A more meaningful way to reschedule Zyzzyva cardboxes

Playing competitive Scrabble but not using Zyzzyva cardboxes? Well you should. Using Zyzzyva cardboxes but you have an unmanagable number of quizzes coming up each day? Read on.

We are not going to talk about the program's built in rescheduling feature. It's usefull if you miss your quizzes for a few days  but it's not very usefull if the number of questions grows to unmanagble levels after you have just added a large number of words to your vocabularly. As always, prevention is better than the cure and there is way to prevent or minimize it from happening; When you learn a set of new words, make sure that you do a standard quiz with them before adding them to the cardbox. That way the questions are spaced out instead of being bunched up. Even then, if you keep adding a few hundred words each day for about week such as when preparing for a tournament, you will end up with a cardbox that looks something like this.

If you are someone competing at international level you might laugh at these numbers but you might still be daunted by numbers that are tenfolds of the above So please read on.

Our strategy will be to spread these out over several days. Half the questions scheduled for the next 12 days will be pushed back by 12 days. Thus the number of questions coming up over each of the next 12 days will be halved and the number after the 12th day will increase. Twelve is a number I chose arbitarily. You can use any number but make sure it's not too large a value or the cardbox the question belongs to will need to be changed as well. How exactly do we do the change? by editing the data file. The quiz data is held in two files named ~/Zyzzyva/quiz/data/CSW12/Annagrams.db and ~/Zyzzyva/quiz/data/CSW12/Hooks.db note that ~ denotes your home folder.

Close any active instances of zyzzyva and double click on the data file. If you are nervous backup the data file before you try this out. When you click you will see something like the following pop up on your desktop.

If you don't see something like that, it means you do not have sqlite installed on your computer. No fear, you can install sqlite quite easily on your computer. But if that feels a bit daunting you can add the sqlite exention to chrome or firefox and edit the data file in your browser. Once you are ready, you just need to copy paste the following text into the sqlite console and click run.

update questions SET next_scheduled = next_scheduled + 86400*12
    where next_scheduled is not null  and next_scheduled < strftime('%s','now') + 86400*12 
    AND next_scheduled % 2 =0

Now close sqlite3 and reopen Zyzzyva you will find that the quizzes have been rescheduled in a more meaningful manner than is possible with the built in feature.