Anki on ¬ just serendipity 🍀

anki: migrate English notes to TTS note types

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:36:25 +0200

Problem statement: migrate my English 🇬🇧 deck to dedicated note types with British English text-to-speech, without adding reverse cards.

I created English Language Card 🇬🇧 with four fields (Front, Front Example, Back, and Striked) and only one card template:

{{Front}} {{tts en_GB:Front}}

{{#Front Example}}
<br>
<i>{{Front Example}}</i> {{tts en_GB:Front Example}}
{{/Front Example}}

English Grammatik Cloze 🇬🇧 uses the same TTS setup for cloze notes:

{{cloze:Text}} {{tts en_GB:Text}}

AnkiConnect could create both types, but did not expose a changeNoteType action. I closed Anki and used its own Python package instead. Before changing the collection, I exported the English deck and copied the SQLite database:

4.8M pre-english-note-type-migration-2026-08-22-13.27.44.apkg
9.9M pre-english-note-type-migration-2026-08-22-13.29.08.collection.anki2

The field and template maps did the migration in place:

col.models.change(basic, groups["Basic"], language, {0: 0, 1: 2}, {0: 0})
col.models.change(cloze, groups["Cloze"], english_cloze, {0: 0, 1: 1}, None)

I rehearsed the migration against the database copy before running it for real:

% PYTHONPATH=/Applications/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages \
  /opt/homebrew/bin/python3.13 /tmp/anki_migrate_english.py \
  ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/User\ 1/collection.anki2
{
  "notes": 1089,
  "cards_before": 1096,
  "cards_after": 1089,
  "language_notes": 1086,
  "cloze_notes": 3,
  "removed_reverse_cards": 7,
  "integrity": "ok"
}

The script also checked every mapped field, retained card ID, and review-log count. After a full upload to AnkiWeb, a normal sync passed.

No reverse cards, and all English notes can now speak for themselves (pun intended!).

🤖 Drafted with /bloggify. ∎

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Anki: archive a deck

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:49:00 +0200

♠ Previously.

The Anki official docs do not provide explicit instructions about the archival of decks that are no longer needed.

Archiving is better than deleting because you never know when you may need a deck again.

One way to archive a deck is to simply export it as a backup and save it elsewhere. But then you collection becomes scattered. I’d really like to manage all my decks in a single place.

So I came up with a simple workaround.

First, create an Archive:: subdeck. A subdeck creates a parent-child relationship which, for our purposes, bundles all archived decks within an umbrella parent. It’s visually easier to manage and organize, effectively hiding archived decks from the deck list view.

Second, move the desired deck(s) within Archive::.

Third, one by one, open the cards/notes list (“Browse”) of a deck, select all cards/notes (Cmd-A), then suspend them all (Cmd-J or right click, “Toggle suspend”).

Side effect: cards/notes from the deck will no longer show up for review. At the same time, your past progress is kept, should you ever want to unarchive them. ∎

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★ anki: flashcard generation with claude code

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:09:12 +0200

♠ Previously.

I started to use Claude Code to generate flashcards for my (new) Tech Deck via AnkiConnect, covering books and topics I’m studying for to consolidate my SWE-SRE knowledge.

The workflow: I tell Claude which book or topic to cover, it researches their key concepts, checks my existing cards (notes) for potential overlap, and batch-adds new ones via the AnkiConnect HTTP API:

def anki_request(action, **params):
    payload = json.dumps({"action": action, "version": 6, "params": params})
    req = urllib.request.Request("http://localhost:8765", data=payload.encode(), method="POST")
    with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as resp:
        return json.loads(resp.read())["result"]

notes = [
    {
        "deckName": "Tech 💻",
        "modelName": "Basic",
        "fields": {
            "Front": "DDIA: <b>LSM-Trees vs B-Trees</b> — how do they differ?",
            "Back": "..."  # HTML-formatted answer
        },
        "tags": ["ddia"],
    },
    # ... more notes
]

anki_request("addNotes", notes=notes)

In a sample session, topics covered:

Topic	Cards	Tag
SRE (Google)	50	`sre`
System Design	40	`system-design`
LeetCode / Python	41	`python`
Kubernetes	20	`kubernetes`
Production-Ready Microservices (Susan Fowler)	28	`microservices`
DDIA (Martin Kleppmann)	25	`ddia`
Building Microservices (Newman)	16	`microservices`
Fundamentals of Software Architecture (Richards & Ford)	25	`software-architecture`
Kubernetes advanced	25	`kubernetes`
Networking	17	`networking`
Linux / Systems Performance	16	`linux`
Python stdlib	23	`python`
Total	~326

For each book, Claude searched the web for chapter summaries and key concepts, cross-referenced my existing cards to avoid duplication, then created a Python script to push cards through AnkiConnect’s addNotes action.

Cards match the existing format: Basic note type, HTML formatting (<b>, <br>, <code>, •), one tag per topic.

Example card (front):

DDIA: Sloppy quorums and hinted handoff — what are they?

Example card (back):

In a standard quorum (w + r > n), writes/reads must reach specific replicas. Problem: during a network partition, the designated replicas may be unreachable. Strict quorum would reject the write → reduced availability. Sloppy quorum: Accept writes on any reachable nodes, even if they aren’t the designated replicas (…)

The whole process took about an hour. Doing it by hand would have taken days.

I am excited to evolve this workflow. The next step is going to be to refactor my thousands of language cards and notes. ∎

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Anki: API access

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:15:10 +0200

♠ Previously.

Install AnkiConnect:

AnkiConnect enables external applications such as Yomichan to communicate with Anki over a simple HTTP API. Its capabilities include executing queries against the user’s card deck, automatically creating new cards, and more. AnkiConnect is compatible with the latest stable (2.1.x) releases of Anki; older versions (2.0.x and below) are no longer supported.

…to be able to do incantations such as:

% curl -s localhost:8765 -X POST -d '{"action": "deckNames", "version": 6}' | python3 -m json.tool

{
    "result": [
        "Default",
        "Languages",
        "Languages::English \ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7",
        "Languages::German \ud83c\udde9\ud83c\uddea",
        "Languages::Italian \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf9",
        "Languages::Portuguese \ud83c\udde7\ud83c\uddf7",
        "Tech \ud83d\udcbb"
    ],
    "error": null
}

% curl -s localhost:8765 -X POST -d '{"action": "modelNames", "version": 6}' | python3 -m json.tool

{
    "result": [
        "Basic",
        "Basic (and reversed card)",
        "Cloze",
        "Deutsch Grammatik Cloze \ud83c\udde9\ud83c\uddea",
        "Deutsch Language Card \ud83c\udde9\ud83c\uddea",
        "Image Occlusion",
        "Italian Grammatik Cloze \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf9",
        "Italian Language Card \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf9"
    ],
    "error": null
}

Why is this useful?

It allows me to connect my LLM to Anki via HTTP¹.

Prompt: create flashcards based on the Site Reliability Engineer book by Google, published by O’Reilly, in the Tech deck.

⏺ I’ll use the Basic note type (Front/Back). The Google SRE book is substantial — it covers topics like SLOs, error budgets, monitoring, incident response, automation, release engineering, etc.

How many flashcards would you like roughly? And should I cover the whole book broadly or focus on specific chapters/topics?

The traditional option is to import an existing shared deck, like this one.

⏺ Done! I’ve created 50 flashcards in the Tech 💻 deck, all tagged with sre and google-sre-book. They cover the most relevant topics:

Core concepts: SRE definition, SLI/SLO/SLA, error budgets, toil, 50% rule

Monitoring: four golden signals, black-box vs white-box, symptom-based alerting

Incident management: roles, mitigation vs root cause, postmortems, blameless culture

Reliability patterns: graceful degradation, load shedding, circuit breaking, retry budgets, exponential backoff

Cascading failures: causes, defenses, deadline propagation

Operations: on-call best practices, change management, canarying, capacity planning

Distributed systems: CAP theorem, consensus, Paxos/Raft

Culture: simplicity, automation hierarchy, PRR, Wheel of Misfortune

Wait until I start to refactor my language notes². ∎

Alternatively you can use MCP if you really want to. ↩︎
Anki concepts: a note is typically a pair of cards (back and front, front and back). ↩︎

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anki: auto-sync

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:38:15 +0200

♠ Previously.

Problem statement: enable auto-sync to AnkiWeb.

First layer: enable sync on open/close: Preferences > Syncing > Automatically sync on profile open/close

Second layer: for manual syncs, press y (source).

Third layer: install and enable an auto sync add-on such as this one:

This addon will automatically synchronize your collection with AnkiWeb at time intervals you can choose. It will never interrupt you while you are using Anki.

By default, the first sync will start 1 minute after your last activity. While Anki is sitting idle in the background, it will sync every 10 minutes. You can change those settings in the options dialog.

Someone forked that add-on to improve upon it, enabling background auto sync.

Should I trust a random add-on though? Even if the Anki community is generally decent and well-intentioned, these days we can’t trust anyone.

I asked Opus 4.6 (Claude) to analyze it for potential malware:

⏺ I've now read every single source file in the addon. Here's my analysis:

  ---
  Malware Analysis: Background Auto Sync (226796325)

  Addon: Background Auto Sync for Anki
  Author: athulkrishna2015
  Source: GitHub
  Fork of: Auto-Sync-Anki-Addon by Robin-Haupt-1
  License: GPL-3.0
  Files reviewed: All 8 Python source files + manifest.json

  Verdict: No malware detected. Appears safe.

  What the code actually does

  1. sync_routine.py (core logic) — Sets up timers to periodically call Anki's built-in
  mw.col.sync_collection(). Saves/restores window state so sync doesn't steal focus. All sync goes
  through Anki's native sync infrastructure (AnkiWeb auth, mw.pm.sync_auth()).
  2. utils.py — Single function: has_internet_connection() which opens a TCP socket to 8.8.8.8:53
  (Google DNS) to check connectivity. This is a standard, benign connectivity check. No data is
  sent.
  3. config.py — Reads/writes config to Anki's own config storage (mw.col.set_config/get_config). No
   external communication.
  4. main.py — Wires up hooks (profile_did_open, profile_will_close, sync_will_start,
  sync_did_finish) and adds a menu item. Standard Anki addon boilerplate.
  5. log_window.py — Simple in-memory log viewer (QDialog + QTextEdit). No file I/O, no network.
  6. options_dialog.py — Qt settings dialog with spinboxes/checkboxes. The support tab loads a Ko-fi
   widget (https://storage.ko-fi.com/cdn/widget/Widget_2.js) via an embedded AnkiWebView. Also
  displays crypto donation QR codes (BTC, ETH, UPI). These are static images bundled in the addon.
  7. constants.py — Config key names and defaults. Pure data.
  8. bump.py / make_ankiaddon.py — Developer build tooling only; not shipped in the .ankiaddon
  package.

  Specific things I checked for

  ┌────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │    Concern     │                                  Finding                                   │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │                │ Only socket.create_connection("8.8.8.8", 53) for connectivity check +      │
  │ Network calls  │ Anki's own sync API. No external HTTP requests, no telemetry, no phoning   │
  │                │ home.                                                                      │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ File system    │ Only os.path.dirname(__file__) and os.path.join to load bundled QR code    │
  │ access         │ images. No reading/writing arbitrary files.                                │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Code execution │ None. No exec(), eval(), subprocess, os.system, importlib, or dynamic code │
  │  / eval        │  loading.                                                                  │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Data           │ No access to deck content, card data, or personal information beyond what  │
  │ exfiltration   │ Anki's sync already handles.                                               │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Obfuscation    │ None. Code is clean, readable, well-structured Python.                     │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Suspicious     │ Only standard library (socket, datetime, os, json) and Anki's own APIs     │
  │ imports        │ (aqt, aqt.qt).                                                             │
  ├────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │                │ Loads JavaScript from storage.ko-fi.com in the support tab — this is a     │
  │ Ko-fi widget   │ standard donation button, not a concern, and only loads when you open the  │
  │                │ options dialog's "Support" tab.                                            │
  └────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  Minor notes (not security concerns)

  - The author has 18 other shared items on AnkiWeb, suggesting an active community member rather
  than a throwaway account.
  - The addon is relatively new (updated 2026-03-27) with 0 ratings so far, so there's limited
  community vetting.
  - The code is a clean, well-documented fork of the established Robin-Haupt Auto-Sync addon.

  Bottom line: The code does exactly what it claims — periodic background sync using Anki's native
  sync mechanism. No signs of malicious intent, data exfiltration, backdoors, or obfuscated code.

✻ Cooked for 2m 36s

I am not installing it though, I am happy with the second layer for now. ∎

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Anki: corrupted database

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:14:11 +0200

♠ Life is hard. Today, when opening Anki on macOS:

DbError { info: "SqliteFailure(Error { code: DatabaseCorrupt, extended_code: 11 }, Some(\"database disk image is malformed\"))", kind: Other }

Database corrupt? What is this, are we in the 2000s? Goodness.

I have automatic backups enabled. For 4 years I haven’t needed them. Today is the day. Never say never!

% ls -lt "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Anki2/Thiago/backups/"
total 234496
-rw-r--r--@ 1 tperrotta  staff  3911921 Apr  8 00:12 backup-2026-04-08-00.12.17.colpkg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 tperrotta  staff  3911921 Apr  7 00:16 backup-2026-04-07-00.16.26.colpkg

I try:

open "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Anki2/Thiago/backups/backup-2026-04-07-00.16.26.colpkg"

…but apparently that file is corrupt as well.

I am not particularly worried because I sync my notes to AnkiWeb. Even if the entire local collection were corrupt, my flashcards are in the cloud.

So I decided to simply start from scratch¹.

mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2.corrupt
rm -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2-shm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2-wal

Then I open Anki.

It prompts me to download my decks from AnkiWeb.

And now everything works as usual! Last cleanup:

trash ~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/Thiago/collection.anki2.corrupt

No idea why this has happened. First time. Life goes on.

!next

Previously. ∎

The idea was mine. The decision was mine. The LLM suggested the command on how to do so. I can still self-troubleshoot, mmmkay? ↩︎

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Anki: find all suspended flashcards

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:14:48 +0200

♠ The following queries are useful to find flashcards (notes or cards) in Anki that you’re struggling with.

is:suspended
tag:leech

The action item for each should be one of the following:

do nothing for now
delete the note / card if it’s no longer relevant e.g. perhaps it is barely used
enhance or rewrite the note / card for better retention and then unsuspend it

It’s a slow process. ∎

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Anki: insert emoji on macOS

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:28:48 -0300

♠ There’s a longstanding bug in Anki on macOS: it’s not possible to insert an emoji in the editor view via the system emoji picker.

Whenever you click an emoji, the emoji picker closes whilst nothing is inserted.

This has always annoyed me.

Today I found a workaround (thanks Luc!):

For anyone who comes across this. I figured out a quick workaround. You have to open the Emoji-Picker-Keyboard on your Mac and then select the Emoji and pull it into the editor window with your mouse.

It works indeed!

My previous alternative was to use the emoji picker to insert an emoji in another application (e.g. the Notes.app), and then manually cut and paste it. ∎

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★ Anki workflow

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:12:52 -0300

♠ I’ve been using Anki since 2-3 years ago to keep up with German vocabulary and grammar. I had originally started with Duolingo.

In the beginning my workflow was quite basic. Then I created custom language cards:

After you install Anki, you need to set up a Note Type to keep your flashcards formatted as you like. Anki comes with a few basic Note Types, but they aren’t suited for learning Japanese.

(via). The advantage of creating a custom note type (language card) is that I can format it the way I want.

On top of it I tweaked my Anki deck settings to optimize it for language learning.

I adopted the Low-Key Anki setup:

The Low-Key Anki setup is a series of counterintuitive simplifications one can make to Anki’s algorithm that result in a significant boost in efficiency, as well as a considerable reduction in the stress associated with reviewing cards

Furthermore, Soren Bjornstad has helpfully written some tips about designing flashcards effectively, some of which I gladly adopted.

And last but not least, Refold provided me with a step-by-step breakdown on how to configure Anki for language learning.

References #

∎

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★ Anki: custom language card (cont.)

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 13:02:39 +0200

♠ This post builds upon the previous Anki: custom language card.

Searching word boundaries #

When searching for a word such as Mann, results such as Mannschaft come up.

To search accounting for the word boundary, like a typical \bMann\b regex, use w:. In this example: w:Mann.

Searching ignoring accents #

When searching for a word with Umlauts such as Über, you should type it exactly as is.

If you are lazy or do not recall where the umlaut falls, perhaps you would think of searching for uber, however that does not work.

To make it work, prepend nc: to the word. In this case: nc:uber will properly match über. NC stands for non-combining.

Searching word boundaries whilst ignoring accents #

Is it possible to combine the two aforementioned operators? For example, to match für. Unfortunately, it is not. Anki does not support w:nc:fur nor nc:w:fur, which is unfortunate. Schade!

In this case the best compromise would be to search for w:für.

Adding images to flashcards #

It is pretty straightforward: Right click the image in your favorite web browser, copy it, and then paste it (Ctrl/Cmd + V) into Anki. The image is automatically imported.

No-brainer image sources:

Nowadays it would also be natural¹ to use “AI” to generate images.

Providing examples: style #

To illustrate with a concrete example:

1: Ja, genau.

2: Das ist ja komisch.

Affirmative

The structure:

Bold numbers to disambiguate
Underscore the word in question to emphasize it
Italicize everything that is meta or an explanation about the word

To highlight substrings, e.g. Mann in Mannschaft, use underscores².

Tags #

I seldom tag notes because there is no need for categorization, all cards are treated the same way. Tagging is only useful in two scenarios:

for grouping / retrieval: for example, if you want to make custom study sessions for a specific domain / area (e.g. animals, programming, trips)
for provenance annotations: to make it easier to remember where a given note came from (e.g. “textbook”, “my german teacher”, “blog”, “podcast”, “work”)

Adding tags creates the burden of managing and standardizing them. You do not want to spend valuable mental effort derailing from your main task.

Sources #

https://docs.ankiweb.net/searching.html

Albeit deeply unnecessary and wasteful (energy-wise). ↩︎
This principle is not strict. I often interchange bold and underscore. Choose whichever feels more natural in the appropriate context. ↩︎

∎

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★ Anki: custom language card

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 13:02:21 -0300

♠ The more time you spent playing with Anki, the more opinionated you become.

Upon reading Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner, I got an itch to create my own Anki note template for learning languages.

The template #

There’s no point explaining how to create a new template; the excellent Anki documentation already does so. Instead, I’ll just list and explain the template I created.

The template is called “Deutsch Language Card 🇩🇪”. It has four fields:

Front
Front Example
Back
Striked

Front and Back come from the built-in template. There’s nothing special about them. I use “Front” for the canonical term in the foreign language I’m learning, and “Back” for the explanation in the base / native language I’m mostly familiar with¹.

Here’s an example:

Front: das Buch
Back: book 📚

Whenever possible I include one or more emojis 😃 in the “Back” field.

The canonicalization of the “Front” field is important, and one of the best (key, even!) features of Anki. It will smartly detect (and prevent!) duplicates from being created. It is case sensitive, therefore it’s important to create one convention and stick to it.

“Front Example” is used to complement the “Front” field. It consists of one or both of the following:

A phrase or sentence containing the Front term.
A picture representing the Front term.

To increase overall retention, it’s always best to add cues familiar to your context.

Add phrases that resonate with you or that you find in textbooks or blog posts that resonate with you. In my experience, adding random phrases is not effective.

Add images that represent well that you’re describing and that resonate with you. Photos that you take yourself are also fair game!

“Striked” is to disambiguate synonyms or false cognates. For example:

Front: der Sturm
Back: storm ⛈️
Striked: das Gewitter, das Unwetter

When I am reviewing the Back card, I want to cue myself not to think about the striked terms.

The source code #

The Front card #

{{Front}} {{tts de_DE:Front}}

{{#Front Example}}
<br>
<i>{{Front Example}}</i> {{tts de_DE:Front Example}}
{{/Front Example}}

The front card includes a text-to-speech sample that is generated on-the-fly. It works very well on macOS and iOS. In fact, that’s main reason why the template is called “Deutsch Language Card” instead of just “Language Card”. The text-to-speech engine is customized to have an accent in the given language. For (High) German, that is de_DE.

The Back card #

{{Back}}

{{#Striked}}
<br><br>
<s>{{Striked}}</s>
{{/Striked}}

The striked terms are ~~striked~~, as you would expect. ∎

Interestingly I prefer to use English most of the time, even though it is not my mother tongue. ↩︎

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Anki: find all notes with an empty field

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:06:49 -0300

♠ Gabriel Wyner recommends, in its Fluent Forever book, that each Anki note (card) has at least one image associated to it. This is intended to improve overall retention.

Back when I started my German Anki deck for language learning, I did not add any images. Now I find myself slowly backfilling my already existing notes with images. However, the more images I add, the harder it becomes to find notes without images.

Upon reading the Anki manual I figured out a way to find out which notes are still missing images:

Open Anki.
Open the deck you want to modify – in my case, Languages::German.
Click “Browse”.
Type in deck:current "Front Example:".

“Front Example” is the name of the field of my note template wherein I add images; you should replace it with the corresponding one you use. This syntax isn’t intuitive at all. Initially I was trying something like -"Front Example:*". ∎

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