Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
oskrim.github.io
oskrim.github.io
They even list it in the user guide https://remarkable.guide/guide/access/ssh.html along with an "developing software" guide https://remarkable.guide/devel/index.html.
Maybe other tablets are like that too, to be honest I'm too poor to swing the 700-1000$ for what I can cover with an paper note pad (with the bonus of being able to comfortably sit my coffee cup on it, use any pen or pencil, rip pages out, drop it, forget it somewhere, etc etc) to buy one but at least it seems like a product I would support.
I have been using it to read HN, as an RSS reader over my news and blog sources, generate audiobooks on topics I want to understand with ElevenLabs, Exa and OpenAI and listen via connecting its bluetooth to my speakers and even as a remote Claude Code & Codex approval sidekick.
It is amazing that a $100 device with a single core and 512mb RAM can do so much and run for so long.
Here is the open-sourced platform https://github.com/BandarLabs/Cobalt
Not to sound like certain influencers but computers are pretty fast and the state of modern software is incredibly wasteful.
This SDK provides more of an android/iOS type framework to use underlying hardware like bluetooth, wifi, battery and a bunch of UI components for creating complex apps with eink rendering, notifications, managed windows, OTA updates, a simulator, a sidekick mode for your apps and more.
I have good news: they (RM2s) are often available on ebay for much less. People buy them thinking they're getting something like an android tablet, but they do nothing out of the box apart from showing docs and taking notes. Sometimes they're returned immediately for a full refund, but often they sit in a drawer, untouched, till they get offloaded on ebay for - comparatively - peanuts, letting us scoop them up and breathe new life into them (koreader rocks, to start with).
They are quite hackable, but a lot of the mods rely on some funky QT hacking… it’s all a bit kind of undocumented. I was able to get Codex to get full Chromium running in a chroot and render the screen via Xvfb though which was pretty cool and is somewhat usable, so I guess most things are possible with determination
This does seem to be caused by a badly set up Linux system though. The clock loses sync and the system can’t recover.
The problem was: out-of-sync device clock prevented software updates which in turn prevented cloud syncing. You don't need software updates or cloud syncing for the device to work.
The fix is to set the clock and do the software updates.
It is a bit sensationalist to say this is reviving it though, which makes this sound like some wild issue.
Defaults that make sense to servers with dedicated ops don't make sense for consumer products. Don't just run a default-config NTP client in a consumer product.
After all, my notebooks are perfectly readable four years later
reMarkable software has its faults, but I keep coming back to them for the best-in-class hardware, developer-friendly platform, which itself spawned an active developer community. Could it be an easier platform to develop on? Sure. But that hasn't stopped a huge number of supported mods being made available
Long shell life is a taboo in the tech world where 5 years is a long time.
I have all sorts of offline digital&analog mechanical/optical devices which just work decades and decades later. The weak point in any of my old tech is when theres a software component that needs to be reverse engineered and ported across multiple generations of CPU architecture / OS / API deprecations.
I have 60 year old records, 35 year old CDs, 25 year old minidiscs that all still work fine. Properly developed film negatives are still fine decades later.
Despite all the warnings about media impermanence and lifespans, it's always the software that screws it up first. I've lost more content from digital / streaming services because it simply vanishes than because a piece of physical media failed.
As software is increasingly "solved" by AI I think this is what will become most important
I actually like that the RM 1 is plastic, it feels durable and light.
I've had all, too. I do like the light weight of the first... I'm less scared to toss it around too.
1. Remarkable's own software is a steaming pile of poo. Their inbuilt web server for uploading files is extremely buggy and unusable. It's dog slow. You can't try to drag many files in one go, or it crashes. You can't try to upload a large file, or it crashes. There is also a hard limit on the file size you can upload (something like 100MB) which makes it unusable for some heavy PDF files I have. They push you towards paying for their cloud service subscription, which I will never do, just to be able to sync files. There is also no way to just ssh files over because their pdf reader will refuse to read them. All I want is to connect the remarkable every day for a few minutes to my computer and have it sync my files, and there is no way to do that.
2. Most of the "hacks" online are written assuming that you can install toolchains like Toltec on the device, and they are NOT updated for the newer firmware. My remarkable came with 3.15 and while there are some instructions on how to downgrade the firmware before installing the toolchain, they never worked for me. So I stuck with the subpar software and reading experience...
... until I discovered [ReManager](https://github.com/rmitchellscott/reManager). It just worked out of the box, did not require a firmware update, and I was able to install KoReader and other goodies (such as some launcher improvements). It can also transfer large files easily. What's ironic is that KoReader can read djvu files, which removes my need to use large PDFs in the first place. Equivalent djvu files are much much smaller.
Thanks to everyone in the remarkable community who contributed to ReManager and other assorted remarkable hacking!
EDIT: Also must point out a cool thing that I discovered recently - ReManager comes with a one click installer for the Zig toolchain on the Remarkable 2! It is slow, but I was able to compile and run zig programs on the tablet.
Citation needed
On the contrary, reMarkable's cloud and associated sync functionality is praised regularly in the unofficial subreddit, as is the access Support has when people accidentally overwrite or otherwise delete notes.
I fully understand why some people would prefer to self-host their documents, but to link your own work whilst labelling reMarkable's as "crap" is somewhat disingenuous
I don't think it's disingenuous to link to my own work, when that work was directly inspired by reMarkable's own awful software. I would call that "relevance".
I don't think it's fair to praise reMarkable's support for restoring access to files they mistakenly deleted in the first place. And secondly, their support is doing this FAR less than they used to. Some people in the subreddit report they don't do it any longer, since about 2 years ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1caeble/b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1nzwt9c/d...
Another defect of theirs is erroneously RESTORING files that were previously deleted.
They do not have sync or cloud figured out.
https://www.google.com/search?q=remarkable+support+restore+d...
Are we sure it's not just from bots?
I tried to use reMarkable as a tablet with screen casting when teaching, and it failed miserably. The screen casting just breaks randomly.
For storage/sync it's fine, but even that is problematic if you want to organize a large library.
I like mine very much except the limitation that I can't do too much with it.
Their hardware is top notch, but I found the software to be so hamstrung that I returned mine after a few weeks. Basically, if you want to have exactly a physical paper notebook experience but with a computer, it’s great. If you’d like to transcend the limitations of a paper notebook and take advantage of the nice hardware to organize your work, or do literally anything but write or draw, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
My car has four wheels, that doesn't make it a good ice-cream van
Well, same here: a Remarkable tablet is nearly identical to a Kobo or Kindle in form factor and basic capabilities. It even includes an ereader app. But the app, frankly, sucks. They could swapped in KOreader and called it a day. But instead of that, they — or rather, their supporters — give the laughable excuse that “it’s not an ereader”. Well, an iPad’s also not a calculator, and yet…
If your car has four wheels, room to walk around inside, and built in refrigerators that are mounted upside down for some reason, maybe the factory would say that they didn’t sell you an ice cream truck, but everyone else looking at it is going to wonder why they didn’t make it possible to stock popsicles while they were at it.
I'm not sure what the "ereader app" is that you refer to. reMarkables come with exactly one app "xochitl" that handles all user interaction. Sure, they let you access PDFs to annotate - but again the primary use case isn't to read them. ePub files are consciously converted into PDFs to support that premise.
KOreader, whilst an excellent reading app, doesn't support annotations. So it's not obvious why reMarkable would consider that an enhancement given the primary device purpose.
My car doesn't have space to walk around, nor refrigerators. That's why I bought it. Same with reMarkable devices. I buy and use them for the content creation functionality. I have a Kindle for the times when I want to swap to "consumer mode"
That’s the baseline I’d expect from an e-ink tablet. It might not blow me away, but should at least be reasonably useful as a reader. Any tablet that can’t adequately let me comfortably read an epub is unserious, in my opinion.
The limitation is the whole point, it does pen input very well.
For example be able to use the ssh access or synchronization web app from wifi, be able to use basic web page, synchronize with your own server like ftp server, ... All that kind of things not very complicated or requiring power. And I'm not even asking for the work/app to be done by remarkable but that the interface to do that is available.
A few things could be done by connecting in ssh and replacing the xserver but it is extremely clunky and could easy make your expensive tablet a brick. But it shows the kind of things that would be nice to be done with it.
I guess that a simple code editor/visualiser could easily be done.
I made notes, saved them. Only for the next morning to find my device out of battery and the notes missing. I don't get it, feels like I was zapped by some evil overlord that didn't want me recalling what I had written for the next part of my cartoon.
Now just use good ole paper and pen.
I don't connect it to the internet, just use the awesome RCU software (paid, but distributed with source code) to move stuff between it and my computer. I presume if I were to try to update it, I'll find the same fate! About exporting, the notebook format is relatively simple, I wrote a very bare-bones software that's able to convert the notebooks to PDF in a few hundred lines of Nim, or you could just use the integrated web UI.
The rm2 is still receiving software updates. The fact that this would have been impossible on more closed tablets, or indeed most mobile phones should show reMarkable in a positive light surely?
All that happened is they stopped selling it. Source: https://remarkable.com/products/remarkable-2
My kids still using thinkpad 430 from 2013
No, this device was only discontinued this year, you can still buy accessories and it still receives software updates.
It just turns out their software has flaws that break the update process after a few years of sitting unused. Not great, but luckily there are workarounds, as this article walks you through.
~ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-30/nt-world-record-darwi...
I dream of a day when you don't have to fill the tyres of your EV with water just to cross the harbour.
This is a platform to discuss all things related to tech. The suggestion that the OP discards their old tablet seems not in the true hacker spirit.
But, that's only my 5 cents.
my handwriting is awful, not to mention that my physical notebook management is awful. i’ve considered a supernote nomad as a way to streamline some of those issues. theyre just so expensive that i cant really justify a $500 experiment.
1) I had a ton of paper notes, looking back, curating, finding old things etc is really hard.
2) An electronic device gives you the ability to cut and paste, move things around on the page, resize stuff, drop in screenshots (so I often screenshot a page of something I’m reading, drop it into a note and annotate it or make my notes about it all around the original) and (best of all) infinite erase with no skank left behind on the page and no surrounding myself with tiny little bits of eraser to clean up.
3) I have all my notes with me on my device even ones I made years ago vs in my study I have box folders and notebooks full of notes filling cabinet after cabinet, I couldn’t possibly carry all that around with me.
1 and 3 are nice, 2 is the killer app. Once I made the switch I find it painfully limiting to go back to having to make notes on paper.
[1] My system in case people are interested is Notability and a paperlike screen protector. It is fantastic. All notes back up automatically as pdfs in box (which I then copy to my linux laptop) and I can search them using AI just fine even though I’m writing equations and my handwriting is god-awful. The notes are all pdf so if notability gets bought out and becomes terrible I just drop it like a hot potato and move on to something else no loss of notes. I tried a colleagues RM2 and the screen didn’t feel as nice to write on as my paperlike screen protector. I also found the latency distracting - I couldn’t write as fast as I would like to.
The ease of filing/retrieving across a lot of notes is a huge advantage. Also the amount you can have with you. The sheer weight of paper is a huge pain. With this you can carry hundreds of books and search the notes you scribbled in the margins.
I've used all kinds of drawing apps on the web previously, and the extra impedance of the mouse/canvas/tool selection/whatever frustrates the whole process.