My Little Project: Getting Those New Cards Done
Alright, so I needed to get a bunch of new cards made up. You know, like flashcards. Was putting it off, honestly. The whole process just felt like a drag, hence the ‘zzz’ part of my little project name for it.
Making them one by one? Forget it. Super boring, takes forever. I looked around a bit first, thinking maybe there’s some app or website that does exactly what I needed. Found a few things, but nothing quite right. Either too complicated, or wanted money, or just didn’t fit the weird way I wanted my cards set up.
So, I figured, screw it, I’ll just whip something up myself. Didn’t need anything fancy, just something to take my list of stuff and spit out cards. I called my little script ‘howl’ – no big reason, just sounded kind of cool at the time, maybe because I was working late and feeling a bit feral trying to get it done.
Getting Down to It
First thing was getting the actual information for the cards together. I just dumped everything into a plain text file. Line by line. Super simple. One line for the front, the next for the back. Didn’t want to mess with databases or spreadsheets. Too much hassle for this.
Then I started writing a little script. Used Python because it’s usually quick for this kind of text stuff. The goal was simple:
- Read my text file.
- Grab two lines at a time.
- Format them nicely – maybe add some basic tags or structure.
- Save each pair as a separate little file, maybe just simple text files ready to be imported somewhere else later.
Sounds easy, right? Well, it mostly was, but you always hit dumb little snags. Getting the formatting exactly how I wanted took way more fiddling than I expected. Little things like spacing, or handling weird characters I had in my notes. Spent a good hour just on that. Felt like I was getting sleepy just staring at the code, trying to figure out why it wasn’t quite right.
The Result: It Works, Mostly
After some messing around, and maybe a bit more time than I first planned, I got it working. It’s not elegant. It’s not something I’d show off, really. But it does the job.
I run the script, point it at my text file, and bam – out come all my ‘newcards’ as separate files, formatted just enough for what I need next. Saved me hours of mind-numbing copy-pasting or clicking around in some interface.
So yeah, that was my ‘howl newcards zzz’ adventure. A bit of frustration, a bit of late-night coding fuelled by the desire to avoid boring work, but ended up with a tool that actually helps me out. That’s usually how these little projects go, isn’t it?
