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Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

I have this device, and for hackers, this review misses some stuff:

* the company behind it is based in norway, so you can be pretty sure the techies got treated well

* they abide by the GPL very well

* by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local

* I really hope they start a good opensource community program. There are already efforts underway for hacking on this, and in theory making custom applications for this could be very fun

* last I saw, some of the developers are active on reddit and HN, so I hope they comment on the last point

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by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local

Maybe it's just me, but why do the defaults for devices like this seem to now always require either a special app or reach out into the Internet? Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth? The hardware is certainly capable of it.

That said, I don't mind the presence of WiFi, but the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.

They tried, but exposing a "simple USB mass storage" isn't easy at all from a running operating system. USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex. This is why file-based protocols like MTP exist.

But, since you can SSH into the device, rsync works just fine on the Remarkable. :)

So because it's not easy, it shouldn't be done?

Personally I would be ok with my device disabling it's UI while it emulated a mass storage device when plugged into a host.

They had a variety of pretty big engineering challenges to solve: getting the form factor right, making sure your hand didn't interfere with the screen while using it, getting the pen-and-paper feel right, and getting the e-ink refresh rate down to where you could draw and write on it and have it feel natural.

I'm fine with them choosing to solve those challenges instead of supporting USB mass storage.

...and designing, developing, and supporting your own custom application and its associated protocol isn't an "engineering challenge"?

USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex.

The point is, USBMS is a solved problem. My MP3/MP4 players, my Android phone, my satnav, even my soldering iron[1] can do it. The Linux kernel, which reMarkable uses, already includes support for this[2]. It's conceptually very simple --- in its most basic form, if the device detects that it's plugged in, it unmounts its internal block device and lets the host control it, and vice-versa. More advanced functionality, such as found on Android and many MP3/MP4s, lets you choose whether the device or the host controls its storage, via a very obvious interface on the device itself (one position is "charge only", the other is "transfer files".)

[1]https://hackaday.com/2017/07/24/review-ts100-soldering-iron/

[2]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/mass-storage.tx...

Yes, exposing a block device over USBMS is a solved problem.

Exposing files from a device's internal storage (which is ext4 in this case) over USBMS is very much not a solved issue. You'd have to copy the files back and forth or write a driver which emulates a FAT filesystem.

The alternative would be to use FAT internally and expose that block device, risking corruption (you have no control over what is done to your poor filesystem).

None of my Android phones can do that. In fact, Android used to expose the raw device in earlier releases and stopped doing it because it was too unreliable and the UX was bad since the filesystem had to be unmounted.

It's not only difficult, it's an inferior solution compared to a file-based protocol, so I'm glad they didn't go that route.

However, here's what Martin (the CTO) has been playing with:

https://github.com/reMarkable/vfatbuse

It might be inferior technically but from a user experience perspective it's superior on most every platform.

> Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth?

I agree that it should definitely be an option because there are plenty of situations when using this device where you might not even have connectivity.

> the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.

It is definitely silly and wasteful but it's oh so simple when it works correctly. Instead of dealing with SMB shares, email, FTP, rsync, cables, mass storage devices, properly ejecting things, or any other technology; you instead just put a file in a designated folder and it's available on all of your devices in a matter of moments.

rsync is much easier than creating an account and gives me more control.

It was one of the first things I thought of, "I hope I can run rsync on this thing to sync notes".

I guess if this device is targeted only at power users then rsync support is great. If they're hoping to make this a mass market device then they probably need something more user friendly.

Of course, but they are not mutually exclusive, you can offer both.

They do

To make it more likely you'll stay within their ecosystem and buy more from their app/book/etc. store, is always my first assumption.

They can always steal from Amazon's playbook and randomly delete sideloaded files.

Most customers are ignorant of security issues and the privacy regulations are too weak. This has resulted on one hand in only noticing the conveniences of cloud sync on the customer side and an information greediness on the side of the companies.

My enthusiasm for this device instantly evaporated when I found out about the mandatory cloud integration. I already know from a customer support situation that Amazon has remote access to kindles, they can tell you what files you have on device, etc.

It's depressingly bad...

Bonus: this reMarkable website does not work without third party JS. It's completely blank. One of the 3rd parties is hotjar, which does all sorts of shady analytics like clickstream and keylogging.

> My enthusiasm for this device instantly evaporated when I found out about the mandatory cloud integration.

From GP: "So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local"

The GP and lima have both claimed that one can transfer files without the cloud, but this is not mentioned in their FAQ (https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us). This is a direct quote: "Use the reMarkable desktop app or the reMarkable mobile app to transfer documents and ebooks onto your device. Once imported, your files will be synced across your connected devices. reMarkable works best with our custom built apps for iPhone, Android, PC and Mac."

By using a search engine on their web-site(!) one can find details about USB support: "NB: This functionality is currently experimental, as we haven't fully implemented it yet. We will work to improve how this works and looks in future software updates."

Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website.

> Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website.

Isn't that par for the course for esoteric information only useful to highly advanced users in the consumer electronics[1] space? I'm yet to see an Android device that touts unlockable bootloaders on their websites.

1. Being "open" isn't the ReMarkable's tablet schtick/selling point. It's a consumer product that happens to be open. The minority users who want to take advantage of that know where to look/can find that out on HN.

I'm talking about being able to transfer your files between two devices sitting 10cm apart, without using someone elses servers.

This is a very basic feature, supported by everything except those spyware products which are selling customer information or those that reserve the right to do it in the future.

If reMarkable is not one of those, they should make it clear in their marketing.

Lock in. Without it you won't get investor money.

It's because Microsoft exerts it's patents on FAT32.

That gives me a lot of hope. At some pint the article mentions a "proprietary cloud service" which immediately made me worry that this would be a locked-up device.

If the underlying software is open source, that would also suggest that it if there is a large enough community, it will keep working for much longer than the company supports it. And it gives hope for better software fixes. For example, the writing-lag mentioned sounds like it should be solvable with better data structures under the hood.

The API used for the cloud service is quite simple. There are already two projects on github implementing it (one by me) - search for remarkable-tablet to find them.

The tablet also works fine without using the cloud service, it has a built-in webserver to upload documents to it that you can just access via WiFi or USB-LAN.

Really this device is a hacker's dream in terms of openness. The only last thing I'd wish for was open sourcing the main software application running on it.

is there any way to tell it to use your cloud service instead of theirs ?

In other words, what good is a custom reimplementation of it if you can't make it point at them without dns hacking?

Yes, you can SSH into the device and change a config file. This is a hacker's dream indeed.

How fast is the data transfer?

Do you think one could hack it into a "screen" by streaming a black-and-white image data from a computer to it?

So the connected computer would do all the heavy lifting related to rendering, compress the result to something that is really easy to decompress, send it over, and tablet would just decompress a bitmap and blit it to the screen?

Haven't tried, but you're either limited by USB2.0 or the wifi chip.

Given the low refresh rate of the panel, something like that should work just fine. Pretty sure I saw a YouTube video by someone who hacked it together using periodic screenshots.

Is the response time really that fast? On my e-reader, it takes solid 1 second in the best case (and sometimes more than 3s worst) to switch a page. This device looks really fast. But maybe it's just updating small region and that's why it's so fast?

A lot of responses are commenting about writing being fast. AFAIK, the slow part of eink displays was always effectively clearing them. Drawing is fast, and drawing without needing to clear anything, such as during writing, should be expected to be responsive. Many new systems don't do a full clear for every update, but that introduces more artifacts each time until a slow full clear is done. But the better displays now can get away with it without being distracting.

Page switching can take a bit,depending on how much there is to render. When I read papers, it never takes more than half a second or so, at most. Drawing also doesn't have any painful latency (I say painful because it IS barely noticable, but it doesn't take away the feeling of drawing/writing and instant feedback)

The response time is optimized for writing, not reading. This device is better treated as a whiteboard than an ebook.

Switching pages can still take a few seconds (the display is lightning fast, but the processor for generating the page is not).

>>Switching pages can still take a few seconds (the display is lightning fast, but the processor for generating the page is not).*

Can take up to a few seconds, but really depends on what the device is rendering. For most arXiv papers and light graphics (e.g. clean charts) the page turns have been very tolerable.

>But maybe it's just updating small region and that's why it's so fast?

Exactly. I have one and I think writing has really short latency. My friend says it's slightly slower than an iPad but I haven't tried that so I don't know, in any case it's still very good.

The only really bad thing about the reMarkable is that the software still sometimes crashes, leaving you for ~20 seconds with a notebook that you can't write on.

>The only really bad thing about the reMarkable is that the software still sometimes crashes, leaving you for ~20 seconds with a notebook that you can't write on.

Interesting, in 3 months I haven't had a single crash

Then I envy you. Mine crashes about once a week, always when taking notes.

Echoing other responses here: writing on it is practically lag-free (there's a tiny amount of lag, but I don't even notice it anymore); using the eraser tool to erase sections takes a little more lag, using the move tool to move sections around lags a bit more, and a full page refresh can take a couple of seconds.

In practice, it's been perfectly usable (for me). The only nit I've found responsiveness-wise so far is the startup time. It's not convenient when I suddenly remember something and want to write it down and have to hold down the power button for three seconds and then wait another five or more for it to get to the main screen and then wait another two or so to get to my scratch pad.

Just curious but which ereader do you have? The current higher-end Kindles (I have an Oasis and a Voyage) turn pages so fast as to be unnoticeable with a noticeable full screen flash every 10 or so pages.

It's Nook, but I don't remember the exact model. Maybe Glowlight.

Maybe it's just time for me to update? I bought this in 2014.

I've seen the Sony offering of this, and it's incredibly fast. But also super expensive

What is the relevance of the “techies got treated well”?

Techies get treated well probably equals higher employee retention, again leading to higher institutional memory, meaning bugs have a chance of actually getting fixed. More happiness probably also correlates with more creativity, meaning that there is also a chance of getting more features with updates.

Some people like to reward ethical companies. Most hackers I know are among them

I interpreted it as equivalent to “Fair Trade” or “Free Range” labels you sometimes see on groceries.

People may prefer to buy it, for that reason.

That statement also struck me -- it's not like "techies" are normally treated unfavorably?

"Normally" would be overstating the problem I think, but it's not as though toxic work environments where people are expected to work unsustainably long hours are exactly uncommon in the tech sector.

Parent asked about relevance. It's relevant if some people have worries about treatment of techies. Should people have these concerns? Dunno, but probably off-topic for this post :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452923#14453083

> by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl

Could you explain how this works? I assumed that's what the HTTP interface setting was, but I couldn't see this documented anywhere. I really don't like the Windows and Android app so this would be a nice alternative.

The SSH access is actually not hidden behind a switch.

When you connect a reMarkable into your computer it identifies as an ethernet adapter and assigns you an IP over DHCP, you can then access SSH on the device via that IP.

This is what the device shows you for gaining access (don't worry, that's not actually my password anymore and I've put SSH keys on it anyways): https://i.imgur.com/zbJUBOe.jpg

This screen is in Settings -> About, right below the GPL information.

Edit: If you were asking about the HTTP interface, that becomes available at the same IP but it is hidden behind a switch (Settings -> Storage -> Enable USB web interface)

The main developer is also the CTO of the company (and happens to be a KDE developer!)

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