Skerritt.blog

japanese

How I'm Learning Japanese August 2025

My morning routine looks like: Anki I do 20 new cards a day. The cards are ones I have created from reading, like this: I only make cards if: * It's within 5k frequency, so it's common to me * OR I know all the Kanji in the

japanese

The Jazzcat Output Method Converstation

I talked to Jazzcat about my retention and wanted to share it here 😄 Jazzcat is a member in The Moeway Discord famous for having a very weird and unique approach to Anki. However, this approach has led them to obtain one of the highest ranks via vocab quizes on the

japanese

Difficulty Hell in Anki

This was discovered by Para in The Moe Way Discord Server. For some people using Anki with FSRS you will have a very high Anki median difficulty: Something like 95% (before mine was 98%). This means cards mature super, super slowly. I was doing 30 new cards / day, and maturing

grind75

746. Min Cost Climbing Stairs

Problem You are given an integer array cost where cost[i] is the cost of ith step on a staircase. Once you pay the cost, you can either climb one or two steps. You can either start from the step with index 0, or the step with index 1. Return

My experience with Amazon Kendra

A couple months ago in a hackathon for Monzo I put together a lil team to complete the impossible: "Organise the world's Monzo's information and make it easily searchable" We ended up using Amazon Kendra, let's discuss my experience with it. The

Introducing CyberFork - The community fork of CyberChef

Click here to go to CyberFork CyberChefThe Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis CyberChef is dying. The last release was 5 months ago. There are over 100 pull requests and 300 GitHub issues. The most upvoted pull request is 4 years

japanese

Using a Japanese Input System (JIS) Keyboard with GB layout

A JIS keyboard looks like this: Notice the 2 buttons next to the spacebar, and in the top left hand corner you have an input switcher button. This is how to use a GB keyboard in Romaji input on a JIS. 1. Start regedit as admin 2. Find your keyboard

japanese

The Best Beginner Kanji Dictionary

Over in TheMoeWay user road_to_redemption shared their Kanji dictionary: It has everything you need from a Kanji dict: * Meaning * Frequency * Top 3 common words with readings + translations * Readings + distributions * Components with keywords I really like this a lot, in particular the frequency + meaning + readings of the Kanji. Current

japanese

My current way to mine visual novels

My main method of learning Japanese is by reading Visual Novels. These are kinda like a game and kinda like a novel. To give you a rundown: * Every bit of text is spelt out on the screen * It is usually fully voiced by Japanese natives * The game does not continue

cybersecurity

Acing the World's Hardest Cyber Security Exam with 3 Days of Study

I passed the world's hardest cybersecurity exam with only 3 days of study. What exam was it? CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) Why is it so hard 1. The exam covers 8 domains. The CISSP is described as a mile-wide, inch-deep. You need to know a lot

japanese

Visual Novel Review: ツユチル・レター～海と栞に雨音を～

I finished this visual novel 2 days ago! It was my first ever visual novel I finished! I had played some Danganronpa before but it wasn't voiced at all. Tsuyuchiru Letter ~Umi to Shiori ni Amaoto o~The prestigious private girls’ school, Kikyou Academy, educates young ladies from

studylog

Autumn's Study Log, Week 7

This is my study log for learning Japanese. 私はこれを日本語書きます。 今週は54時間勉強しました. 日曜日はまだ終わっていません。 121単語を覚えました 450つの漢字は思えました。ankiの名前は「rrtk450」 フラッシュカード計算 219 若い 132 古い 古い==覚えました Total active study hours ⏱️ 2023: 7h 8m (started in December 2023) ⏱️ 2024: 912h 13m 42s (I got serious, but still struggled. Deleted all my flashcards and known words

languages

Using Yomitan (a pop up dictionary) for Hawaiian

I added support for Hawaiian to Yomitan, a pop-up browser based dictionary. I originally learnt Hawaiian on Duolingo in 2016. Then I spent a few years learning Japanese and now I am writing / updating Japanese learning software to work with Hawaiian 🥳 What is Yomitan? Yomitan is a browser extension pop

AI

Why talk in English? Gibberlink

English is a bad language for communicating. It takes so long to say so little. This repo introduces GibberLink, 2 AI agents realise they are both AI and switch to a dial-up like language to communicate much faster and with less issues. Pretty cool! GitHub - PennyroyalTea/gibberlink: Two conversational

japanese

Kokoro TTS for Anki

When I make Anki flashcards from movies or TV shows I can easily just rip the sentence audio from the show. But, for manga? News articles? Random words I found in the wild? No audio here! I made this project to generate audio for Anki flashcards without native audio using

AI

Tip: Use OpenRouter instead of OpenAI / Anthropic / Deepseek

I recently had to make API calls to Anthropic and I noticed I was getting rate limited pretty hard. Turns out, they rate limit you until they "trust you". Even if I did pay them £10.... I then Discovered OpenRouter OpenRouterA unified interface for LLMs. Find the best

japan

Japan Working Holiday Documents

These are the 2 documents I used to get a Working Holiday Visa to Japan as a trans woman in 2024. Want to see my other Japanese posts? See this tag on my blog: japanese - Skerritt.blogSkerritt.blog You can watch my video here: https://youtu.be/pxlCic908FU Itinerary

anki

Memorising Leetcode by using Anki as a Scheduler

Problem: When you have to do Leetcode, you often cram it all in a few weeks before your coding interivew. It sucks. The interviewer knows it sucks. But there's nothing that can be done. Everyone knows cramming leads to worse retention, and you do not really "grok&

self-hosted

Over-engineering my backups

2 years ago I wrote about how I over-complicated my document storage system: Over-engineering my document storage system with Paperless-ngxI think the first realisation that I was getting old was when I implemented a system to store physical + digital documents and was excited about it. My previous document system looked

Everywhere I changed my name in the UK

First I got a name change deed, I did not enroll this. Instead I had my friends sign it digitally. It was free and took around 5 minutes. * Internet bank accounts Monzo is super easy to change my name on. I did it in like a minute or 2 minutes.

japanese

Playing Stardew Valley in Japanese

So you want to play Stardew in Japanese. Download Yomininja to OCR the on-screen text: GitHub - matt-m-o/YomiNinja: Open-source OCR and dictionary tool.Open-source OCR and dictionary tool. Contribute to matt-m-o/YomiNinja development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubmatt-m-o Next you'll realise the font is too

japanese

How I learn Japanese offline

Sometimes I travel for many hours or I sit in cute coffee shops, and I love to learn Japanese while doing it. But I don't have internet :( Here's a collection of tools I use to learn Japanese offline. Manga I read manga that has been processed

ScreenPipe AI company will harvest your email without your permission

Opensource AI company ScreenPipe has been harvesting your email without your permission. All you have to do is star their repo, and they will add you to their marketing lists. This is illegal in many countries around the world. Who would have guessed that an AI company would not respect

japanese

How to download 800gb of Manga and put it all onto a MicroSD card

Why do this? I work in tech and love tech. When you love tech, sometimes you make something just because you can. There is no real reason as to why you want to do this, but perhaps if you are not familar with having fun there are some reasons: 1.

japanese

Reading Manga everyday for 1 hour

I just published this video on YouTube, come check it out!