Incremental Reading – Dealing with Information Overflow

Posted on February 4, 2011 by bobo

You want to read your favorite blogs, you get e-mail newsletters every day, you have websites you check regularly, newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, interesting Wikipedia articles – a lot of digital input you want to keep up with. But unless you make reading on the computer your full time job – you can’t. So how to select the really important stuff out of it? Emotions from reading a particular good article often let you loose the big picture.

RSS made some aspects of dealing with a lot of information easier. At lest you can get nearly all information into one place through RSS feeds without opening hundreds of websites every day to check if something has changed. You can usually select special channels of interest to get more specific news. On the other side you probably have to deal with an even larger amount of information.

But the biggest problem is: when and how to read/process all the information?

This is where the concept of Incremental Reading comes into place. Sometimes you only want to read about a specific topic, sometimes you just want to read a bit of a complicated article or just read about anything randomly to build new connections / enhance creativity. You can all do that with incremental reading and do not have to worry to miss something. Sooner or later (you can influence that) it will appear in your incremental reading process.

So how does it work?

You collect all the information you want to process and store them in one place. Then you review all the articles (or any other kind of information) randomly or by category. You can highlight important parts, set a reading point (bookmark), extract fragments and generate Question-Answer items for later repetitions.

I am currently using Supermemo for Incremental Reading and recommend it very much. I am not aware of any other software on the market that supports something similar. Most applications like knowledge base software or read-it-later apps only let your organize and collect information but do not help you on deciding when to read something and in what order of importance.

The basic work flow for incremental reading:

Try to get most of the input from one application (e.g. an RSS reader), so you do not have to check many different places/websites
Go through all you RSS feeds
Make a quick decision (title, tags) for every article if it is worth reading
Import the articles in you incremental reading software (you can copy & paste to Supermemo)
Use Supermemo to review articles when ever you have some time for reading

If you have a tight schedule, you can limit your reading for 30min / one hour per day, or just do a bit of incremental reading when you have some time. But you do not have to read each interesting article completely due to fear to forget about it if you do not read it immediately.

You can get a good in-depth article about incremental reading by the author of Supermemo here.

How to get 2500 epub ebooks for free

Posted on December 15, 2010 by bobo

I am not talking about public domain content of Project Gutenberg or similar sites. I am talking about free access to current bestsellers! And no – I won’t tell you where to get pirated ebooks. The solution to free high quality ebooks is: Digital Libraries. Digital Libraries have the benefits of regular libraries without the caveats. You can not be fined for not returning an ebook, as it will destroy itself through the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that allows you to open the ebook only for a defined time period.

The problem with libraries is, you usually need to be resident to be eligible for a library pass. Furthermore libraries with a lot of digital content are rare and often not at the place you are a resident at. And of course – they cost money, a lot of them have an annual fee.

A loophole few people know about: There is a library which has a huge epub ebook section (>2500 at the time of writing), which is free, allows you to apply as a non-resident and best of all gives you instant access. It is the Singapore National Library Board.

Download your first bestseller within 5 minutes for free:

Go to http://www.pl.sg/page/PlRegistration
Select “Foreigner without FIN” and enter your passport number, name and desired account credentials.
After accepting the terms you are supposed to receive a confirmation email. I did not receive it but your account gets activated immediately.
Log in using your passport number & username.
Download your first ebook.

Note: You need to install Adobe Digital Editions for this.

Other Libraries with memberships for non-residents:

Free Library of Philadelphia
epub books: 2917
Annual Fee: $15
Fairfax County Library
epub books: 1250
Annual Fee: $27
Houston Public Library
epub books: 516
Annual Fee: $40
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
epub books: 166
Annual Fee: $45

Note for Kindle users or others users unable to use Adobe DRM: The DRM format has been hacked. So there are options to remove it and convert the ebook to a kindle compatible or other format. Depending on your jurisdiction, this might be illegal though. For more information check out http://darkreverser.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/new-blog/.

title image by Johan Larsson

The Best Data Backup Solution for Nomads

Posted on December 11, 2010 by bobo

The most common backup media for individuals is an external hard drive. There are however two problems with this setup for nomads:

Weight of external hard drive
Though it protects you from hard drive failure and accidental deletions, it won’t help you if your backpack with your computer and your external hard drive in it is stolen.

If you are involved in any kind of online business, a reliable backup solution is especially important. And the problem with backups is – you only think about them when you need them and not before.
So you want to automate everything and make it as easy as possible.

Online Backup

If you want to have a backup of your data that you can access, even if all of your possessions are stolen, you need an offsite backup. But how to make an offsite backup without constantly going “offsite”? An online backup is the way to go.

With all the WikiLeasks news and other privacy disasters you might feel uneasy to purposely upload your private data to the cloud. I can understand that. Therefore a very important criteria for an online backup solution is that the encryption and decryption of your data is handled on your system. All uploaded data will be already AES-256 encrypted and neither your backup host nor the CIA can access your data.

There are a lot of services which provide unlimited backup space for a monthly flat fee. You have to be very careful with that however. Unlimited only means that they won’t tell you in advance how much space you are allowed to use. Those services tend to cancel subscriptions with heavy-duty users, go bankrupt or save money on data security.

If you want to have maximum security for a fair price use Amazon S3. S3 is part of the Amazon Web Services and has redundant data centers mirroring your data in different locations. Though any company could possible face bankruptcy, it will be less likely happen to Amazon in the next years. As Amazon S3 provides only an API to store object on their web service, you still need a decent Backup software.

JungleDisk is a very robust multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) backup software that uses Amazon S3 or alternatively their own Rackspace Cloudfiles service to store the data. Important for nomads with suboptimal internet connections: the JungleDisk network protocol layer is very robust and background backup uploads even work with very bad internet connections and thousands of resume operations.

I suggest to separate the files you want to backup into two categories:

Data (program code, documents, plans, SRS data, mails, …)
Storage (Music, Videos, Photos, all the bulky stuff …)

All of your data will reside in an encrypted TrueCrypt container file that can be mounted as a virtual disk drive. TrueCrypt is an encryption tool that allows you to create encrypted container files. For example you create a 10GB container file that can be mounted and gets the driver letter u: on a windows system. All data you put on drive u: will be instantly encrypted and stored in the container file.

There are several benefit if you store all your data in that encrypted container file:

You can use it as a normal drive, but to make a backup you just copy the container file to your backup media which is much faster than copying 10.000′s individual files.
You do not need to figure out where all your important files are. You will get used to configure every software to only save data on drive U: and all you have to worry about is to backup your container file.
You have one more layer of security when backing up your container file to the cloud as it is encrypted itself.
Your data is encrypted and won’t be compromised if your computer gets stolen. (Although I would recommend a full system drive encryption anyway – I will write about that in a later article)

Backup to a USB Stick

My second backup method I use, is a daily backup of my data container file to a USB stick. If I am in an area with no or slow internet connection so that my storage files can not be backed up online in a reasonable amount of time, I copy all new digital camera photos etc. on it as well until they are backed up online. I use a 128GB USB Stick for that but if your space requirements are lower, an SD-Card will do it as well. It is even easier to carry, as you can put in in your purse. I never put the USB-Stick in my backpack, so if it gets stolen with my computer I still have the USB-Stick.

As all my data is already encrypted and packaged in one single file, no fancy backup software is needed. I just need to copy the container file to the USB-Stick. As your container file is in use while mounted, the normal windows copy function won’t work for this. I use HoboCopy which makes use of the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) to copy the data container while it is mounted. It is a command line tool, so a simple batch files allows me to do daily backup process with one double-click.

I suggest one of the following media which are both very fast:

Sandisk Extreme 32 GB SDHC Card (30MB/s write speed)
Corsair Flash Voyage GTR 128GB (28MB/s write speed)

Backup Time for a 10GB data file: ~6 Minutes

Restore is more Important than Backup

You do not want to make a backup. You want to be able to restore it, when you need it. Some people do regular daily, weekly and monthly backups since years but never ever tried to restore any data. Whatever backup solution you have, you should try to restore data and see how fast you can recover from an emergency before it actually happens.

Copying my data backup from the USB stick is done in a few minutes. Restoring ~100GB of storage data from the cloud takes a few days but usually you won’t need everything immediately and can restore important files first. Amazon AWS has a very good connection from anywhere that allows a fast restore, which can not be said for some smaller online backup providers.

The last resort – Offsite Backup

I still do a Backup of my storage data to an external hard drive once a year. It is stored in a safety deposit box of my bank. So if for some reason my computer gets stolen and a hacker deletes all my stuff from Amazon S3 at the same time, I still have a backup of my photos etc. with a maximum of one year data missing in the worst case.

title image by neospire

Wandern in Shangrila

Posted on August 21, 2010 by bobo

Shangrila

Shangrila (香格里拉) – nach James Hiltons Roman “Lost Horizon” – ist ein tibetisch geprägtes Gebiet in Nordyunnan welches auf einer Höhe von etwa 3300m liegt. Es war früher unter dem Namen Zhongdian (中甸) bekannt und Tourismus-fördernt vor ein paar Jahren in Shangrila umbenannt.

Ich bin zusammen mit André unterwegs. Ziel ist es den “Shi Ka Xue Shan” zu umwandern um zum Grassland am Fuße des Berges zu kommen.
Wir haben uns zunächst entschieden durch die Schlucht im Süden zu starten um dann im Norden wieder rauszukommen (siehe Karte unten). Das hat den Grund da es im Osten einen “offiziellen” Zufahrtsweg zur Seilbahn gibt, an dem man höchstwarscheinlich auch eine Eintrittsgebühr für das Gebiet bezahlen muß – wie dies in China mitlerweile üblich ist. Diese wollen wir aber sprichwörlich umgehen. Nach ein paar Kilometern sind wir am Startpunkt im Süden angekommen. Dort haben wir dann leider “Alte Bekannte” getroffen – mittem im Nichts macht die Volksbefreiungsarmee Schiessübungen. Meine letzte Bekanntschaft mit denen war nicht so angenehm. Also sind wir schleunigst umgekehrt.

Da nun neben der Nordschlucht auch die Südschlucht nicht in Frage kommt ging es querfeldein den Berg hoch…

Bis zum Gipfel ging es dann aber mangels rechtzeitiger Aklimatisierung nicht zu Fuß, sondern einen Tag später per Seilbahn. Hier Fotos von “oben”:

Zur Fotogallerie

mobile learning

Posted on March 22, 2006 by bobo

You think vocabulary learning on your desktop is just too inconvenient – as it would be a perfect activity to do during waiting/transition time?

The supermemo.net academy allows you to learn via web frontend, learn by e-mail or with a PocketPC PDA. If you decide to use more than one option, the online learning data and the data on your PDA can be synchronized with each other. The system works very good but is officialy still in a beta testing phase. The PDA application is provided for free at this stage. There is also a huge amount of prepared learning material available, most of it free of charge. The primary focus are language learning programs, which include voice-data from native speakers. Learning vocabulary with the Supermemo method is one of the most efficient learning methods that I know of. I am a long time user of the desktop-program Supermemo, which uses the same algorithm as the online version (see my post about Learning Vocabulary).

MediaWiki on a USB-Stick

Posted on March 20, 2006 by bobo

Want to have your own Wiki or Blog System on a USB-Stick to organize your notes, to-do lists, whatever? MediaWiki is one of the best software to do this (used by Wikipedia). You can get your own portable wiki running in about 15 minutes!

1. get the Uniform Server package:

http://www.uniformserver.com/

download the zip archive and extract it on your usb stick. (Or better to a crypted truecrypt volume on your stick if you want to secure you data)

2. get Mediakwiki

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

and extract Mediwaiki to diskw\www

3. install your wiki / blog software

for software with web installers, just point your browser to it:

e.g. http://localhost/wiki/config/index.php

using other software you might have to change the config file manually
DONE!
This is the quick and dirty version. You might want to change some details especially regarding the security settings!

A detailed guide is available here.

Learning Vocabulary

Posted on March 17, 2006 by bobo

There are many ways of learning a foreign language. Whatever way you chose, you have to deal with simple vocabulary learning as well (there are some exceptions though – I will come back to this in a later post).

Many methods for learning vocabulary exist. They vary a lot – from reading the vocabulary list in your exercise book to using mnemonics and intelligently scheduled repetitions. If you are using a computer to help you learn vocabulary, there is a lot of “Flash Card” software out which emulates the manual method of using Question&Answer index cards and reviewing stacks of them.

There is usually a confusion between learning a new vocabulary item and remembering it. You have to learn it initially and then take care that you do not forget it by reviewing it regularly.

The problem of most flash card software: you have to decide when and what to learn. If you have too big gaps between your repetitions, the time and effort will skyrocket, if they are too short you are learning inefficient. The best way is to let the software decide when and what to repeat/review. It has the benefit that the computer using an good algorithm is far better in scheduling what to review than you are. It will also make it harder for you to procrastinate. You have to do a number of repetitions each day. The key to efficient/effective learning is to do your review regularly (that means every day).
As I said – there is a lot of software out there, but only a few that schedules repetitions for you:

Pauker, free (using the Leitner Card File system)
Supermemo, commercial (using the Supermemo algorithm)
FullRecall, commercial (using an artificial neural network)

There are some other programs as well. All of the programs above are using different scheduling algorithms. Many users claim that supermemo has the most efficient scheduling algorithm but I think it is not very important which one you use, as long as you do your repetitions every day. These programs are for repetitions only, you have to actually learn the vocabulary items first (an exception is “Pauker”). A very good way to do this is using mnemonics. Mnemonics is a big and interesting topic which can not be covered in this post. You can find further information here:

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 6

Posted on February 22, 2006 by bobo

problems! My cold symptoms got worse – or: I definately got a cold. I had to do an unscheduled nap at 4:00am when I was really fucked up and overslept the first time since starting this experiment (from 4:00am to 8:30am). Now I am not sure what to do. I want to recover as soon as possible but I do not think continuing this experiment would be very beneficial to it. I wonder what other polyphasic-sleeper do when they are ill. When I am ill I usually stay in bed and get a lot of sleep – but this not really compatible with polyphasic sleeping – is it?

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 5

Posted on February 21, 2006 by bobo

Last night was surprisingly good – it was actually the first night in which I could engage in real productive work (I was hacking my first Ruby on Rails app ). After my 6:00am morning-nap I got some cold-like symtoms which are worrying me a bit. It got worse during the day. I have no idea if it is related to my sleep experiment (maybe my immune system is not as good a normally now!?) or just bad luck. Let’s see…

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 4

Posted on February 20, 2006 by bobo

uptime: 88 hours (not sleeping more than 30minutes straight)

Last night was better than before. I was not overly tired at night but got a bit tired after my 6:00am morning nap. My alertness is still not normal during the day but I am able to work and do not feel sleepy most of the time. It feels all a bit weired to see people getting up in the morning, going to sleep in the evening and getting up again – but for me it is still the same “day”. In fact there are no “days” anymore…