The Modos Paper Laptop
modos.tech
modos.tech
A separated device to write my blog or some short stories would be a godsend to me. With each year it passes, I feel my concentration vanish more and more. A distraction-free device could help me regain some concentration (I think).
It won't free you from the distraction of your other devices though, as you've probably got a fully-online phone within reach.
It’s not very portable, though. I just picked up a Sears Citation for that, but the 1960s typewriter definition of portable is much closer to “you can take it on a trip and type in your hotel room” than it is to “you can take it on a hike and type under a tree.”
For actually portable typewriters I've really enjoyed my Royal Mercury and Smith-Corona Skyriter, both of which are usable on a lap on a bench (or under a tree).
I realise this is not an option for everyone of course. There's also apps that allow you to time lock your phone with exceptions for important things. Protip: set it up so you can get around it by rebooting the phone, in case you forgot to whitelist something, etc. Smartphones are painfully slow to boot anyway, so it still helps discourage the constant distraction if you can muster the will power to not do the reboot. More effort means you consider it rather than reflexively do it.
I've been using an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi as my daily driver for about a year. It's an e-ink Android tablet, principally intended as an e-book reader (which I use it for), though it also serves quite well for podcasts, web browsing, and general terminal work (Termux / SSH).
If I really want to minimise distractions, I'll disable networking. I can read local content (articles, or my Pocket stash), which is already ample distraction. Or play back downloaded podcasts.
It is far more usable outdoors or under bright lighting than any laptop or tablet, which is itself highly useful.
Battery life is quite good when reading ebooks. This involves disabling Bluetooth, WiFi, and if possible, the Backlight, and avoiding screen repaints. When used for podcasts or browsing, CPU drain is fairly substantial, though I can get well over a day's use per charge typically.
There's no social media or any other apps on the device. My one authenticating app is Pocket.
The UI is not entirely as distraction-free as I'd like, but it is far more so than any other device I've owned in decades.
Lacking colour and high-speed animations is of and by itself a major win on distraction-free status. So, interestingly enough, is the ability to take freehand notes on the device. I'd not anticipated doing that much, it's turned out to be a significant use.
Except, if it did not achieve your expectations. Note the article is short on facts, high on marketing verbiage. If I'm not mistaken this is the same blogger, Alex Soto who previously made a lot of claims and when I challenged him on it, rapidly backtracked. Same guy previously claimed that E-Ink was a patent abuser, and another similarly named guy who headed some kickstarter program claimed E-Ink was suppressing his business and that was why he wasn't able to deliver on previous products, but when I asked him to substantiate it, he changed his blog post.
Some guy in his basement that cobbled together a working e-Ink word processor would be much more interesting to me.
Also, you might like to check out the pomera https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/digital-memo-pomera-dm3...
That's exactly what this looks like. It looks like someone glued an e-Ink display into an old ThinkPad T41.
Zoom in on the bezels in the up-close view: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/61a133075b8ce58a48f1bed1/61e...
The southeast corner looks like there's a battery indicator half-covered up.
It even has a IBM ThinkPad logo and a "T41" in the corner and machine screws holding the screen together.
This was already done successfully in another project; though on that one, it seemed like one would need to read Chinese to be successful with it.
I'm on my mobile so don't have a picture but will post one later.
One surprising thing to me?
I don't use it. At least, not much in comparison to my actual laptop.
It reminds me of folding keyboards for cell phones. I've bought a couple and thought, these are great, they'll make inputting text on a cell phone so much easier... except I don't end up carrying them around in my pocket, and so end up typing on my mobile phone using the touchscreen just like everyone else.
People think that a distraction free device will allow them to achieve their goals but it is actually the discipline to do the work which will allow them to achieve their goals; the device probably won't change that.
Requires a largish 3d printer (which I happen to have, one of the advantages of co-owning a makerspace:https://revolutionmakerspace.com/) or ordering a 3d print online.
I've talked with him about e-ink projects before (because I've got a similar project brewing). You previously caught him on the steep upward slope learning about e-ink where he had some incorrect information (e.g., your link), but he always took corrections and has kept at trying to make the e-ink laptop vision happen.
He is a true open-source advocate and while I don't know about Modos beyond the website, I trust he really is hoping to help such a project see the light of day and empower others to be able to make their own e-ink laptops.
Either someone's taking the piss, or terrible at naming things...
Plug it into a computer via USB and it will declare itself a keyboard, and with one keystroke, "type" all your text into your computer.
Very clever.
The Dana touchscreen isn't as contrasty, the backlight eats battery, and if you use up all your batteries you will lose your data without backups. It's all quite manageable of course (since as you say it's just a Palm PDA with a keyboard) and has much more functionality, but not as bulletproof.
(I'm just happy to participate in a Alphasmart discussion LOL.)
https://getfreewrite.com/collections/writing-tools/products/...
Thank you for your words and for describing your use case. For writing, I tend to go analog. I use paper and pencil to write a rough draft and get my ideas on paper; the next stage is to type up the thoughts digitally and use a low-tech device like an AlphaSmart Neo, or Pomera DM30. I've found breaking up the writing process into steps and using a dedicated device works for me.
Realistically speaking it's your personal discipline and work ethic that's going to make it or break it, whether or not you have a hardware or software solution.
But I think the answer to this is "yes".
>I haven’t used emacs, would you say it is worthy?
Absolutely. Don't fall into the trap of having 4000-line configuration files. Emacs works well out of the box, and you can enable something called "CUA mode" to make the hotkeys for e.g. copy+paste work more like Windows, if that's what you want.
I think doing this concept properly is as much of a software project as a hardware project.
A mouse pointer may itself be a bit hard to display on an E-Ink Screen. It will definitely leave a trail behind.
All these speeds are in a dithered 1-bit mode though. As soon as you start playing around with grayscale things starts going slow (you essentially need to display N levels of grayscale as N frames). The system I'm using is capable of updating parts of the display in 1-bit mode and others in "high-fidelity" 16 levels mode. This means that I could e.g. tell it that my picture viewing program should use the full quality mode, and my text editor should use the fast mode. Since I'm using a tiling window manager opening a picture would then use about a second to display the image, but once it's there I could type into a window next to it at full speed. It could also allow me to highlight areas to redraw in high-quality mode if I was browsing a website for example and wanted to watch a particular image.
I wonder, is there any practical way to do 1-bit just around the cursor?
Having used an e-ink device heavily for over a year, including both local (Termux) and remote (SSH) system use via it and a keyboard, I'm conveninced that for text-heavy work it's fully functional, and would probably be viable with a sufficiently-thoughtful GUI which adhered to the design principles and respected the imitations of e-ink:
1. Persistence is free.
2. Pixels are cheap
3. Paints are expensive
4. Refreshes are slow
5. Colour is limited to nonexistent.
6. Pagination over scroll.
7. Full refresh (of page or portion) over pan.
8. Reflective rather than emissive.
9. Minimise animation.
10. Line-art or halftones over shade gradients (images).
For e-ink, it's the electrophoretic display itself which imposes lag. It's a bit like pushing a wet noodle or a heavy arm. No matter how fast the graphics card is responding, the physical display simply can't keep up and iposes inertia on changes.
Again, for text-heavy applications and reasonably static imagery, this isn't much of a problem.
Current displays can cycle between refresh modes, and it's possible to trade image quality for response time. Presently that's only possible for the whole display at a time, but I might imagine it would be possible to zone a display such that a portion is at a high-fidelity mode and another at a lower-fidelity, higher-refresh mode.
If the idea is for a low-distraction device, I'm not sure that's actually the direction you'd want to go in, however.
If we go really old, we start getting into really slooooow phospors. It would take multiple seconds for a blinking cursor to fade.
Or punch cards.
Or toggled programs.
Or jaquard cards.
Or ...
The discussion above was of the 1990s. Displays were graphical and bitmapped, not text. I remember when dragging and resizing windows with contents visible became A Thing.
And yes, I used computers in the phosphor age. And just a tad during the teletype period. I don't think either applies, though e-ink does have some characteristics of phosphors in terms over overall response rate.
The main distinction though is that phosphors painted in a line, not a full-screen refresh (though it might be interesting to see just how e-ink does refresh in super-slow motion), and then decays.
For e-ink, the characteristic is that higher-quality refreshes take longer, and that a full flush (blacking then blanking the full screen) creates a marked flash. It's much better on recent high-end displays than on, say, a ten-year-old Kindle. But there's still some of the effect visible.
Much less a problem when paging, or when there's a single cursor-point-of-change when typing text. More a problem with complex dynamic displays.
Mac OS up through System 7.5.5 works excellently on such displays, because it had to run on several models of PowerBook with black and white or grayscale passive matrix displays, which were notoriously slow. While not as good, black and white support remains decent all the way through the end of Classic Mac OS, with version 9.2.1.
For this reason, when imagining an e-ink semi-unitasker laptop such as this I imagine it being built with extremely low power hardware and running old operating systems, such as the aforementioned Classic Mac OS. I'm sure DOS/Win3.1/WinNT could stand in here too, probably more easily since 486/586/Pentium-compatible x86 CPUs are still being manufactured. One wouldn't be able to run Google Docs on such a machine, but there's a veritable cornucopia of abandonware readily available for such platforms at places like Macintosh Garden[0], and given highly specific use case of such a machine I think most people could find something that suits their needs.
e-ink displays are not even up to that standard of responsiveness yet. And, as you point out, modern software has higher expectations than the systems that kind of sucked on those old passive matrix LCDs.
Technology is the same. I noticed I was getting distracted when I carried a tablet for work. So I replaced it with a remarkable. No more easy distraction = no more distraction.
So for some (especially those of us with addictive personalities), it is about finding supplementary aides to help with that discipline and restraint.
There's definitely a feedback cycle here though. Swap your dazzling iPhone 14 Pro Max for an iPhone 4S and then change the display to greyscale and see just how fast this technological solution reduces your levels of distraction.
Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
Here are some other technological solutions that I have found helpful:
* News Feed Eradicator: a browser plugin that hides those algorithmic news feeds that are the cocaine of the internet
* Unhook - Remove YouTube Recommended Videos: removes the sidebar on YouTube
* Podcasts - Even if you "already know" all the psychological tricks the world is pulling on you, your brain is programmable and if you simply listen and re-listen to Tristan Harris on a regular basis this imprints these lessons into your head. That, in turn, provides a well of motivation that can be used when the lure of addiction presents itself.
This worked for me. A few years back, I turned down everything (black background, no icons on home screen, no auto-wake on raise) on my iPhone SE (original version) and removed all social and mail apps. I’m still on this phone, both for this and for (small) size reasons.
Other than direct texts from people who need to reach me (which I liberally put into Do Not Disturb from time to time), I don’t get any notifications on my device.
It’s wonderful.
I eventually brought back Mail, mostly because I was using it for address references or communications during things like Craigslist transactions, but I no longer check it unless I’m looking for something in particular.
Along these lines, for all apps I install, I deny notifications by default, then consider (and often, don’t) enabling them for functionality that I need later on.
Though I don’t do as much as I used to (I’ve mixed in many other platforms), I do contract iOS development from time to time. I typically use my (also 5+ year old) iPad Pro for either iPhone/iPad development. When I need actual phone testing, while my SE is a little slow, the bigger problem I run into there more frequently is screen size considerations — even some of Apple’s apps assume you have more screen real estate and cut things off awkwardly.
> Of course as you say it alone isn't a panacea: doing that is painful. But live with the pain long enough, and you've now used technology as a crutch to change your brain to expect the distraction less.
Absolutely — a great way to put it.
I don't know what I'll do when this phone dies. I need a modern smartphone for cellular connectivity, messaging applications, photos, and music. But I can't bring myself to buy a giant screen, 6GB+ of RAM, and lose out on features like the headphone jack and my fingerprint reader that serve me well every day.
If you are one of the people for whom a low-distraction environment works, could you say what sort of stuff you are writing?
That's a... superpower.
I'd love to have less eye strain for the worthless time I'm spending in front of a computer in order to make money. I'm worried the refresh rate speed won't be pleasant enough though: typing on my kindle is a pain.
On top of that, a huge portion of my paid time is spent in equally worthless video meetings so I would need some other device, regardless.
When I was studying American Lit in college, my laptop died and I replaced it with an AlphaSmart Dana (this would’ve been around 2004). It was like a palm pilot with a long narrow screen and nearly full-size QWERTY keyboard.
I used it for about 2 years and just synced files w/ my roommate’s computer to print. Most of my reference was to external material as well, but in the form of printed books. It was also a great note-taking device in class.
I was going to write a blog post about this but I ended up sitting on the draft for too long and forgot about it, I really should publish that post :)
I think my best laptop is 45 minutes or so per charge. At one point I even bought extra batteries and kept them safely stored and dry, only to realize that this does almost nothing to preserve their longevity as now years later I find them all to have about the same lifespan. I have extra 18650 batteries, however Im not sure, given the size of these, that this is what they use in there.
For voltage, just get some cheap buck converter board off Ebay, one that you can adjust down to the voltage the laptop needs, and have your battery pack a higher voltage than that. And a Li-Ion BMS board to charge it of course.
For those looking for a distraction free, portable writing experience specifically, check out the pomera dm 200. It does not use eink but has a UI that sports a very similar look and feel to eink devices. It’s responsive, extremely portable, and only supports writing text. It’s Japanese, so the UI is in Japanese only, but you can write using English characters.
It will appeal to people who have to do a lot of reading, writing and thinking; and who are currently distracted by a lot of applications and features on their all-purpose devices.
Theoretically, you can turn off the Wi-Fi, put the writing app in focus mode, turn off notifications and avoid googling and looking at email and twitter. In practice, it is nearly impossible to do so. Which is why there are so many focus apps, pomodoro timers etc. It takes a lot of will power to avoid distractions.
Unlike a Kindle this thing can be used to key in text.
It certainly has a niche. What we don’t know is how big that niche is, and whether it will cause others to adopt non-distractive devices.
That said, I also think that an eink screen (or tablet with screen) that you can use with any laptop has a much larger audience than having it built in.
Here is a demo of the Pixel Qi10 display : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi6DbFyZde8
They had a dual mode so you could have the look/feel of a normal backlight LCD panel but when you wanted to go outside you could toggle to transflective mode.
This means you would have normal refresh rates, color, multimedia, and an actual useful display when outdoors.
Not sure why they ever went bust or what happened to the IP for these displays.
Refresh rates on e-ink are more than sufficient for text, and suffice for getting a general sense of video, though I wouldn't call that a high-level experience.
Scrolling and similar are a bit rough, though the general solution is to avoid doing that, and instead navigate through pagination --- a full page (or portion) at a time.
Hard disagree but I understand this is personal and that perceived experience will vary across the board.
I agree that e-ink is great for _reading_ text which is why it is used in e-readers.
I'll say again that on the device I have, I can quite reasonably get a sense of a video.
Video of BOOX playing video: https://yewtu.be.com/watch?v=XRDJv_-wWBI (Videoception!) Yes, it's B&W, yes, the framerate is low (about 4--8 fps AFAICT), and yes, there's some ghosting. But it's clear what the content is. Not appreciably worth from an old B&W television in the day --- better resolution for lower framerate, perhaps, on e-ink.
If I'm writing text, it's almost always within vim or a similar text editor, and my navigation is either paging forward or back through the document (full-screen repaints), or using search. Again, that is well-suited to e-ink.
I'm not sure how many tones this eink screen has, but there certainly is a variety of monochrome editor themes. You could make your own if not.
Not too bad it turns out. You still have bold, italic, underline and gray. You can do an inverse text, which is good for headers (e.g. magit sections). I guess with a GUI editor, you can do things like boxes around tokens etc. -- I'm in an emacs over ssh most of the time, so I haven't looked into that.
I actually ended up liking this and have been using it since then, on a LED display.
That said, working on an e-ink device and doing mostly lightweight scripting occasionally, it's not a showstopper, and greyscale highlighting (which I've not looked into yet) could well work out.
I do remember when monochrome ANSI sequences were all I had on early serial terminals: regular, bold, underline, and reverse video. That's at least four gradations, and with a few greyscale shades, the palette should be usefully broad.
It works nicely for books. Can't see why it wouldn't work for screens.
Otherwise, yes, quite.
Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).
Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).
Though there are alternatives I'm looking at, like an android eink tablet with a bluetooth keyboard, which has the advantage of portability.
I'd mostly work through Mosh either way, so the x86 vs arm doesn't matter that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Concerto
The design was clever, the "tablet" part had a metal bracket that was used to support it when on a desk and the (small but not bad at all) keyboard was detachable and was connected by a short cable with a "normal" PS/2 connector, here is a photo where you can see the detail of the detachable keyboard:
First of all it's a terrible reading experience. Why would I want to lug around a whole laptop to read some books? My 10.1" e-ink tablet is already perfect. And if not books, what else would I read, documents? documentation? as per what reason? to _program_ on that device? so it would need to have a complete desktop OS to deploy everything that I need? on such limited hardware?
Secondly it's a terrible writing experience. Not in a million years that keyboard is going to be better than a model M or even a decent mechanical keyboard. Also, again, write what? A book or a scientific paper? ok sure, if you are so dedicated that you are willing to buy a device only for that to bring with you on your travels then please go ahead. Also writing code would be impossible because as I've mentioned you would basically need your whole stack.
Lastly it seems to really not solve the problem it claims to solve. What's the purpose of this device, to have less distractions? Ok, then why couldn't I just write my stuff on a notebook or with a typewriter? If you want purpose and intentionality those are really the ways to do it, not mash your keyboard infinitely at a e-ink laptop. Same goes for reading, if the aim is to make reading slower and more comfortable then just read a good old book. Nothing slower and more distraction-free than being able only to bring one with you at a time because of the size.
Please then, could anybody tell me what they find interesting about this product? Because I really don't get it
this is very disingenuous. it's a product being developed by a company. this isn't some github repo with a few images of an open source e-ink reader made by some hacker guy, this is a proper thing that is being designed, developed and maybe pushed to the market.
and to me, if you're a company developing a product you should at least make sure its basic existence is justified. nobody has yet told me why this product has any real use.
I couldn't care less about the market. I am personally not in the slightest convinced by this product and I specifically asked other people to please tell me why they would want it. I just really dislike bullshit products (not projects) that lead nowhere and brain drain the open source world.
I read pdfs on my laptop, code using gedit without any fancy plugins for code highlighting or whatever and drop to the terminal if I need to mess with stuff. Hell, the majority of the time surfing the interwebs is in reader view on my iPhone, like a good 90% of the time.
Plus, you are in no way entitled to the brain power of anyone who you are not directly compensating for their labor.
Maybe nobody owes you an answer?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31394866
> A separated device to write my blog or some short stories would be a godsend to me.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395049
> I'd love to use this for programming, or writing.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31394890
> I would buy this indeed. I like working outside and it's not very good at the moment.
I already wrote in my comment that programming would be impossible unless you literally mean just writing code without actually compiling it and running it and testing it. If you have a stack to take care of, unless you are working with some mind-boggling lightweight stuff, this underpowered hardware would not work, so your second link is not an answer.
Third link is about some genering work that could be done which doesn't really tell me anything, so it's not an answer.
Also would compile pretty much anything I felt like playing around with where the only real limitation was memory…well, and time.
The world would probably be a better place if these “full stack” devs were forced to use underwhelming hardware so you don’t end up with 200mb downloads to view a simple webpage. Just my opinion.
Being able to work outside would be fantastic for my well-being, and I'd accept quite a lot of compromise to get that.
Don't want to be distracted by XYZ? Turn it off.
Your devices are made to extract attention from you these days. The companies that makes them and the online services most of us use derive their money from the time we spend using their services (so they can profile us or upsell us). It is all designed to interrupt you and draw your attention in.
As a writer, let me say that it is increasingly hard to be focused for extended periods of time while writing if I don't switch to a either a distraction-free device or switch all the stuff off like you said. These distraction-free devices reduce friction in being focused, not only they don't provide distractions but since they are built around the notion of focus, just picking one up puts you on a more focused mindset. Much like putting on some apron puts some people (mostly me) into a cooking mindset. I'm totally able to cook without my apron, but wearing it is part of the ritual. These devices are a tool and also a prop to help us focus.
I'd personally love to have an e-ink laptop. Currently it's unthinkable for me to be in a beautiful spot in the sunshine while doing some light coding or writing. Seems like this product would make it viable to some extent. I wouldn't expect it to become a daily driver though.
If it were convertible (folding) it would be even better.
e-ink is for reading and writing, an underpowered laptop will work just fine for that. Heck, AlphaSmart Danas are doing fine for that and they have Dragonball CPUs at 33mhz.
Do not discount how pleasant it is to split the screen into two regions, have an eBook on one and and editor in the other so that you can write and research at the same time. I've used a 10'' Surface Go for a long time, it was a wonderful little machine. Being underpowered made me proactively conscious of what I was doing with it, which led to more focused work. Still, starting at the LCD for extended periods of time was not fun. I'd love to replicate that kind of setup with this new laptop.
The cult of model M has some truth in it. Yes it is a wonderful keyboard, but guess what, there are other good keyboards out there. They might not be Model Ms or unikey (or whatever the new makers of Model M are), but that doesn't mean they are crap.
You seem to be a developer since your comment is very focused on using this for development, which in my opinion is not where it would shine the most. Still, you could totally use an underpowered e-ink laptop as a development machine if you have an internet connection and leverage cloud services for a ton of stuff. A lot of developers are just pushing stuff to CI/CD pipelines anyway.
You're clearly not in the audience for this, but if you just do a bit of research around how much creative writers love their Freewrites, AlphaSmarts (no e-ink unfortunately), Pomeras, and other distraction free devices, you'd see that maybe some people would find this very appealing.
Joking aside, I still think this could be an interesting product for a certain small niche of writes that want an easy to read, and to work slowly with a keyboard based experience.
The sort of person that would write using either WordStar or Vi. The sort of person that might still use a typewriter. very niche.
You mention keyboards but that's te thing about them, preference is very subjective.
My self I have an original Made in Scotland Model M and a Cherry Brown Pok3r sitting on a shelf, gather dust.
They're not for me and I don't enjoy using them.
It turns out I find typing on short travel laptop keyboards much more comfortable. I do almost everything via the keyboard so it one of the most important aspects of any computer for me and I choose something different from you.
Different users, different use-cases, different products.
ps I love eInk but this is not probably not for me either but I'm not discounting that it is for someone.
Recently Onyx released a 25" version. But it is expensive, around $1700
One thing I’m wondering is what’s the power draw of these screens? Ereaders famously sip power, but that’s due to the race-to-zero environment. If you’re running these on a 60fps HDMI connection how do they stack up against LCDs?
A major hint of trouble is “we’re accepting applications.” A team that is likely to succeed here would have a core founding team in place, not just a Wordpress post.
Instead of using e-ink which does have it's merits but has a very poor refresh rate, why not use an algorithm to adjust typical laptop screens to be more visible in sunlight conditions.
Second thought, smartphones are really on the cutting edge of display technology. If e-ink was viable, wouldn't we be seeing at least some e-ink smartphones?
Making the back of a phone an e-reader just sounds awesome, especially for larger phones.
Good enough? I would have to try one out.
I take my laptop out to the park a lot and my primary solutions are to sit in the shade, and stick a little shadow box to my laptop’s lid via the magnets it uses to tell when it’s closed. It’s barely enough to make it usable; you have to fight against the fact that the outside world can be a lot brighter than any lamp suitable for sticking inside a portable computer.
I currently use several modern laptops in tandem with an Onyx Boox tablet, but would love to offload even more of my use cases that make sense to e-ink. Followed the Twitter account, and am looking forward to more updates on what this turns out to be! Wouldn't mind seeing them here on HN either ;)
In the previous discussion, I also learned about RLCD which I vaguely knew about when Qi Pixel was a thing but it seems to have improved. So one of those for the frame.work too, and all is good!
For the right price it could be useful and find its niche.
However I think the biggest problem to tackle here is not the hardware but the software. If it runs for example some kind of regular Linux distribution or Android it won't be very usable as they're just not designed for e-ink. If on the other hand it runs something custom, it would need to be able to sync documents to the exact syncing setup that I currently use for me to consider buying it (and of course also the exact syncing setup of any other potential buyer, of which there are probably close to infinite, especially in the kind of circles that this device appeals to in the first place).
You've got to start from somewhere. Once you have hardware that can run regular Linux well enough, adapting the UX to e-paper screens ought to be comparatively easy. This is exactly how we got mobile-friendly Linux distributions after all.
As for webapps, you have einkbro on android, which you could run on linux with Waydroid.
https://alexsoto.dev/challenges-building-an-open-source-eink...
Since that blog post, we are exploring developing Wayland protocols that will offer native e-ink support to client applications.
I’m less bothered about surfing the web on something like this.
When writing I find it easier to type and edit what I’ve put down.
Not sure if Remarkable has an optional keyboard or not but I think using a pen requires more thought overhead for me, if that makes any sense.
None of the bundled software is designed for using a keyboard, of course, so it’s going to be just as DIY as the very earliest Linux handhelds. (Anyone else remember the awful HP “iPaq” PDA Linux environment? I set one up because I could, and them never see the device again because the UX and battery life were so bad.)
If the goal is to get a distraction free writing tool all you really need is something like Vi, emacs or Wordstar/Joe in a terminal.
I never had an ipak but I did have a couple of Sharp Zaurus PDAs running Linux back in the day.
Just for kicks. I never did much with them.
That being said I'm sure there's some magic you could do to reduce latency here if you tried. I know it does some magic behind the scenes with the drawing to improve responsiveness.
The way I understand the technology : refresh time looks related to how many pixels you draw at once. When you write with a pen, very few pixels have to change state on a given unit of time (the pixels under the stylus) the "magic" behind fast writing on e-ink is to draw the pixels under the pen as fast as possible then if needed add details once the user stops writing.
The problem with your terminal is once you reach the bottom of the screen and you start scrolling : from now on, every new line will redraw the entire screen. Now you are exactly drawing as much pixels as any e-book which is … slow.
You would need a terminal without scrolling (or some mid-page scrolling). This could probably be done but you would probably have problems with a lot of cli programs.
I'm imagining a 3.5" handheld device for kids, that can't be broken. Very low power. Could show comics or other graphics, but usually just text.
The maximum information density would be to fill that "cheat sheet" with Traditional Chinese characters, written top to bottom, left to right. And that depends on the PPI.
https://www.quora.com/Can-literate-Chinese-people-easily-rea...
I think a flexible backplane is good for wearable electronics, and a rigid covering layer (polycarbonate or glass) is better for typing on a keyboard.
Take a look at Keywriter: https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter
Stick it in a 3D printed clamshell case and boom, you've got yourself a basic e-ink laptop/writing device.
However, Waveshare whose epaper displays I use a lot always say they are not suitable for working in direct sunlight. Which is kinda the one thing such a laptop would really shine at.
So, would this be suitable?
PS: Front View and Side View show a svelte laptop but the "Chassis" photo shows a Lenovo/IBM T41? I assume this is a prototype and not the actual chassis.
I wonder if they would sell the display they put in those T41 prototypes, I still have a T42 lying around that would come in handy for this.
I've been using an ancient ebook reader for reading recently, and contrast will be washed out to about 50% when exposed to sun while page flipping (until next refresh). However, I've been thinking this is due to the old age of the device.
I have to say though that waveshare's displays are of pretty low quality. They are designed to be used in electronic price tags in stores and as such will never see daylight.
I've used an old Kindle in sunlight and I had no issues, but if I'd buy a laptop like this for a significant price I'd want to be sure of course.
John Mayer to Steve Jobs: “Why don’t you bring out a vintage looking MacBook G3 Pismo, but with all new guts inside?”
Steve Jobs: “Because we would sell 14 of them.”
Edit: #6 https://youtu.be/bTkRdVPM9fs
When will this product ship?
I believe creating an e-ink device is, in many ways, a new category of devices that requires changes to the hardware, software, and many other areas to create a cohesive experience for people.
In the long term, I see it as a process of creating an ecosystem of e-ink devices that is open-hardware and open-source.
It's fanless. Cost $45. Makes almost no heat after tweaking. Has a 12 hour battery life under use. Basically functions as an electronic (abeit more advanced) typewriter.
Since the screen is 11 inches. I usually prop the Kindle on one side of it and use nvim in vsplit mode. Half the screen becomes e-ink. Can read and take notes at the same time.
Thank you for the feedback; we are working on creating the laptop chassis and are taking this into consideration.
Also, the faster you refresh a e-paper display, the power consumption can even surpass power efficient LCD tech so it's just not viable in that case unless the panel has the capability of partial refresh but even then it's not ideal for consuming fast moving content.
E-paper displays are power efficient for static images (books, price tags, advertising, notifications, etc) but if you have to refresh them fully several times a second, the power consumption goes through the roof (moving the e-ink particles around in their pixel compartments requires more effort than rotating LCD crystals/OLED).
We hope this may partially address the power consumption/efficiency of static/dynamic content related to e-paper displays.
It is unclear to this day why it never made it to market considering that E-Ink is a far inferior product.
The short of it seems to be that production runs of Mirasol panels had very high fault rates, which lead to delays and losses. Qualcomm ultimately decided to abandon it and to fully focus on the Snapdragon processors which were perfectly aligned with the booming IoT space at the time.
Mirasol was apparently very promising and ahead of its time, albeit immature. It was based on electro-mechanical mirror pixels rather than dye. The biggest technical downside seemed to have been that the colors were pretty washed out and bland.
EDIT: It actually did make it to market. There was even a smartwatch powered by Mirasol (the Toq). It was never implemented by the big e-Reader brands though.
It does look good in the comparison you linked. It is being backlit though, while the E-ink is not. Maybe the mentioned blandness is more of a problem when used fully passively.
It seemed to have been a good competitor regardless, and it's sad that it got mothballed.
(there were warnings though that using the higher refresh rate settings would greatly affect longevity of the screen though.)
7/10 would not recommend.
Why no recommendation? Seemed like a positive overall experience.
Also the eink monitor I bought for $1k is quite small by today's standards, so I couldn't utilize as effectively as a vertical monitor which keeps more continuous text visible at a time.
The tech on its own? 7/10. I love it and it only lost points because the driver documentation and accompanying tool interface wasn't fully translated from the original Chinese. Ghosting issues and a relatively slow refresh rate were known tradeoffs at purchase time. so can't fault it for that.
A word processor and a basic file system (with possibly a link to Dropbox or something). That's it.
That would be amazing.
[edit] as mentioned here: http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2019/07/distraction-f...
I'm working on a blog post about what a dedicated distraction-free OS would look like.
As noted in thread, I've been using an e-paper device, the Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, for about a year. It's my strong preference for reading, and I do some Linux-type stuff on it, mostly through Termux.
A few thoughts:
- If you think you're going to avoid distraction simply by changing the screen properties ... you're likely to be disappointed. Though desaturation and reducing animations does no doubt help. You and your environment remain your biggest enemy.
- Shutting off WiFi is your biggest win for productivity.
- High-density, high-contrast, B&W display is a pleasure to read.
- The lack of tools to schedule / manage / organise tasks and resources on my tablet itself is a huge frustration. Much of that is the lack of tools to view / manage content metadata. If you're reading a book at a time, or 2, or 10, that's not such a problem. I treat my tablet as a library, with 100s to 1,000s of references / documents available. There are no tools to effectively manage these.
- Much of the problem with content presentation online is not due to shortcomings of the PDF format itself, but of displays. Simply having a large enough and portrait-mode display is a huge win. "Large enough" starts at about 9", though I'd recommend 10" -- 13" for the sweet spot. A problem of course is that you want to accommodate the worst cases you're likely to encounter, and for me that's three-column, small-font, scanned in journal and periodicals articles. 13" is almost too big for standard book reading, but it's awfully nice for handwritten notes.
- Having a fixed keyboard at all times might actually be a disadvantage. Being able to flexibly transition from tablet to laptop seems a useful option.
- There's a stunning amount that can be done at shell and with fairly minimal system capabilities. Serving up the modern Web is not amongst these. The degree to which a web browser absolutely pigs out a system really cannot be overstated. This is sad and a Very Bad Thing.[1]
- Android sucks.
- I really cannot express in words how much Android sucks. I'd desperately like to have some sort of e-ink / mobile / portable device that isn't based on Android or iOS. Real Motherlovin' Linux would be awesomesauce. That said, the more you pile onto a mobile platform, the more battery life will suck. Some compromises simply have to be made.
- Android sucks specifically because: 1. The OS management is not geared to constand usage. 2. User state is constantly lost/discarded. 3. The app ecosystem is abysmal. 4. Filesystem access is walled off. 5. The device owner is subordinate to the system and OS, and lacks root by default. 6. Such arcane matters as handling keyboard input consistently across applications seem to be Deep And Insurmountable Mysteries Of The Universe. 7. Google Play Is Motherfucking Spyware. 8. Google. 9. This is not the end. It's not the beginning. It's not even the beginning nof the prelude of the introduction of the preface of the beginning.
- Which raises some interesting prospects for battery-sparing power. A very lightweight terminal handler (reads keystrokes, updates display), paired with a larger system that fires up when Other Shit Needs Doing, such that the platform is effectively catnapping most of the time, might work out. How often the system wakes and processes is an interesting question, but that might be anywhere from every few seconds to every few minutes. The key is for wake/sleep to draw less power than remaining on constantly. On mains power, wake would persist for longer. An audio-output channel might also remain more persistently awake.
- So long as E-Ink (the company) controls patents and production, e-paper display costs will be high. I don't know what the BOM for Onyx's display is, but suspect it's a major share of the device's final $800 cost. That means that everything else will have to fall into whatever residual budget exists. Yes, the laptop will be expensive relative to its processor / memory / storage specs. OTOH, it's probably possible to economise considerably on graphics.
- Prototyping this as a display module option for the Framework laptop[2] might be really interesting.
- If presented as a desktop, optimisations for E-Ink will be necessary. How much of this is attainable through existing desktop environments/software, and how much needs customisation, remains to be seen. I espect some significant teething pains in this area. This applies to both the graphical shell and applications. Einkbro, an e-ink optimised Web browser (Android) is a good study in what optimisations are useful. If anything, the app does not go far enough in favouring paging to scrolling, IMO.
- Some sort of dedicated hard screen refresh is likely necessary. Ghosting is tolerable to a point, and then it's not. Giving the user an option to refresh seems highly useful.
- The ability to divide the screen into different regions of different refresh/quality modes would be useful. Text -> "Regal", scrolling "Speed" or "A2" mode, animations / video, "X Mode". These would probably be assigned either by appllcation, or by content within applications --- e.g., video -> X Mode, images -> Speed. (In my experience, the halftoning / dithering of Speed and A2 modes is actually preferable to "Regal" for images. "Regal" is best suited to text and handwriting.) This is all but certainly an E-Ink / vendor issue, and not something Modos would be able to address themselves, though there might be hooks / conversions in the graphics layer (Xorg or Wayland?) that would address this.
- Modos all but certainly wants to use a tiled / tiling-friendly window manager.
- In addition to the display, I'd like to see a decent audio system, with hardwired audio output and no onboard speaker. Both audio media (e.g., podcasts) and voice comms should be an available function of the device. (Use for voice comms would probably entail battery/performance compromises, podcast playback largely should not.)
________________________________
Notes:
1. How to fix this is of course one of the Perennial Conversations and a Hard Problem. I'm increasingly of the view to 1) split the web into a) content, b) applications, c) media, and d) commerce, and to impose extreme penalties on poorly-performing and standards-noncompliant sites. Of course, a major driver of all of this is monetisation and control, both of which are their own long digressions. But unless these are addressed, no technical fixes will suffice. Defeat the system itself.
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606962 https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-diffe...
> Some compromises simply have to be made. [...] A very lightweight terminal handler (reads keystrokes, updates display), paired with a larger system that fires up when Other Shit Needs Doing, such that the platform is effectively catnapping most of the time, might work out.
Check out PaperTerm [1]. I like it a lot and keep bringing it up, but there have been no other news about it yet.