated the whole house in midwinter. The future is amazing, isn’t it? It has finally arrived!

The first thing I did was connect it to the mains. It came with a tree-prong head, but I soon figured out how to pop that off and replace it with the enclosed two-prong. It does not even need to be grounded, and it figures out on its own what voltage it is connected to and adjusts automatically.

While the machine was spinning up, I attached the network cable and plugged the other end into the network switch. If you have a router, you should plug it in there. If the router also broadcasts WiFi, you can access the NAS from your laptops, slates and phones wirelessly.

After a couple minutes, the NAS was running. Even before I ran the CD, I could find the NAS under Network, and clicking on the picture of it brought up a menu with help for setting it up. You don’t need to do that, it works fine right out of the box. If you are the only person who will use it, or if you have nothing to hide, you can login as admin without a password and just use the public shares.

Users, shares and devices: I set up a separate user for myself and one for Tuva the Imaginary Woman. I gave each of us a private share in addition to the public ones. What is a share? Basically it is a top-level folder on the hard disk of the NAS. You can have many of these, and they can be public or private. The system comes with some public shares set up already, for things like photos, music and video. But if you have deep dark secrets that you don’t want to share with others, you can have private shares as well. It took me only a little fiddling to hide my private share from my Imaginary Other, and the other way around. You can also have shares that are owned jointly by parents but not children, or other arbitrary groups of users. If you are using the NAS in a business, this suddenly gets more serious, but it is still quite simple.

So shares are only loosely tied to users. You can have many of each, and they don’t need to be one on one. A user can have many shares, a share can have many users. Or not. It is up to the Admin, the first account that meets you the first time you log on the Duo.

Devices is a bit different. As long as you are in your home (or small business) network, you can log on any user from any machine. Remote logon is slightly more complicated. You have to explicitly create a web access account for an existing user if you want them to log in over the Internet. The procedure requires their email address, which will get a mail with the instructions to create a new password. This comes in addition to the password they would have used if they were physically at the home network. (The two passwords can be the same, if they are strong enough to be accepted.) Once the user has created this password, they can log in from any computer on the Internet. (Whether they should is another matter. The solution as it stands today is based on Java, which is as full of security holes as a Swiss cheese, or so the experts say.)

Adding a mobile device is a separate action. It also requires an existing user. You can have web access but not mobile access, or the other way around. Mobile access also requires an app; in the case of Android it is named WD2go (Western Digital to go, OK?) and is free on Google Play. It is simple and straightforward to use, but you first have to register it using a 12-digit code that must be generated on the NAS. This means that even though I downloaded the app at work, I could not register it until I came home and could connect directly to the Duo on the home network. The app allows not only streaming of music but also of video. You should have a pretty new and powerful device to do that, though. And even then it will wait some seconds before it starts playing a song, and even more before playing video.

So each user can have multiple mobile devices but they must be registered separately, whereas on a PC you can log on your account from any computer once you have been set up with web access.

Extreme expansion: The third hole in the back of the Duo was for a USB cable, but contrary to my first imagination you can not use this to connect it to the PC like I did with my long row of external disks (half of which died horribly before the warranty expired, sometimes in mere months). Over time the external hard disks became gradually more robust, and my 1.5 TB Samsung has proved quite a reliable companion. But now that I have the NAS, which is built for heavy duty, it is time for the Samsung USB disk to retire. I gave it one final chance to shine though: Plugging its USB cable into the back of the Mybook Live Duo, it suddenly showed up on all my PCs simultaneously as a share within the NAS, without me having to do anything extra. You can even use a USB hub and connect all your old external disks and memory sticks, and make them all available to the whole family (or office), as well as friends and family all over the world on the Internet.

There are probably limits to how much extra storage you can add this way, but I am not sure what the limit is. I added 1.5 TB, but there are 2 TB disks available at affordable prices, and the documentation explicitly states that you can use a USB hub to connect multiple devices.

In theory I could just let things stay that way and continue to use the Samsung. I mean, it is Samsung, so it probably won’t keel over dead easily. But just in case, I am currently copying the contents to the NAS. That way I can just keep the old disk as a backup. A NAS is made for heavy duty, or so I am led to believe. It is not a backup solution, but more like the servers of a corporate network, where you want the data to lie on the server and not on each PC.

Speed, or lack thereof: Copying takes its sweet time though. I blame the USB 2.0, the system told me it would take 19 hours to copy 1 TB from the old disk to the new. That’s a lot of time, but then it is a lot of data. A letter page with typewriter text is about 4000 characters. 1 TB is a million million characters, or a thousand billions.  There are just over 7 billion humans in the world today. So I could write a short description of each of them to make a terabyte. We’re not quite on the same order of magnitude as the US national debt, though. Perhaps with the next generation of NAS!

Copying from my laptop over the network cable was actually quite a bit faster than copying from the USB disk, but still took some time for large folders. Like the MP3 files I ripped from my hundreds and hundreds of CDs before throwing them away. 12.6 gigabytes of data I have legally bought and paid for. Unfortunately so, in many cases, since most non-Irish CDs have only 1-2 good songs and the rest filler. The least I can do is share them with family and friends. (In Norway this is actually legal, although the definition is pretty strict.) And with my new NAS, I can do that without publishing it to the whole Internet. Another question is whether my family and friends want to hear my music, given that even I only do so sporadically.

One final thought before I close. Even when I am not copying anything to and from or between the WD NAS and the Samsung, they are both blinking frenetically, as if they were busy moving stuff around. What’s up with that? Back when the Samsung was attached to the laptop, it would go to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. So I assume it is the small computer in the NAS which is doing something, but I don’t know what. Indexing? Quality checking? Defragmenting? Pointless running in circles? I will probably never know.

[Edit to add: Two days later I woke up in the morning and both of the disks had quieted down. I noticed that copying from the Samsung to the WD now seemed to go a little faster. So probably it had done something useful, like indexing or defragmenting.]

But even with that, I am impressed. Not quite indistinguishable from magic, but close enough. I love living in the future, and that future is now well within reach of the working classes here in Norway.

Memrise vs Anki: place yer bets

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Instead of doubling the amount of time I spend studying, I am trying to double the precision. Although you can learn almost anything by repeating it 7×70 times, the best time is just as you are about to forget. Anything before or after is less effective. But how do you know when you are forgetting if you don’t remember it?

I have written quite a bit over the past month about Memrise, a free Web resource for memorizing facts, vocabularies etc. It combines two of the most powerful techniques for rote learning: Spaced repetition and mnemonics. Spaced repetition tries to make you recall the fact just before you forget it, as this causes maximum learning with minimum effort. Mnemonics try to associate random facts with something that is easier to remember. This is obviously most effective if you do it yourself, but that can be frustrating. Memrise uses associations volunteered by users, and you can add your own.

I rather like this approach, and the way you can study at your own pace. Unfortunately, most of the time I remember 66% at best rather than the 90% that is the goal of spaced repetition. This was also the problem with the two previous SRS programs I used, AnyMemo and Mnemosyne. (Spaced Repetition Software is SRS business!) So I am testing another free program, ANKI, which has a good reputation among self-study amateur linguists. I am not too optimistic though. Now that this is my fourth attempt, I may have to accept that it is I who am too old for the programs that fit most people. It is the same with physical exercise, after all, but there I can set my own pace. And that’s the thing.

What I really miss is a dial or lever I can set, so the software reminds after e.g. 90% of the time it thinks should be right. Clearly the programs all overestimate my memory for random words. Of course, it would probably have helped if it was not so random, if it was at least somewhat related to my ordinary life. But that’s not what I need it for. I would really like something that was adjustable to me, rather than the other way around. It is kind of discouraging to have forgotten a third or more of the words when it is time to review them. It is also bad for learning – the “memory traces” in the brain weaken more quickly after the ideal recall time, or so I’ve read. So ironically, I would probably even spend less time reviewing if I had that “confidence dial”.

Anki does not have that, but it does have levels in the answers. Instead of just checking for itself whether you got it right, it asks whether it was hard, good or easy. The ideal is good, which is when you remember it with a little effort. If you had to think long and hard, it goes easier on you with that word or fact next time, in the form of asking you earlier. If you say it was too easy, it waits longer. And if you don’t get it right at all, it shows it again very quickly. So that sounds like an improvement.

On the other hand, I liked the suggestions for memorizing words, and I liked the way Memrise used different forms of multiple-choice questions in the early phase of learning a new word, then giving more and more options and eventually requiring you to write the answer. It also requires writing when reviewing, which involves more of the brain and makes it harder to fool yourself (“well, I got it ALMOST right!”).

I have picked up Anki and installed it on my PC and my Galaxy Note 2. (Unlike Memrise which is a website but requires some advanced browser features and can’t be used on my mobile devices.) Anki is also easily synchronized between two (or even more) devices. There are a lot of premade vocabularies and other data sets, and it pleases me to see that a lot of them are for studying Japanese. I downloaded a fairly small one that is mostly tangential to what I have already learned, and am testing it now.

Unfortunately there are obvious errors in the dataset I am testing, although small ones. Occasionally a romaji (western character) is used in a word written with katakana. I saw one obvious misspelling beyond that already in Japanese, and another in the English text. The Japanese is written in a font that is like an uglier Japanese version of Comic Sans. I hope this is a feature of that particular set and not of Anki! It is quite hard to read after the very legible font on my Windows machine, not to mention the downright beautiful hiragana font on the PC running Ubuntu Linux.

Apart from that, it seems nice enough. With the mobile app I can study at the bus, during breaks at work, even while a game is loading. OK, not much since I have a fast machine. But still, very handy. And I like its approach: If I don’t recognize a word, Anki shows it again after a minute. Once I recognize it, it increases to 10 minutes, then a day. I inserted 1 hour between those, the system lets you add steps like that. Then it goes up to 4 days and so on, I am not sure how far it goes. The most important part is of course whether I actually learn the words. I will have to come back to that. But if it turns out to wait too long, like all the rest, I will try to choose “hard” instead of “good” even when I remember, and see if that fixes it.

I really hope I won’t have to write my own. There are already quite a number of these. There’s Supermemo, the original and possibly best, if you can live with complicated. And there’s at least one other that I forgot the name of. I do that a lot, forget names. Although I don’t always remember doing it.

More shiny?

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Screenshot anime Little Busters (safe for work and school)

It is just a small thing, but since it makes me happy it is amazing!

The last fluorescent bulb in my home flickered and died, although happily it did not shatter like one did a few years ago. It was time to replace it with a LED bulb, the way I had done with about a dozen incandescent bulbs last year. I was also looking for a smaller bulb for the last spot in the living room 5-bulb main lamp. In addition, I ended up buying a set of three LED downlights for the kitchen. “Make your Home a Palace of Neverending Light!” Well, at least 20 years, according to the packaging. I don’t see why they would stop working then if they’ve lasted that long, but those who live shall see!

I also bought a new charger for my Galaxy Tab 7.7, as I had accidentally swept it off the table where it was charging. The tablet took no damage, but the connector at the end of the cable from the charger broke beyond repair. (I did repair it, but it worked only fitfully at best.) Stupidly it was made in one piece, so I had to replace it all. The replacement has a USB cable that connects the charger and the tablet, so if one part breaks, you need not replace them both.

My trip also brought me past a display of the new Galaxy Note 10.1, the big brother of my Galaxy Note 2 phablet (big mobile phone). The Note 10.1 was very nearly as Shiny as its little brother.  By “Shiny” in this context I mean the mysterious ability to radiate a small but noticeable amount of joy and satisfaction, giving the user a feeling similar to an orthodox worshiper watching an icon (according to studies of Apple fans; I believe Samsung has somehow managed to copy this memetic tech from Apple, by means unknown.)

For those who don’t use Note or iPhone or religious icons, it is similar to the feeling you get when watching a picture of someone you like a lot. Otaku (fans of Japanese entertainment) get this feeling, only more strongly I believe, when watching merchandise relating to their favorite series, such as small dolls of the main characters, or pillows decorated with pictures of them. I have not gone quite that far down the slippery road of the otaku, but it is big business (and parodied in some anime!)

Since I already have the Note 2, I was not seriously tempted to buy the Note 10.1 for its shiny. Hopefully there will be a Note 7 eventually, by the time I am ready to retire the Tab 7.7. But that may be a year or two off if things stay their course, and that is an ocean of time to me. Who knows who will be alive and who will be dead two years from now? We must do all the things that must be done, before they are lost forever. Buying yet another tablet is not near the top of that list right now.  But if you are looking for your first, this one is shiny. And it has a pen so you can draw on it and handwrite.

I consider “shiny” a good thing in and of itself. If objects you use can give you some measure of joy beyond their more prosaic function, so more the better. Increase the amount of joy on earth without harming anyone? Sure. Of course, one may get attached to it, as one may get to other joys: Art, music, architecture etc. (I use “joy” here as distinct from “pleasure” which in my use applies to the senses and fulfillment of instincts, but there is an overlap. Eating when you are hungry – even just a little bit hungry – is a pleasure, but food that is deliciously prepared and presented adds joy of the mind atop the pleasure of the flesh, as it were. There is also a considerable overlap in romantic relationships, but let’s not go there today.)

I would not mind if all of us could live our lives surrounded by objects that broadcast joy, so to speak. But I may be too optimistic about our ability to detach from such feelings. If we cannot die peacefully because we don’t want to part from all the shiny things, then clearly we have gone too far. But overall I think we should not wish for more suffering in the world, but more pleasure, joy and happiness in so far as it hurts no one and goes along with a virtuous life. (Not that I’m going to hold myself up as an example of the latter, but I mean in principle.) So, shiny, but not at any cost.

Overwatering memories

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I want to praise myself! But that’s not easy when I have forgotten every third word pretty much every time. Time to bring a bucket!

Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote in praise of Memrise, a website that teaches (mostly vocabulary) by a combination of mnemonics and spaced repetition. Since then, I have discovered a problem with it. Not a showstopper, but an irritation. Luckily, there is a built-in solution.

The problem is that the system is way too optimistic about my ability to remember the words. Actually it is pretty good when it comes to very simple pieces of knowledge, such as the katakana (a Japanese syllable script I have not made the effort to try to learn before). But for more complex information such as Japanese words, I have frequently forgotten them by the time the next repetition comes around. This is particularly bad with longer words. The website uses the same interval by default for single syllables and long words, but my fail rate is much higher for the longer words.

The goal is a 90% memory retention, but my average sessions tend to yield 60-70%, depending on the mix of words. That is not optimal – the perfect time to repeat a fact is the moment it is about to be forgotten. You should ideally have to think for a moment before recalling it; having it at the tip of your tongue but not getting at it is also acceptable. Remembering without effort is less effective, and having to re-learn it even less so. The closer you get to just barely remembering, the better.

The second effect of this, apart from less than ideal learning, is that it is a bit demoralizing. Failing a third of the time feels like failing a lot, even though technically I remember most of the phrases. Failure has a stronger emotional impact in the short run, although psychologists say that we remember our successes better in the long run.

Strangely the Memrise website comes with a tool that fixes this, but subtly discourages its use. The tool is called “overwatering”. The very name is a discouragement: If you overwater your plants in real life, they will sicken and wilt eventually, just not as quickly as if you forget to water them in the first place. To further discourage its casual use, the “overwater” button is white, the same color as the background. (The “water” and “harvest” buttons are in bright attractive colors when they appear at all.)

But the interesting part is that when I overwater, I get pretty close to the target rate, and also have a much more positive feeling. Yes, the short words are now too easy, but correspondingly I spend very little time on them, just write them and press enter to get to the next. The easy words don’t get much attention, as well they shouldn’t. According to the site forum, overwatering does not directly affect the timers. So you won’t get a longer pause if you get a word right during overwatering. This fits with my experience – new words to water appear fairly soon after an overwatering session, and may randomly include words from that session. It seems to be a stand-alone feature, more or less.

I am a bit baffled by the choice to deflect attention from the overwater tool, and the lack of explanation of it anywhere on the site. Only in fragments of discussions on the forum do I get some idea as to why it was included (by very vocal demand, it seems) and the almost fanatical disagreement between its supporters and opponents. I am surprised: Everything I have read about long-term learning implies that memory retrieval fades quickly once you pass the threshold where you can no longer recall it at will, even with effort.

***

One possibility is that the average user of Memrise learns much more easily than I do. That is certainly not beyond imagining: I am almost 54 years old at this time, while college students are probably the most likely to use a site like this. The ability to learn random data tends to drop off over time, whereas the ability to learn by association remains high until dementia sets in. Hopefully I am not quite there yet, although I feel painfully incompetent at work as well. (Then again, judging from the speed at which our pool of cases is solved, many of us are probably like that. I have no idea whether the others actually feel it though.)

Anyway, if college students remember 90% of the phrases through the ordinary watering process, they will not feel any need to press the white button. So that is one possibility. But I don’t have that luxury. If I want to actually learn enough Japanese to read Japanese books one day, I have to forge on. Even if it means overwatering, by the standards of other people.

Samsung Galaxy Note 2

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I bought this a few days ago. To be honest, it was a case of gadget lust rather than necessity. If you want to judge me for spending my money unwisely or unjustly, I will not hold it against you. My previous smartphone is still under warranty for a long while yet, and would have been sufficient. If I have an excuse, it is my principle of trying to buy the kind of inventions I hope to see more of in the future.

And this invention, gentle reader, is about as futuristic as you can get on a Norwegian working class budget. It looks and acts like something out of a recent science fiction movie. One could imagine Tony Stark carrying around one of these. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but it gives a hint about how I feel about it. In other words, I am impressed. I am very impressed.

After a couple days, I started writing a lengthy review, listing many impressive features. But it just kept getting longer and longer, and at the same time I realized that there were already many great reviews on it, including several on YouTube where you can actually see it in action.

(I sometimes read positive reviews or watch YouTube presentations of products I already own, so I can feel the happy glow of owning them. Ideally, at the end of the review, I should feel ready to run and buy the product… Except that I already own it. I mean, I have already wasted the money, so why shouldn’t I milk it for all it’s worth? ^_^)

So rather than compete with the expert reviewers, I will just list a few things that impressed me in particular.

***

Handwriting and “Han writing”: The handwriting recognition impressed me so much that I found myself handwriting instead of using the on-screen keyboard, which is incidentally the best smartphone software keyboard I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Swiftkey 3. And I generally dislike handwriting.

I mean, handwriting was a great invention back in ancient Egypt or wherever they first tried it. And it is very versatile, you can bring a pencil and a scrap of paper pretty much anywhere except the shower. But I have preferred typing for as long as I can remember, at least from the age of six. (Well, with the exception of the few times when I had acquired a new fountain pen or some such.) From shortly after the first IBM PC, I have written by hand mostly in “emergencies”, to jot down a name or phone number or some such. Well, this is like having my first fountain pen again, except it is magic.

The handwriting area is a black slate at the bottom of the screen where the keyboard usually is when you’re writing. Writing with the built in S-pen makes the letters appear in thin white lines. I write a few words without stopping but with spaces between the words. When I stop, the phone pretty much instantly converts the text into typed text in the field where I am supposed to write – a comment field on Google+, for instance, or an email. At this point the slate goes black again so I can start writing from the upper left corner again. Even though my handwriting is ugly – especially after decades of disuse – the only recurring problem is that it occasionally capitalizes the first letter in a word if the letter looks the same when small or large. So for instance it might write Can Spell, but not Take Flight, because I write these letters differently when capitalized. With a quarter hour of practice I have mostly gotten rid of the extra capitals though. I am not sure whether the slate has learned from me or I have learned to write better.

I have failed to enable recognition of Hanzi / Kanji characters (Chinese / Japanese logograms). It was selectable in the phone’s setup, but for some reason it reverted to Scandinavian (my location) handwriting recognition, which incidentally works too. Perhaps you need to go all Chinese / Japanese to get it to work, although I doubt you need to physically be there. The Hanzi keyboard input worked though: You type the English letters which the word begins with, and immediately a long list of relevant signs show up. Chinese writing is far more compact than alphabetic languages, and expanded to 3 lines you get dozens of alternatives. It must be a bit of a nightmare learning all those characters, but man, Orientals must be able to read and write at a crazy speed with this thing.

The English word suggestions can also be expanded to three lines, but with only three words to a line, that is merely 9 suggestions. They are good suggestions though. As I’ve said, I think Swiftkey 3 may be better once it has learned from your writing, but I don’t know yet how well Samsung Keyboard learns from experience, so “the jury is still out” on this one.

***

Split screen: As the biggest smartphone on the market today, it makes some sense to use that space to run two windows at once. Only certain applications support this, I am sorry to say. You start them from a separate docking are to the left. To bring this up in the first place, hold the back button on the phone a couple seconds, and a small marker will pop up to show you that the pop-up dock is available. Pull on the tab to get to the dock, launch the first program, then hold the next program icon and pull it to either the top or bottom half of the screen. This will tell the Note 2 to run both of them at once. You can do this with movies without slowing down (unless you are streaming on a bad line, obviously). More likely you will want to open a Google search window while writing an email so you can copy some information…

Mouseover: You are probably used to being able to hover your mouse cursor over various fields without clicking and getting a tool tip, a preview or an expansion of a link. With the S-pen, I can do this on my Note 2. I can’t do it with my fingers, alas. Perhaps at some later time? It looks like pure magic: The pen does not even touch the glass (the distance is about the radius of a pinky finger) when the small mark appears in the picture, and if I do this over a feature that supports it (typically Samsung programs, at least at first) the mouseover effect will turn on. This is what Arthur C. Clarke must have meant when he said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Face recognition: Not a Note 2 or even Samsung feature, but part of the more recent Android versions (Note 2 has 4.1, but I think face unlock came with 4.0). Still, it is the first time I have tried it, and it is indistinguishable from magic. When I turn it on, there is a lock screen, but when I see my face in the screen, it unlocks. It will only work with people who look like me, or at least that is the theory. On the down side, it reminds me daily of how ugly my face now looks up close… Well, I am not sure that reminder is a bad thing. If you are young and pretty, you may want to use that sharp front camera for video conferencing instead. ^_^

Power: The battery has very high capacity for a smartphone. You can use the device actively from dawn till dusk and still have some juice left. I mean, like continually watching video or something. For everyday use, it could easily last two days. That is how things should be, of course, but very few competitors come even close to it. And that’s with the big, high-resolution display and a four-core processor that runs everything I can throw at it at full speed. The machine responds immediately and in crisp detail, and it just keeps running. Extremely habit-forming. Don’t borrow one if you can’t keep it.

And here is the review I would have written, except it is not written, it is shown on YouTube. If you have the time, the awesomeness just goes on and on. I did not watch it until after I had bought it though. ^_^

 

Memrise!

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Tiny angels of curiosity

Are you insatiably curious? Then this website may be for you.

I have found another fun thing to do: Memrise, a website that teaches things, mostly vocabulary of foreign languages. Of course, there are many such websites, but this one uses state of the art psychology which lets you learn better using less time.

By “less time” I mean less time in total, when you sum up the hours of your life you have spent on learning the thing. It does not mean that you can sit down the night before an exam and learn at superspeed. One of the three “legs” on which this method stands is spaced repetition, which I have written about before (SuperMemo and Mnemosyne.) But this time it is combined with two other “legs”:  Mnemonics and motivation.

Mnemonics is the use of images or other associations which we connect to a random piece of information. Except for small children, most people have a hard time remembering something that is unrelated to everything else. The more vivid, amusing or emotional the association, the easier it will be to remember. If it also is associated with something we think about regularly, the energy that flows through the neural pathways will spill over on something associated. The best mnemonics therefore are those which we associate with ourselves, because we tend to think of ourselves a lot. This site cannot really help with that, but every piece of random data comes with a number of “mems”, images or thoughts that can make it easier to remember. Not as good as making your own, but easy and reasonably effective.

Memory refreshment, or spaced repetition, is the art of reviewing something just before you have forgotten it. This is the ideal time. If you review it while you still remember it easily, the effect is less. If you review it after you have forgotten it, you have to put more energy into re-learning it. The website remembers when you learned each word or fact, and even sends you a mail to remind you. At first, you repeat every few seconds or minutes during the main drill, but then it can take half an hour, four hours, 12 hours… it depends on how many times you have already reviewed it and how well you did. If you keep acing your reviews, it could soon be days or weeks. If you fail miserably, you will have to return to it soon.

Unfortunately, the calculation completely ignores work and sleep, so it is unlikely to work too well in the intermediate range, when you are supposed to review in a few hours. By then you are probably asleep or at work, hopefully not both at the same time!

Motivation is the third and often ignored factor. Most electronic teaching systems assume that you are already motivated by an external factor, and that may well be true. But this one has taken a leaf from the popular Facebook games (or “social games” now that we have Google+ and other venues for them). In these social games, people come back every day or even several times a day to water and harvest their plants or do other boring task to get some small imaginary reward, especially when they can share these with their friends. Memrise uses the same model. The initial learning of a word or fact is called planting a seed. Later you return to water it by testing your knowledge of the word after some hours. Finally you can harvest it into your long-term memory. You get points for each successful action, and your “wealth” of points is visible to your Memrise friends. (My name is itlandm4b by the way.)

As already mentioned, the website will mail you when you need to return to water or harvest your memories. You can also see if you go into each course how long it is until your next interaction with each plot of verbal crops. I have a lot that fall due in 12 hours, when I will hopefully be at work. This thing may be better suited for students. But no worries, if I fail miserably, I will simply have to return to them faster than I otherwise would. The game… er, teaching site keeps track of each individual fact, helping us work more on the difficult ones and less on the easy ones … for us personally, not some imaginary average person.

To keep track of everything and mail you when needed, the site needs you to register. You can create a new account or log in with Facebook. Unfortunately it does not take any of the other popular identity managers, like Google or Twitter or OpenID. Then again, it is free. If you don’t like having to create a new account, you don’t need to. But you may lose out on some of the most entertaining learning, or most instructive fun, on the web.

Wait! If it is free, how does it pay its bills? Well, so far it survives on generous investors, it seems. The plan is to take a cut of for-profit courses, but so far these are notable only by their absence. This may not bode well for the future of the website. But on the other hand, expenses are probably moderate as well: The users are making pretty much all the courses. After developing the software, the founders basically just need to run the server, and people contribute everything from single mnemonics to complete courses. So hopefully it will be around for a while. By then I should have learned thousands of new things. Perhaps. Or I might flutter off like a butterfly to the next flower. You know how I am with such things. Time flows differently for me. A month is an ocean of time, at least until it is over…

http://www.memrise.com/

The end of a world

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“Even if this world ends today, I will still protect you.”

November 30 marks the end of the online multiplayer game City of Heroes, which has been running since April 2004. I was actually playing it already when it was in closed beta, and was impressed. In my first review of it here, I described the game world as “a believable world, but larger than life: Beautiful and dangerous like the first weeks of love.” This may explain why I kept playing it till the end. But it is more than that: It was the goodest game I have ever played.

I don’t mean just that it was technically good, which it also was. The controls in particular was superior to any multiplayer game I have played before or since. But more importantly, there was an inherent goodness in roleplaying a hero constantly protecting people from danger, and defeating evil. (In the game, the concept “defeat” was always used. It was implied that nobody was ever killed in the epic superpowered battles. If a hero was defeated, they would immediately recover at the hospital, and it was assumed that a prison hospital would receive the villains.)

It should surprise no one that a game like this attracted a special type of players, a bit different from the ones playing elves and rangers, jedis and space traders. Comic book fans, of course, but it appealed to a particular temperament. Its players tended to be friendly, helpful, tolerant and mature in a way I never really saw in other games. (Although there was some of it, of course. Dark Age of Camelot gave me some happy memories back in the day too.) Over the years, these people have stayed with the game, to the very last. Sometimes couples were playing together, or parents and their grown children, or friends who had moved to different places but met up in this virtual world. Many new friendships were also made in the game, and it is likely that these people would have continued to play for another decade if they had a chance. But that chance disappeared.

NCSoft, a Korean company that bought the rights to the game some years ago, suddenly decided this fall to close it down. This came as a shock: The game had shaken off two newer competitors and was growing. It was running a profit, and new content was arriving at a brisk pace. Suddenly one day it was announced that the game would soon be closed, and the whole developer team was fired immediately. The reason given was that the company wanted to concentrate on its core (that is, Korean games, translated to English for the international market). I am not overly surprised. CoH is a very American game, and America has gone from being cool to embarrassing over these same years. Americans are probably not aware of this.

Be that as it may. This is not a day I want to spend talking about politics. Today I want to remember the “goodest” game I have ever played, the wonderful people I met and shared a beautiful, colorful dream with. The heart that made you thrive in such a place, will still be beating elsewhere.

People are bewildered that life must end
And time strikes them harshly.
But even if this world ends today,
I will still protect you.

(The end of the world, by Angela. YouTube. Translated by Suri-chan. )

Talk to your toaster

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I also used to be excited about the future, but now that I live here, I take it for granted.

NaNoWriMo – national novel writing month – is approaching once again. (“The month formerly known as November”, as I like to call it.) The forums for 2012 are up and running, and in the technology section there is as usually a thread dedicated to speech recognition, or more specifically Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (I would not mind a more general thread, since Windows also comes with speech recognition built in. Hopefully we can have more threads later.)

One thing I wanted to say early on was that it is not enough to be able to use speech recognition in a technical sense. The next challenge is to be able to tell a story to the computer. This is a very different thing, especially for us who have been writers for many years and are used to thinking with our fingers. It also doesn’t help to have been a grown-up for many years, during which you have not been able to tell long, obviously made-up stories to people without them looking at you very strangely. I suppose there are some families in which this problem does not exist, but I am not sure whether it is a good thing or not… ^_^;

So I recommended that people start telling stories to their computers already now, all through October, so that they have gotten over that hurdle, that shyness or awkwardness of telling imaginary stories out loud to inanimate objects. In fact, I recommend practicing on the toaster as well, and with blatant nonsense. The purpose is not to deliver the Great American Novel to your amazed toaster, but to get yourself to accept the unreasonable fact that it is possible to tell stories to home equipment. Such are the times in which we live. I could not have made it up in a sci-fi novel. Magic fantasy, perhaps, just perhaps.

I ask you, gentle reader, to consider this: Not only do I occasionally talk to a machine without being insane (or more so than those who don’t). I also carry in my shirt pocket a telephone, my own library with dozens of books, a bookstore with millions more, thousands of newspapers from all over the world, millions of songs and an unknown number of movies, and enough cat pictures to last the craziest old cat lady for a lifetime.

You can probably add to this, but the point is: I do this almost every day without giving it a second thought. I don’t wake up each morning thinking: “Oh my God! I live in a miraculous, magical world filled with amazing wonders that I would not have believed were possible when I was a child – what should I do today to take advantage of this to the fullest?”

If I did, and if my conclusion was that I should start the day by talking to my kitchen equipment, that might not be the worst thing I have done in my life.

City of Heroes closing down

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Well, at least it seems America will outlive its (original and best) superhero game.

I logged on to Virtue, my favorite server on City of Heroes, for a little superheroing. It has been a couple weeks since last time, I guess. There were a bunch of people outside the City Hall in Atlas, where I usually log out. They seemed to be protesting something?

They were, it turned out, protesting the closure of the game, which is due for November. I had not heard anything about that. That was certainly unexpected: There were recently released a couple new power sets, and the number of users has been fairly stable for a while now. But evidently NCSoft is restructuring to focus on their [buzzword], which presumably means Korea, so Paragon Studies in America got the ax. I can see a certain logic in that. America is in decline. In a few years, it will join the Soviet Union and the British Empire as fond memories of a glorious past, I expect. Owning such an arch-typical American game will be a liability for an Oriental corporation in the new Asian dawn.

Still, it would be kind of nice if they could sell it instead. It is probably a bit late for that now, though. Customers will start drifting away. Well, after they finish today’s great rally on Virtue. There were 33 instances of Atlas Park when I left, filled with protesters holding signs or torches. Thousands of people making one last try to change the mind of people half way around the world. Good luck with that.

Perhaps I should log on some of my favorite characters and take some final screenshots before it is over? The game had great graphics and was one of my favorites for screenshots from before it even opened. Yes, I played from the closed beta onward. But it so happens that I have begun to play it less and less over the last two years or so. Not because of the game, which has grown steadily better. It is truly awesome by now. But I spend less time gaming now, I guess. Well, except for Go, currently, but I will probably give up that pretty soon. Anyway, that part of my life was slowly fading away already. So it is kind of convenient for me that this is when it ends. Still, it is a shame. It was a great idea and well executed. There is nothing quite like it. I doubt I am going to play any MMORPGs again after this one. Certainly not any from NCSoft.

The Go Teaching Ladder

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“People only learn from mistakes when they are hurt by them” says Fujivara no Sai. I disagree. At the Go Teaching Ladder, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. In contrast, I don’t seem to learn from my own, even when they hurt – at least in Go.

A place where Go players can learn and teach at their leisure.

During my current Go (igo) fad, I have made my way to the Go Teaching Ladder. It is a website and database based on a simple but great idea: People can get their matches reviewed by someone who is more skillful than themselves, while also reviewing the matches of those ranked lower than themselves. For instance, if you are a 10-kyu player, you could review the game of a 20-kyu gamer and have your own latest match reviewed by a 1-kyu player.  (Actually the difference from 10 to 1 is greater than from 20 to 10, I would say. Progress is easier at the bottom. Well, once you get started, I guess. I still can’t seem to get it.)

By using this system, only the ones at the bottom are only receiving, and only those at the very top are only giving. And even that is not exactly true. You see, not only is it a well known fact that teaching makes your own understanding more solid. In the case of Go, there is also the element that Go is not a single skill. Some players are strong in the mid-game, others in the endgame. Some play logically, calculating possible future moves; others are intuitive, reacting to the shapes and patterns formed by the stones on the board. Some play more aggressively, others more defensively. Some rely on remembering a vast library of standard responses, while others prefer to think for themselves with every move they make. Because of this and more, you can be better than a player at nine moves in a row, and then the tenth amazes you with its brilliance. So reviewing someone moderately below you can still give you a bunch of new ideas.

Best of all, the reviewed games are stored in an archive for anyone to download and watch. It uses the .SGF format, which can be used by a number of programs to play back the moves on a visual Go board on the screen, with comments on the side and pointers on the board and alternative play sequences shown. The standard program from Pandanet, GoPanda, can also load these files. (The same format is used when you want to look back over your old games that you have played on the IGS.) GoPanda is written in Java so it probably runs on several non-Windows computers as well.

I have downloaded a few games, mainly such where a low-level match was reviewed by a high-level player. I was hoping that some of the mistakes were similar to mine and some of the advice was relevant to me. Wouldn’t that be nice. So I read a couple reviews, got a number of great ideas, and fired up a new game on my Galaxy Tab, still on the easiest level. It crushed me just as easily as before. Not only am I unable to learn from my mistakes, it seems I am unable to learn from other people’s mistakes as well, even when they are thoroughly documented and an alternative approach is spelled out. I must have lost close to a dozen games by now!

A dozen games? What happened to the 20 000 games I was suppose to lose, getting butthurt every time? Well, that was to become a master player. I am just saying, it should be possible to see or feel some progress after spending hours each day for several days studying Go. Perhaps I have an anti-talent, perhaps I am immune to Go somehow. I saw this guy at the Internet Go Server just recently, who had won 2100 games and lost 2400. He was 17-kyu (the lowest that is recognized on IGS) and struggling against someone in the beginner class (everything below 17k, basically). So after playing over 4500 games, he was still clinging to the bottom like a sea star. That is kind of sad. I wonder if that was someone who started playing Go in his later years as well? Or someone with an anti-talent, like me?

But for everyone else, the Go Teaching Ladder seems like a great resource.