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Comment by heyflyguy | Hacker News Reader

I love my Remarkable, it forces me to stay in creativity mode without jumping to the internet since it doesn't have a browser. That being said, the inability to simply put your own templates in the machine and have them persist through and update is so close to being a showstopper for me that I am not sure I would consider buying a new one. The RM2 template manager is great, but you have to update your templates after every firmware update and I hate that with a passion!

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I have scripted this (well, installation of some systemd units, but the workflow is the same). So I just plug my tablet into my laptop and run my script every time it updates.

It’s not ideal, but not super tedious either.

I’ve been planning to start charging via a raspberry pi so that the pi can automatically tend to the device whenever it’s connected, but haven’t gotten there yet.

Why not script it over ssh (wifi), preference or is not as simple as I imagine? (never used one but the ability to get shell and be able to rsync files is one of the reasons I consider a remarkable).

I could be misinformed though, haven't researched it a lot.

Firmware updates blow away any customizations. So you need to bootstrap things again after each update.

Updates can be deferred, so the process isn’t too disruptive.

Edit: oh, yeah I see what you’re getting at. That direction could work, and I used to do that years ago, as it turns out, but these days I am frequently not on a familiar WiFi network when I’m using the tablet, so cabling has been more practical.

Ah, if I'm on the go I think I'd hotspot on my phone and sync via termux, but that is great to hear!

IME IP addresses handed out by my phone’s tethering mode aren’t stable, so it’s sorta more of a hassle than just fishing out the little cable and letting my script run. (The device assigns itself a stable IP address on the USB interface.)

Although I haven’t looked at those addresses in some time; perhaps they are more stable now than they used to be.

Good point, I've resorted to nmap in desperation in similar cases but would hope there is a more elegant solution.

It’s easier than that with the remarkable tablet — the device documents its current ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. But it’s several taps away, and then typing on the laptop keyboard, whereas USB is just a connector away. Plus, you need to charge anyways.

Many rM owners (myself included) work around the template limitations by using pdfs as "templates" and writing on them. This covers probably 95% of my use of the device, their notebooks feel very limited by comparison

If you do it this way, can you move pages around within the notebook, across different notebooks, add additional pages, delete pages, change the template for a specific page, etc? Seems like a rather crude workaround

On the reMarkable at least, you can: * move pages around in the pdf * add or duplicate pages * delete pages

You can't: * move a page to another notebook * change the template for a page (though you can duplicate a page with that template, and then move it to where the first page was)

Nice, I didn’t know about most of these features. Thanks for clearing that up.

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