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Comment by lidavidm | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Still way more effort than Kobo: plug it in, drag and drop.

I've switched to exclusively using SSH on my Kobo, because I find it less effortful. The connection procedure consists of enabling wifi on the Kobo and clicking on the sftp bookmark in my file browser.

Wait is this an official method?

No, it's KFmon stuff.

What's wrong with the USB web interface of the remarkable, though? It is quite spartan, but I haven't updated mine in ages, so I imagine they have improved it.

The workflow is plug -> web browser -> remarkable IP -> drag and drop.

That's still quite a bit more than just plug -> drag and drop, also especially because sometimes I had to manually bring up the interface, and remember some IP that I might only use every week or two at most. (I guess I could set up a bookmark, sure.) Also, it chokes on large-ish files (it would just never upload, no indication in the UI), so I had to split up books.

Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.

What does the customer gain from having a web interface you have to navigate to by IP rather than a simple external storage device that shows up like a flash drive?

I think one reason for the web interface is that the device stays usable. If it would export a block device then it would need to unmount the file system on itself or at least block changes. If I remember correctly in the old days before MTP, all Android did this, making storage on the device itself unavailable while making it available via USB.

Yeah, that would be an issue with presenting the device as a block storage device.

The web interface also has a couple of other advantages: the tablet simultaneously listens for ssh connections, and can be used over Wi-Fi, IIRC? Though it could also expose a "USB HUB" with both the network interface and block storage.

I just wish we had a more ubiquitous "network file storage" protocol. The tablet itself could offer NFS, but mounting it under different operating systems would be a pain, requiring manual user intervention.

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