Comment by simonw
2 days ago
I'd be fascinated to read more about this. I'd love to see a sample screenshot of a few of your cards too.
2 days ago
I'd be fascinated to read more about this. I'd love to see a sample screenshot of a few of your cards too.
Sure, I'll write something up later. I'll give you two samples now.
One reason I love the Obsidian + Markdown + Spaced Repetition plugin combo is how simple it is to make a card. This is all it takes:
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...
The top image is a screenshot from a game, and the bottom image is another screenshot from the game when it showed me the proper location. All I need to do is separate them with a question mark, and the plugin recognizes them as the Q + A sides of a flashcard.
Notice the data at the bottom: <!--SR:!2025-04-28,30,245-->
That is all the plugin needs to know when to reintroduce cards into your deck review.
That image is a good example because it looks nothing like the vast majority of Google Street View coverage in the rest of Kenya. Very people people would guess Kenya on that image, unless they have already seen this rare coverage, so when I memorize locations like this and get lucky by having them show up in game, I can often outright win the game with a close guess.
I also do flashcards that aren't strictly locations I've found but are still highly useful. One example is different scripts:
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04...
Both Cambodia and Thailand have Google Street View coverage, and given their geographical proximity it can be easy to confuse them. One trick to telling them apart is their language. They're quite different. Of course I can't read the languages but I only need to identify which is which. This is a great starting point at the easier levels.
The reason the pros seem magical is because they're tapping into much less obvious information, such as the camera quality, camera blur, height of camera, copyright year, the Google Street View car itself, and many other 'metas.' It gets to the point where a small smudge on the camera is enough information to pinpoint a specific road in Siberia (not an exaggeration). They memorize all of that.
When possible I make the images for the cards myself, but there are also excellent sources that I pull from (especially for the non-location specific cards), such as Plonkit:
https://www.plonkit.net/
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing.
Small question - have you ever used Anki, and/or considered using it instead of this? I am a long-time user of Anki but also started using Obsidian over the last few years, wondering if you ever considered an Obsidian-to-Anki solution or something (don't know if one even exists).
I used Anki for years, not for Geoguessr, but I've been a fan of spaced repetition for a long time.
It worked well and has a great community, but I found the process for creating cards was outside my main note taking flow, and when I became more and more integrated into Obsidian I eventually investigated how to switch. As soon as I did, I've never needed Anki, although there have been a few times I wished I could use their pre-made decks.
I know there are integrations that go both ways. I built a custom tool to take Anki decks and modify them to work with my Obsidian Spaced Repetition plugin. I don't have a need to go the other way at the moment but I've seen other tools that do that.