Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple’s “problems”. If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.
As the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan… at the moment.
Hólar’s church, if I’m not wrong
I’ve been procrastinating a lot with this post. Although it may not look like this from the pictures (or even the text), this was one of the worse days in our trip. Uneventful, visiting not-so-interesting places and with a lousy guest house at the end of the day. Let’s see if you find if interesting! If not, the next post will be, don’t worry.
From my cheap dictionary
I first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.
I have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.
I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?
From my cheap dictionary
Last February I set myself a goal for these next three months (February, March and April): to learn Gaelic. The time is up and I must confess I have not made a lot of advances. The reasons are plenty, and most are shared with whoever wants to learn a new language. They are even harder for people learning a few languages at once, the kind of language nerds that have way too many Teach Yourself books on languages.
No more gas ahead
Leaving Mývatn was a little dull. We saw a pair of handcraft stores that looked really interesting… And they were closed until 11! No way we could spend so much time waiting. We fueled, bought vanillated skyr for the route and took the road to Dettifoss. This is one of those places where you definitely have to fuel, there is no other gas station in 130km.