Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable

digest.ferrucc.io

78 points0xferruccio47 comments

Really interesting project! A few questions:

1. How do you send the document to the Remarkable? My understanding is that Remarkable does not provide any public APIs. Do you use one of the unofficial open-source APIs? 2. Are you using pstmrk.it for tracking purposes? Maybe you can be more explicit about this in the Privacy Policy.

Additionally, the magic link email is landing in my spam inbox. I assume that this might be because you are using an icloud domain.

I use rmapi-js (https://github.com/erikbrinkman/rmapi-js) to authenticate, which allows you to get a token you can use to send digests to the device

I use postmark because it's supposed to get emails in your inbox and because I already had an account on it. I'll see what I can do to not make it go in spam :P

Most of the complexity in the product is in:

- Scraping RSS feeds (have to use proxies to extract html and mirror all the images so that I can embed them in the digest)

- Generate PDFs of exactly the right format using Puppeteer (using cloudflare workers for this)

Super interesting! I can assume that it is quite complex to scrape all of the RSS feeds and build the PDF. I will make sure to play with it.

Doesn’t rmapi-is give you read access to the user’s remarkable library as well?

Any chance you’d be willing to release source code for self-hosting?

Theoretically yes! Unfortunately there's no API with more restrictive permissions :P

Good point around releasing the source code for self-hosting. The only painful parts are that I two commercial services here and there for stealth proxying requests to fetch articles like (https://www.scrapingbee.com/) and Puppeteer on Cloudflare Workers (https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/platform...) to generate PDFs, so it's like $50/month to self-host something that actually works

But maybe if I open source this others can contribute too and find ways to make this cheaper to run

This is really great idea, but as a Supernote user instead of ReMarkable, I just wish the output could be something different instead of tight ReMarkable integration.

Thanks! Yeah I just made this for myself and figured I could allow others to make their digest too.

How would it work to send things to the Supernote? Is it enough to just send an email with the PDF?

I also have a supernote and yeah I think that could work. You can add email accounts to a supernote and read PDFs

I had an RM2 it was great, love that writing texture feel and how you can program it yourself too that's nice. I never subscribed with mine or even connected it to WiFi. I'm still unsure if I will get one again as I think I would just use something like a Surface Book.

My reasoning is financial mostly in the past when I was better off (like I am now) I bought so much crap like multiple G lenses (thousands $). Now I'm about avoiding being broke so just 1 type of similar device vs. multiple. I also had an iPad Pro which arguably their hardware is the best eg. built in lidar but I don't like the iOS ecosystem in an iPad so I got rid of that too.

I had the rM2, and recently sold it and bought an rPP.

I hear where you're coming from. I'm in a similar place actually, but I've embedded the reMarkable so deeply into my workflow it would be a very painful device to cut out of my professional life.

Just the ability to cast my "paper notebook" in a Zoom call is incredible.

that sounds resource intensive to cast, so I guess that's the difference between rPP and rM2? I guess it's just a greyscale image being streamed.

the writing feeling is what I enjoyed the most and long battery life, you just have it sitting on the side for weeks/month(s) no charging concern

Both had the ability to cast with the remarkable app.

The reMarkable 2 streams in color as well.

This is really cool! I unfortunately don't have a reMarkable but I run a similar "free personalized email digest" service https://www.getchangelog.com mainly for people following changes to tools / services / Github repos & other RSS feeds.

Wonder if you'd be willing to add email support? Anyways, great work, and I love the design. It really matches the design ethos of reMarkable.

That's super cool! Your product reminds me of https://mailbrew.com/ which I used for a couple of years

> Wonder if you'd be willing to add email support?

I might add support for Kindle/Supernote and send a PDF by email to them, but I wouldn't really want to turn this thing into a business. I already build another SaaS for a living and just don't have enough energy to dedicate to this

The bottom image on the page got me believing there was something wrong with me :-)

What a great idea! When testing this out, the text from the articles is somewhat opaque, which makes it difficult to read. The images and headers seem look fine though.

Hey Caleb thanks for reporting this! I hadn’t noticed it in my use, but I do use a dark shade of gray for the pdf

I’ll update the colour to be a full black colour for when digests get sent out so this doesn’t happen

Edit: I just updated the fonts to just render in black for the article body so the text should be all black in your next digest

For those of us with a black and white remarkable like RM2 could you add a setting to set all text to black including links? The blue washes out to gray.

Also setting the journal prompts to black would be wonderful - they are hard to see unlike the articles.

Man... I'm not kidding. This morning I thought "I should build a news aggregator for my reMarkable". Thanks for saving me the work

Love to hear that :)

Does Calibre not work with reMarkable? It has a feature that simulates a newspaper. You create a recipe for a website (e.g. NY Times), and have it run once a day. Based on how you created the recipe, it will pick all the articles in the last day and package it into an ePub (with TOC).

I used it a lot over a decade ago. The feature is still there.

Haven’t tried that! Will try it out and see how it compares as I assume it does most of the things my app does

I guess the nice things I was able to add in this were the journaling prompts and the next thing I wanted to add was a daily puzzle kind of like the ones on:

https://sudokupad.svencodes.com

This looks incredible, thank you for creating it! I have been looking for something exactly like this for a while now

That's amazing to hear super happy it resonates :)

I was planning on building this but never got around to it. After getting this set up its perfectly fine for my needs. Is there a way we can pay for it or at least tip you? I know the servers aren't crazy expensive but I'd love to support the work and hope it sticks around a while!

How does this make money? I'm just curious? Data aggregate sales?

It doesn’t make money, I was already hosting it for myself and decided to share the spare server capacity for good karma on the internet!

If it gets too expensive to run I’ll just block new people from signing up and only have existing users

This is really nice of you but if you want to serve the public it wouldn't hurt to think about how the service can be made self sufficient financially so that when you no longer wish to run it, or want to, it can be handed off to someone wants to do so, and without being a burden or needing more charity

Good point! I'm not against the idea potentially charging for this if people like it

I'll track if some other people besides me will still use this 3-6 months from now and potentially introduce a paid tier to be able to run it forever if there's lots of people relying on it

I am RM2 user and this is useful for me. I signed up not expecting much but that digest designer is so well done! Kudos. Beautifully executed. Signed up and looking forward to the digests.

Lovely landing page, appreciate the care over the icons!

I hoped to find something different: a digest of my recent notes. Would be cool as well

you could try my https://github.com/j6k4m8/goosepaper :)

oh wow this is so cool! would've saved me the time of building this from scratch if I knew about this :)

you're welcome to use/snag any of it you like :) planning to keep that repo growing, so if you think of good synergies for us, I'd love to keep making useful stuff!

I got a remarkable and i love it. its a linux tablet. i can ssh in. i love it

I keep getting unauthorized? Is there an FAQ or dummy guide?

Hey there are you getting unauthorised on the website? Maybe you can try and hard reload the webpage and it should work!

Feel free to email me at hi@ferrucc.io and I can help you get unstuck. There are still some rough edges around the app as I made it over a couple of weekends and it was initially only intended to be used by me :)

I got it to save, after fiddeling a little bit with the template and saving it.

I am curious though, when you get the token - theoretically can you access all my synchronized files and notes? How do you protect the token?

regards

Theoretically yes - the authorization allows read/write access to articles on the device as unfortunately there's no API with write-only permissions for the reMarkable. I store tokens securely on my VPS that hosts the site in a SQLite DB.

I've made it very easy to both disconnect devices and void tokens, as well as delete your account completely. I'm considering adding logic to automatically disconnect devices after 90 days of inactivity to minimize the number of active tokens.

This is a personal project I made for fun, but I still made sure to follow as many best practices as possible to keep the servers safe (like setting up ufw and disabling logins with passwords)

Thank you for the honest answer. It is a definitive show-stopper for me to continue using your service considering how much access you will accumulate in your database - I am sure your current setup is technically more secure than any enterprise solution - however - considering my notes and remarkable are sensitive information, and contain (c) documents I cannot risk it.

I think remarkable should consider opening/widening their API.

have you investigating using the browser extension/word/ppt "send to remarkable" API?

if you have a patreon or community I'd love to support because the idea is great!

Thanks for the kind words! I completely understand your concerns about data security - it's exactly the kind of thoughtful consideration I was hoping users would have.

I'm actually considering open sourcing the entire project, which would allow security-conscious users like yourself to self-host the service. Alternatively I could also build a "self-hostable reMarkable gateway" that could issue write-only tokens, though this would require some architectural changes.

Regarding the browser extensions - unfortunately those wouldn't work for my use case since they require the user's browser to be running to execute any actions. The service needs to be able to run on its own schedule.

I don't have a Patreon set up, but your offer of support means a lot! The best way to help right now would be to probably support the development of building a more privacy focused integration once I open source the app sometime over the weekend

does this work with boox?

Unfortunately it does not! If you/someone has any appetite I can open-source this so people can can contribute more integrations (some friends wanted to get the PDF sent to a kindle email)

would love PDF to kindle Email version

kindle support would be great!

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