ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks
github.com
github.com
The hacking community is quite active, one frequently asked question is how to get and run custom software on the device.
There's the Entware[0] package repository for running ARMv7 software on the tablet. Recently a community maintained package repository, toltec[1] for tablet-specific software was created and is actively maintained.
For Nix users, I've been helping build a Nix-based cross-compile toolchain[2], so you could easily cross-compile a good amount of the 60K packages on Nixpkgs for the tablet. Upstreaming the cross toolchain to Nixpkgs is in the works.
To see what the community is up to, see the IRC channel[3], Reddit[4] and Discord server[5].
[0] https://github.com/evidlo/remarkable_entware
[1] https://github.com/toltec-dev/toltec
[2] https://github.com/siraben/nix-remarkable
[3] #reMarkable on Freenode
My hacking attitude says it is absolutely unacceptable. The good news you can disable it, and I did. But for poople to be aware , this is what it does by default. Can't say I like that part of rM software.
Unfortunately now I've looked for the article and can't find it. If you saw one, please drop the link here, there is more info there.
Producers managed to improve products for thousands of years without violating the privacy of their customer. Equating slightly inconvenient with impossible doesn't make for a great argument.
That said, while I am fine with automated bug tracking for this sort of goal, I absolutely agree that all automated tracking needs to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Edit: Often times we're not talking about the difference between good data and really good data. We're talking about the difference between useful and useless data.
There is a limit to what majority can decide for a person and it's called "rights of a person" designed exactly for that purpose.
So, for instance, majority in Nazi-Germany was ok with humiliating and eventually killing Jewish people and that fact doesn't make it justifed anyhow. Majority sometimes disrespect freedom of speech using bullying innocent comments advocating respect for a freedom which we observe recently even here in form of downvoting and it also have no justification what so ever.
>otherwise they don’t know how to improve the product. they should ask and pay for participation if they wish to know, or they simply don't know, it's ok.
If I wasn't asked about it I consider it a spyware activity and we have no idea what they do with this information now or in the future.
R. Stallman explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc
And it being popular doesn't justify it, it's just an invasion of privacy that many people put up with (or are unaware of).
You lack imagination my friend
> otherwise they don’t know how to improve the product.
That number is zero.
Users like this because they are actually being listened to by the software's author, there is no overhead to fixing problems, and they aren't being shoehorned into a database.
I believe a gradient exists here. That's why we don't collect any usage information, but error reporting is something I've found life changing especially given how fragmented the experience is across different browsers and devices.
Asking customers what they want can be useful sometimes but mostly people don't know what they want other than a slightly improved version of the thing they already like.
Really - in a respectful relationship with a vendor - you would gain SO much by just asking. Even if people say no.
Really, it's like "I wasn't stalking you, I was just collecting valuable feedback for improving our next date!" <slap!>
Instead, try "Hey, how are you - did you have fun?"
> Then I remember there’s no analytics for my toilet paper.
reminds me of the Blue Man Group (performance artists) doing a hilarious send-up of the internet interpreted as interconnected sewage plumbing
[1] http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
chroot for now, systemd-nspawn as soon as I have time to hack on it later, as I want to be able to switch between whatever I'm running and reMarkable's original software.
Parabola-rM is really a labor of love, and half of the proceeds are donated to the FSF and Parabola project. It would mean a tremendous amount to have your financial support for independent free software development (and if you have already bought a copy, thank you!).
There's also a problem with how certificate authorities are run which I strongly disagree with. People trust them because corporations trust them, which is already bad, because those same corporations are in-bed with NSA and probably other "security" agencies (which are hard to tell apart from criminal syndicates). If we moved to an HTTPS-only world (Universe, please forbid) there would be an absolute CA racket, and any website could be censored by having the CA revoking its certificate. I fear very much for that possibility, and I completely disagree with the direction that corporate browsers are taking by moving towards HTTPS-only, and especially false messaging like when Chrome reports websites as "non-secure". Firefox, which along with Mozilla is almost entirely funded with Google dollars, is going the same direction.
Another problem is if an ISP is tampering with a customer's connection, that is a social problem and not a technical one. Sure, some technical measures may mitigate that from happening, but ultimately the problem is social and users of that network should stop using it, or start tunneling their traffic some other way.
I provide HTTPS as a convenience for people downloading my software who otherwise wouldn't check my PGP sigs. Browsers like Chrome have false messaging claiming sites are "not secure" and techno-illiterate users don't understand what that really means, and they complained, so I listened but still advise everyone to check the signatures anyway.
Another major reason is that I don't care to support HTTPS for the rest of my life on my personal website. If I were to start supporting it, then everyone will start linking to the HTTPS version, then I could never get rid of that because redirecting back to HTTP requires HTTPS. I never collect any kind of data through my website--there are no form submissions, it's read-only and purely serves .html pages (not even server-side rendering). There's not really a purpose to a secure connection for that.
This only scratches the surface of these problems. I won't even get into how certificate authorities assign, then revoke, bogus certificates all the time--but that happens more than they will ever admit to. If you do a search for that, even just on Ars Technica, you'll find a lot of examples.
My biggest complaints may be summarized as, "we need completely distributed human-to-human trust without any corporate authorities."
The contents of the https transaction is not available to the CA.
The data is not available for snooping for intermediaries.
And tampering, while it seems like a silly check, is actually done almost casually by ISPs for a variety of reasons. They will insert executable code into a HTTP reply.
In other words, preventing HTTPS might support the subjugation of your users by others.
Sounds silly but once RMS said "proprietary software subjugates people" and it sounded like weird over-the-top political rhetoric when I heard it. But over time I notice that indeed subjugation is a huge part of our use of computers
> I cannot reply to your lower-level comment at the max nest level, but I disagree with you about https.
> The contents of the https transaction is not available to the CA.
> The data is not available for snooping for intermediaries.
> And tampering, while it seems like a silly check, is actually done almost casually by ISPs for a variety of reasons. They will insert executable code into a HTTP reply.
> In other words, preventing HTTPS might support the subjugation of your users by others.
No, if I don't want to support HTTPS then that is _my freedom_. Would I not be subjugated by a corporate CA, and would I not need to support that for the rest of my website's life? (Yes, I would.) And, again, it is not my responsibility to protect people from their malicious ISPs. The problem is obviously the ISP, not my website. And again, I offer trust and validity checks for all important files served by me in the form of PGP certificates.
> Sounds silly but once RMS said "proprietary software subjugates people" and it sounded like weird over-the-top political rhetoric when I heard it. But over time I notice that indeed subjugation is a huge part of our use of computers
I don't support the subjugation of users--I believe users ought to hold all the freedom themselves, including the freedom to protect their communications if they wish, but I don't have to actively participate in the obvious corporate racket of acquiring SSL certificates, and the eternal responsibility they require. I deserve the freedom, too, to host a site independently--and that is what mandatory HTTPS (without a distributed web of trust) will take away--not away from me, because I can always host a site no one visits, but away from users who won't anymore have the choice.
"we need completely distributed human-to-human trust without any corporate authorities."
Just to be clear: I'm not against HTTPS--I would love to have trust and validation to those I'm speaking with electronically. But, the way SSL is implemented today (with CAs) is not something I am willing to support for my personal website.
I think this is sort of like "lock you car doors". Yes, a dedicated thief can bypass the locks and open your car, but you don't have to leave your car doors unlocked and let anyone enter you car at will.
I think a reasonable middle ground might be to maintain HTTP and do HTTPS using letsencrypt. If one of the CAs does something to limit your freedom, you could redirect https to http and turn it off.
Anyway, it's good to see you're basing your argument on your principles, many people cave early and easily.
It's interesting that the second most visible comment on a thread about an open platform product holds them to a much higher standard. (I'm not calling out your comment, but rather the general perception.)
I wish more people would take your perspective for our phones and devices.
Sounds pretty acceptable to me actually
I like Syncthing's approach: In Syncthing, telemetry is enabled by default, so they get statistics and can improve their product. But there's also a prominent info banner about this, so everyone learns about it, and can opt out.
What? That's amazing. I agree with you, so refreshing.
A pity that three friends tried the latest one and all decided to return it. Very dissatisfied with the product overall.
Also, it would be pretty sweet some part of the API was documented.
My view of embrace is goes further than releasing an operating system. For some, it's a little intimidating for a dev to start with. :)
Unless you limit yourself to mainstream Western eReaders, it's not really the case anymore.
Also, are these devices properly GPL compliant?
I haven't inquired about GPL compliance.
You should explain when you ask.
ReMarkable is sort of astonishingly expensive, but that would be justified if these "hacks" were officially supported or at least acknowledged enough that some future firmware update wouldn't ruin any workflow I build with them.
Is there any hint of such acknowledgment, or would I be risking $448 on a device that might turn itself into a paperweight?
The fact that you can literally SSH into it, out of the box, was a strong signal for me. I don't regret purchasing my RM1.
[0] https://remarkable.engineering/
I have been contemplating buying a ReMarkable 2 as I prefer to handwrite everything/annotate/. The price tag is a bit hefty given the cost of an iPad and pencil and the zillion other things it does.
I'm curious if you are indeed going to buy one?
I wouldn’t compare it to an iPad. This is much more tuned to helping you think - no notifications whatsoever, no web browser to offer opportunities to do something else. Or, put another way, the fact that it doesn’t do a zillion things is a good thing if your goal is to be able to think deeply.
Kind of like how some writers use ancient equipment that doesn’t connect to the internet to get their writing done.
I've had mine for about 4 weeks now, and I'm still consistently using it every day.
It's fantastic for planning, diagramming (I use this to capture measurements and dimensions for items I'm going to be making in CAD software), getting signed forms, taking notes, and sketching.
The hardware is delightful, even for left-handed folks like myself, where other tablets often make erroneous marks where my hand is resting.
Now, all that said, the software can still come along way. My single biggest gripe is that I haven't found a way to search for text within notes. I'd really love to have an option to automatically convert handwriting to text on save/close and keep that around as meta data for searching.
I may play with implementing it at some point - A large part of the reason I bought the device was because of the open ecosystem. I do software dev for a living, and knowing that I can get into the device as root and muck around REALLY makes it feel like it's mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/jt41e1/my_max_lu...
Having a Laptop + ereader setup would probably be a mess to set up with the cut+paste stuff. If e-Ink reference materials is your use case I'd probably suggest instead that you either get one of the Boox models that has HDMI in (Max Lumi does) or if you have $ to spend, get the Dasung e-Ink monitor instead, and use it as a 2nd monitor for your laptop. That would be much easier to cut and paste between your coding environment and reference materials.
(Also, Boox tablets aren't easily rootable so auto-inputting stuff into apps isn't easy. You could solve that by building a virtual bluetooth or USB keyboard with an Arduino that your laptop controls, though.)
the cut and paste stuff would definitely be messy but autoinput works without needing root so the only thing i need to figure out is how to transfer the text to tasker. probably something like 'join' would do the job
The reMarkable hardware is nice, but its stock software is frankly disappointing. The hackability is a "plus", but I don't want to have to resort to unsupported firmware tweaks to fix a $500 device.
Specific feedback:
* Zooming is incredibly coarse. There is no pinch zoom, only a button in the UI that jumps in intervals of 100% or more. On many of my documents it goes from slightly too small to WAY too big with no level in between
* Speaking of zooming, the pen controls overlay the document, often blocking parts of the text. There is no way to scale the document to fit in the remaining space. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you could still read most of the text.
* It doesn't support in-document hyperlinks in PDF or ePub, so your table of contents and index are worthless.
* If you somehow know what page you want to jump to, that's buried two menus deep and frustrating to get to
* Search is very slow in large (100+ page) documents, and results trickle in gradually so you can never be quite sure when you're looking at the whole list. Given that one of my desired uses for the device is to carry around some PDF textbook-style references, this hurts.
* You can't change the default writing utensil, so if you don't like the grainy mid-width pencil you have to change it every single time you open a new document
* There's no pressure sensitivity in the pen
* The eraser works like a pencil eraser, not a digital one. There is no way to erase a stroke, so you'll inevitably erase more than you want to and have to redraw some of it
The actual drawing and doodling is nice, but there are a number of issues.
First the cloud/sync software will happily let you add lots of ebooks/comics to transfer (I have a couple of comic bundles from humble bundle I've yet to read). The end result is that the disk fills up, and the on-device file manager is anemic and slow. Not only is there no discernable way to clear the sync queue (so as you free up space it gets filled again..) - even if you can sort by file size, you can't actually list file size.
I had hoped to use it, beyond comics, for technical books - but both zoom and reflow of text, and font selection is poor for both Pdf and epub.
Then finally, I had hope it would work for viewing Pdf rpg rulebook - but it chokes pretty badly (on the admittedly quite horrible) white wolf mage 20th book for example.
And to add insult to injury the built in Pdf reader can't be used with the interactive (Pdf form) character sheets.
It can read a "printed" version and allows doodling on top - so it's not all lost. But the end result isn't machine readable, so you're almost better off with a paper sheet anyway.
Finally, reading a standard epub (like "The Star's my Destination") is painful because the limited font/margin/reflow, and the sluggish response for turning pages (a hw button would've helped here). In the end, my aging huawei phone [1] with oled display set to night mode is a better book reading experience both in Kindle and FBreader.
But again, the doodling is pretty good, and the screen is crisp - so I hope something can be done via software. Maybe even just adding a djvu-reader and do the conversion off device if the cpu is truly as underpowered for Pdf as it appears.
[1] p20 pro (wow, it really is a 2018 phone - thought it was older..) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20
The specific points of feedback you have are common with the v1 device. With the exception of pressure sensitivity. The pen for the v1 device was pressure sensitive. Has that been removed? Of the other points, the only one that I've found really bothers me is being unable to change the default writing implement.
* PDF annotations are automatically flattened, so you can't browse them separately or easily extract them on a computer
* sync is terribly, agonizingly, slow and unreliable
- it looks and feels like paper. No glowing screen, textured surface, it just feels like writing with a pen.
- the always-on display. I use the ReMarkable as my notebook while working and can have it in front of my all day long. You still can see the screen content when it goes to sleep after 20 minutes (sleep can be deactivated) and you can even have it preserve the content when it switches off after 3 hours. So you keep your notes in view. With the iPad, it turns itself off quickly and of course uses way more power.
- overall I think it has the better design for this purpose than the iPad, I have the book-like cover and love it.
- hackability. I need to learn more about that, but you can ssh into it and have a normal linux shell. Try that with an iPad :p. It seems to be very easy to cross compile Go programs for the ReMarkable.
If you're not excited about the very limited feature-set, or because it's hackable, I'd pretty strongly recommend looking elsewhere. Much more user-friendly devices exist at similar prices, but they're locked down / run android (so less battery life, various android benefits and issues) / not as thin.
- Matte screen protector + pencil means reading/writing experience feels just as good as an eink.
- It can comfortably handle large, color PDFs. Other solutions either don't have color, or don't have processors powerful enough to handle rendering large PDFs anyways.
- Both iPad and Remarkable have almost identical pixels per inch - 224 and 226 ppi.
- iPad has polished reader apps. My favorite is Kybook3, which supports auto trimming PDF margins & horizontal scroll locking which makes it super convenient to read PDFs. It can also read epubs and other formats with plenty of knobs to tweak background colors, fonts etc. I don't think the Remarkable is quite there yet.
- Reading, researching frequently means looking something up on the web as you go too. Again difficult to do on a remarkable.
The iPad can potentially be more distracting, but that can be solved by setting it up right IMO. I don't install any TV/Media/News/Games apps on it, turn off notifications for most apps and have a shortcut to limit the colors to black and white.
Duet display (the original app which Apple Sherlocked with Sidecar) supports Windows 10, but as far as I know, if you want to do this on Linux, you're out of luck.
Was a good decision.
It doesn't matter if a gadget is hackable if it locks you into a proprietary file format and doesn't have good interoperability. Exporting PDFs just doesn't cut it; the point of keeping your notes digital is being able to (a) maintain them as living documents and (b) use them on hardware of your choice.
Buying an Android-based device like Onyx Note Air gives you an option to use apps like Xournal/Xournal++ (best-in-class for handwritten notes, but unfortunately still in alpha on the mobile), or Stylus Labs' Write. This means that your notes are available, in their original form, on virtually any platform, in an open format. This is way, way more important than being able to root or ssh your gadget du jour.
[0] https://remarkablewiki.com/tech/filesystem#lines_file_format
"proprietary device using open file format" would make me be stuck with whatever format they decided to use, and stuck with the same reader/writer. This is less helpful to me than being able to change everything in the device.
Just look at the announced resolution in dpi in b&w vs color, and you'll see they use a LCD mask in front.
If you want both color and eink, it's better to get a dual screen, like a Lenovo C930 book: use the screen clone mode and just turn off the color screen when you don't need it.
This can also gives you a eink laptop if you use a USB keyboard.
I've also toyed with the idea of purchasing an old Surface Pro 3 because of the price and the ability to run a full Linux distro—though obviously, I lose all the benefits of e-ink with this option.
For the keyboard, consider getting a USB or bluetooth keyboard, like Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II, or ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint (0B47190) - they are very comfortable.
As for linux support, check out https://github.com/aleksb/yogabook-c930-linux-eink-driver
It is coming: a waveshare 7 color eink screen is $600 on aliexpress, 16 second refresh
If partial refresh comes more supported in open source, pictures could be drawn immediately with the b&w text, then refresh little by little to add color.
There are a few "color eink" displays floating around in demos which are actually just an lcd with a matte layer over the top.
They're a lousy company that does not respect the GPL and ships intentionally insecure software (ancient linux kernel with SELinux disabled for starters) that phones home to Chinese servers. The bootloader is locked, so putting pmOS is out of the question and their update files are intentionally obfuscated.
I explain it all in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543
This received some attention in the re--it community last month--the company still does not care [1]. It's a tragedy because their hardware is good, otherwise and they can compete on that.
In other news, I am now a happy owner of a ReMarkable 2 and the first day I was able to SSH in, set up rsync on my local network and customize the hosts file to disable their cloud services. We should not tolerate the inability to run software on computers that we own, especially for devices that are as trusted as notebooks and personal computers, which this tablet is.
I'm not sure if I should sell my Boox Note or relegate it to use as signage. The only problem is that if the battery dies, it refreshes the display to a "battery depleted" screen, instead of leaving up the last image. But you can't customize that because the bootloader is locked.
Edit: Another note about Onyx. At least my Note does not support proper C2C charging. In other words, you can't charge from a Type-C charger, you have to use a type-A charger. My rM2 works just fine with all of my C2C chargers.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237328
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hl09g7/onyx_boox_chi...
That said, sketching/writing are just as good as they are on the iPad Pro or Surface Pro. The pen/glass "feel" is no worse than those other two solutions either (but no better either). Very low latency, easy page switching. The iPad's rapid zoom in / zoom out is helpful in sketchpad for drawing details which epaper clearly has challenges with. But In terms of taking notes or writing down things as I'm coding and need to get back to? It's super awesome.
I've also put PDFs of data sheets on it which are easy to read (if a bit shrunk). The PDF reader is functional, same with the EPub viewer, would like to have the click the page to turn pages that the kindle and other apps on touch screens do.
Syncing with the computer is pretty seamless.
I don't like that it clears the screen and puts "reMarkable is sleeping" on the screen when I've had it sitting open with a PDF. There may be an option to change that but I haven't found it yet.
All in all I'm glad I got it and I've been using it pretty much every other day or so.
And you can modify the png for sleeping. Any transparent pixels will show the screen contents. I changed mine to completely cover the entire screen when sleeping. (I use a passcode and don’t want people seeing the screen contents)
I also agree with one of the previous posters, I wish this would be A4/Letter size like the Sony. I read mainly pdf articles and the size is just sufficient.
Can anyone who has one tell me how accurate the handwriting recognition is? And how responsive is the pen-tablet interface? Does it actually feel like writing on paper (responsiveness-wise)?
Even on the RM1 I can't notice any myself.
Here is an example on how it parses my terrible handwriting: https://websites.instantwebsite.app/wPhkwSStQvStUrzPC9jW5Kw/...
(no, I'm not a doctor)
According to the licenses on the device, the handwriting is "partially powered by MyScript" which seems to be this service: https://www.myscript.com/
For me, at least some of it is that the pen is more pen-like ("hard" rather than with a tip that depresses), and the sampling rate is much higher than e.g. a Surface. I have a Surface device and I absolutely can't stand writing on it - I have to write huge and slowly and lift a couple mm, or it screws up all over the place. ipads are dramatically better, but they still sample slower AFAICT, and close many of my "e"s into "c"s and similar loss-of-detail.
https://handwritingsuccess.com/
Edit: looks like they have released an iPad app since I last tried it! I’ll also add that when I first did it I found doing the worksheets pretty relaxing as a wind down exercise, in the same way that mindlessly playing puzzle games on a phone would be, but with much more benefit.
Jokes aside, practice PDFs for improving my handwriting does sound interesting, thank you for taking the time to share it.
It results in the words from the language picked to be pretty well recognized, but the words from the 'other' language being mapped to similar words from the picked language quite a lot.
For exemple, me writing 'Quelle horreur !' is recognised well if I pick French, but as 'Quelle horror!' in english.
Not sure if you can add stuff to the dictionary, I did not find anything similar yet
In the summer I like to sit outside coding, but the sunlight outshines my laptops LCD display. So I'd like to use an eInk display as an external monitor. And I gather ReMarkable is the best bet because of their hackability.
If your laptop isn't very bright, you're mostly out of luck. You can work in the shade, try polarized glasses, buy a brighter laptop, or find a portable monitor that is brighter than your built-in panel.
As someone who works with my laptop outside in the sun a lot, the trick is not to have a brighter laptop but to have one with a matte display instead of glossy, and use bright backgrounds for everything. Even when I'm in direct sunlight, matte display and light themes make me able to see my code without any squinting or troubles.
> The refresh rate on e-ink is so low that coding on one would probably be excruciating
If you've edited files in vim over a spotty SSH connection and wasn't phased too much by it, you could probably survive the e-ink refresh rate as well.
https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee
Or you know another one? Did you manage to conntect it with Mac?
https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee
The author is also very nice and responsive to bug reports.
I've managed to make it work as second monitor for linux virtual machine.
I wish I could use it as second monitor for Mac and was unable to make it work with MacOS so far.
Anyone made it work with Mac? Who knows how to make it work with MacOS ?
1. Set a password for the setting “VNC viewers may control screen with password:” in the screen sharing settings. Most of the issue with standard VNC clients is that MacOS uses MacOS-specific login security, but setting a password opens it up to VNC-standard security
2. Install an alternate VNC server on the Mac. This bypasses all the MacOS security nonsense.
I don’t have personal experience, but for these types of low-level things, I start my research with `brew`. In this case it looks like https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/tiger-vnc is a contender.
http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/iis4fo/em...
I'm hoping KoReader can salvage what the reMarkable team has ignored.
It would be nice if KOreader were better integrated into the official OS, but yeah I don't really care myself.
I ordered an iPad mini and a 20 dollar Apple Pencil clone (which imo is better than the actual Apple Pencil with its USB C charge port)
That combined with a matte screen protector got me everything I wanted out of the Remarkable, without the wait, and with an incredibly fast computing device that can do far more.
-
I get that traditionally Tablet vs eReader is largely down to the eInk and some some other factors like battery life, but I really think the math has silently changed
iPads have gotten so fast, yet the battery life has improved dramatically (in sleep mode I can forget about it for a week or two and find it still has enough charge left for a day of use. E readers can manage months, but these numbers are lightyears ahead of the early days where a day of standby was pretty good.
Software support is excellent with the pen. Max brightness is plenty for direct sunlight when using a matte screen protector, and it gives it the writing feel of a proper digital notebook.
-
I think anyone considering one should take a look at the combination. I didn't cancel my order on the RM2 out of apathy honestly, but I would have taken the iPad if I realized how far they'd come.
That doesn't seem right.
I still use my original iPad (v1) for reading and note taking quite often, if not daily.
That lasts for 6-8 hours of reading without needing a recharge. If I don't feel like reading for days/weeks there's no chance the battery has gone flat, as it lasts weeks (at least) in idle mode.
Pretty sure the battery life has degraded significantly over time too, and is about 1/2 what it was when new.
Usually it was Android tablets that would drain in a day of sleep because of random services draining them to death.
(To put it into perspective, the iPad mini weighs less than the Remarkable 2)
The reMarkable, OTOH, "just works", as well as an i.MX6 machine with an e-paper display can.
It's a Linux machine with a framebuffer, with the added difficulty that you have to explicitly tell the framebuffer to update itself, unless you put the driver on auto-update mode. For my application, explicitly refreshing the framebuffer works better, though.
Asking because I've recently been getting into drawing with Grease Pencil in Blender (on a Wacom tablet).
Grease Pencil is vector based (mostly). Being able to adjust drawn strokes after making them, really helps people (like me) that can't draw perfect curves and straight lines freehand.
Hoping there's something similar available?
http://101.wacom.com/UserHelp/en/TOC/CTH-480.html
The small size is actually pretty annoying though. ;)
I mean they ship readers on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and Web so it's not like they care that you buy a Kindle.
People hate when you type notes during 1:1, but love when you take handwritten notes and remember previous conversations.
I'm yet to figure out (haven't searched enough yet) how to export the files out of the device (i.e. convert from their format to PDF/SVG) without using the USB web interface though; when I do, my workflow will be complete.
> I'm yet to figure out (haven't searched enough yet) how to export the files out of the device (i.e. convert from their format to PDF/SVG) without using the USB web interface though; when I do, my workflow will be complete.
This WebUI does not work unless the USB interface is connected or you give it an IP after each reboot [1]. I wish there were a simple way to push and retrieve files from the tablet without relying on too many hacks or too much patching that would reveal maintenance heavy over time. There is one script that might be the one but I haven't tested it yet [2].
And I am wary of the direction ReMarkable is going : "recurring revenue, with a focus on software functionality" [3], it might be in their best interest to shut down any hacking possibility in the future.
Funny how the company advertises for a simple experience that will let you focus on the essentials, but because the software is lacking many fundamental features, you spend more time hacking it than working with it.
[1]: https://github.com/reHackable/scripts/issues/20#issuecomment... [2]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ddvk/remarkable-touchgestu... [3]: https://shifter.no/nyheter/okte-inntektene-med-150-millioner...
I'm keen to use one because 1) i think over it's lifetime it will likely consume less energy than an LCD/OLED tablet, and 2) because it would be better for my eyes when i'm reading articles/research or books.
Great, it has expensive royalties and it betrays the user.
Probably the same thing for people brushing their teeth too much?
Your cell phone also sends out photons that can be spied on. Worse yet they're multicast so multiple parties can receive them at the same time.
Seriously though, this is an absurd concern, and I say that as someone who is very privacy minded if not actually paranoid.
I still don't trust that cell phones aren't sending back keywords picked up on the microphone, but I guarantee you that right now no one is listening to your digitizer's rf output, much less that the device itself is somehow "betraying the user" by exfiltrating anything over it.
Anyone heard of a way to do that? (I don't see it in the repo, or this HN thread)
It looks like they've just been hit particularly hard by the apocalypse, probably because of their relatively small batches, production wise
They are cheaper with better screens and more powerful processors, too.
As for GPL compliance, that really only means anything for the kernel. For the rest of the software, they can easily be closed sourced and not provided. Not that they necessarily wouldn't be, but I'd still rather have an Android device with an unlocked bootloader and no kernel sources.
The other thing to disable is sending some stats info to their server enabled by default to my surprise. It can be disabled with terminal through ssh and I did. Can't find though the article with detailed instructions.
[1] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-uuuflash [2] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable2-recovery