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pre

Indeed.

"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"

Ugh. Nope nope nope.

But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.

That is more win.

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> But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.

Yes, I can confirm this. I have never connected my device to wifi. I backup my notes to my home server using rsync.

You mean rsync via USB? Or can you rsync by WiFi without allowing it to send requests to their services?

> You mean rsync via USB?

I mean rsync via USB (but over ssh protocol - the USB mounts as a network device, rather than as a disk drive).

> Or can you rsync by WiFi without allowing it to send requests to their services?

I have never connected the device to wifi, so I don't know about this.

While I haven't used this device, because it's just a standard Linux system, certainly.

I don't own one of them, but I would surely be able to instruct my router to put it in jail like I can every other device.

LAN-only.

Fine until you're elsewhere.

Eh?

When I'm elsewhere it can continue to not have the passwords to anyone else's wifi.

Wouldn't you still need to be careful about the device auto-joining to open public wifi? Basically, if you were going to be away from your house you'd have to always remember to disable the wifi before you left. Alternatively, just keeping wifi off and only using the USB cable means you don't have to worry about forgetting to disable wifi before you leave home. :)

This.

Most devices don't auto connect to open wifi unless you tell them to. I'd assume this would have an option for that as well.

This requires being militant about never connecting under any conditions. If the device ever is even briefly connected to a particular network (especially any commonly-named public network), unless that entry is cleared, the device may reconnect later unintentionally and with no obvious indication of having done so..

For those with more expansive threat models, intentional dvice or network spoofing or cloning might bebrisks.

Since firewalling is performd off-device (on the home-LAN router), this will resut in an unsecured evice.

My preference would be for some on-device configured networking limits. Putting full reliance in fixed-site infrastructure migh be unpleasantly surprising.

People have mentioned you can ssh into it, so it might be possible to make changes to the /etc/hosts file.

That's assuming the device doesn't use straight IP addresses for whatever it's communicating with. That's possible, but pretty unlikely.

Or update/modify the networking, WiFi, routing, gateway, firewall, or other configurations on the device itself such that it connects to and communicates over only specified networks and/or hosts.

Again my point is that relying on off-device, local-netork hardware and configs is brittle.

Their support page does imply if you want to avoid cloud sync you should keep it offline, but perhaps that is just because it is the most brief/user friendly way to describe the situation. There definitely isn't an explicit option to turn off the cloud sync in the device settings, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are workarounds to this once you ssh in. You could also maybe block internet access to the device via your router settings, so you could at least use rsync while at home?

https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264829...

The cloud sync requires an account, which the device works fine without. So just don't sign up.

I think I'm missing out on features I don't care about, like OCR and emailing docs to people, but it's well worth it.

But can you have it sync automatically in the same way with your own private cloud? That would be really awesome.

Sounds like you could maybe use git-annex on it for that? (I use rsync (via "FolderSync") on the android-based onyx boox max, so as soon as I turn on wifi it pushes to one of my personal boxes (internal format is a hideous sqlite-based thing, but after the third round of updates they generate competent PDFs so I just push those) - sounds like on this I'd also just use rsync from an ifup script or something...)

Sounds like the optimal approach would be to run some kind of server on your own hardware, and update the /etc/hosts on the device to point at it.

Shouldn't be too hard to figure out what it's communicating over the network, then put together a server to match that and do useful things with it.

...and now I, too, have reason to consider ordering one. Looking like it was dependent on the cloud was what turned me off before.

>"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"

It's opt-in, FWIW, it doesn't work unless you log in to a ReMarkable account and you can just store everything locally. It has ~6GB of usable space (8GB but 1-2GB reserved by OS)

And if you mod it, it looks like you can fairly trivially handle the syncing yourself: https://github.com/verbavolant/reMarkable-autosync

My thoughts exactly

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