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ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

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Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#151

Post by tubularhells »

diggan wrote: post #47
smt88 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The refresh rate on e-ink is so low that coding on one would probably be excruciating. You should think of it as a replacement for paper, not a replacement for a monitor. If your laptop isn't very bright, you're mostly out of luck. You can work in the shade, try polarized glasses, buy a brighter laptop, or find a portable monitor that is brighter than your built-in panel.

> If your laptop isn't very bright ... buy a brighter laptop ... and a portable monitor that is brighter As someone who works with my laptop outside in the sun a lot, the trick is not to have a brighter laptop but to have one with a matte display instead of glossy, and use bright backgrounds for everything. Even when I'm in direct sunlight, matte display and light themes make me able to see my code without any squint…

Or used intellij over a Citrix terminal for a bank client, for that matter.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#152

Post by afandian »

ericd wrote: post #121
afandian wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm talking about RM1.

Oh I see, that makes more sense. I heard that RM1 was a great device, but with some v1 rough edges, and that a lot of that got smoothed out by RM2. And that jives with my experience, the RM2 feels very polished (some obvious feature improvements to be made especially in OCR and searchability, but the basic functionality works really well).

I really like it, don't get me wrong. It's just the e-ink led me (and maybe others) to suggest it would have herculean battery life when in fact it's about approximate to a conventinoal tablet.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#153

Post by _underfl0w_ »

6d6b73 wrote: post #63

Does anyone know if syncing with cloud can be disabled?

Yes. AFAIUI (haven't received mine yet) it's not required in the first place. You could likely unlink your account from the device though, if you already signed up. You can even edit the hosts file on the device to just block connections.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#154

Post by bergstromm466 »

reificator wrote: post #97
bergstromm466 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it's the Wacom digitiser broadcasting RF all the time. Great, it has expensive royalties and it betrays the user.

> Great, it has expensive royalties and it betrays the user. Your cell phone also sends out photons that can be spied on. Worse yet they're multicast so multiple parties can receive them at the same time. Seriously though, this is an absurd concern, and I say that as someone who is very privacy minded if not actually paranoid. I still don't trust that cell phones aren't sending back keywords picked up on the micropho…

Yeah I mistook rf for something else

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#155

Post by reginaldo »

davisr wrote: post #143
lovelyviking wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stumbled on some article describing that Remarkable calls home and sends some statistics. I've checked and indeed it does. My hacking attitude says it is absolutely unacceptable. The good news you can disable it, and I did. But for poople to be aware , this is what it does by default. Can't say I like that part of rM software. Unfortunately now I've looked for the article and can't find it. If you saw one, please d…

Some of us hackers feel the same way. I'm the author of a paid-but-GPLv3+ program called RCU[1] that almost 400 people use because they don't want to, or legally can't, interface with a cloud. I never connect my tablet to the net except to get software updates. [1]: http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

Thanks for the software and documentation you've written for the reMarkable. I've taken a different approach for running Debian buster, but your guide [1] saved me a lot of time nonetheless.

[1] http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/

chroot for now, systemd-nspawn as soon as I have time to hack on it later, as I want to be able to switch between whatever I'm running and reMarkable's original software.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#156

Post by e12e »

Arainach wrote: post #93
jason_slack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ReMarkable is sort of astonishingly expensive, I have been contemplating buying a ReMarkable 2 as I prefer to handwrite everything/annotate/. The price tag is a bit hefty given the cost of an iPad and pencil and the zillion other things it does. I'm curious if you are indeed going to buy one?

I've had mine for 4-6 weeks now. I'm not returning it, but I can't particularly recommend it - both the annotation and eReading experiences are significantly inferior to what you'd get with Onenote, Notability, or Drawboard on iPad/Surface. The reMarkable hardware is nice, but its stock software is frankly disappointing. The hackability is a "plus", but I don't want to have to resort to unsupported firmware tweaks to…

I've had my rm2 for a few weeks, and I think the software is remarkably bad - but I've yet to truly experiment with the various foss/hacks for it.

The actual drawing and doodling is nice, but there are a number of issues.

First the cloud/sync software will happily let you add lots of ebooks/comics to transfer (I have a couple of comic bundles from humble bundle I've yet to read). The end result is that the disk fills up, and the on-device file manager is anemic and slow. Not only is there no discernable way to clear the sync queue (so as you free up space it gets filled again..) - even if you can sort by file size, you can't actually list file size.

I had hoped to use it, beyond comics, for technical books - but both zoom and reflow of text, and font selection is poor for both Pdf and epub.

Then finally, I had hope it would work for viewing Pdf rpg rulebook - but it chokes pretty badly (on the admittedly quite horrible) white wolf mage 20th book for example.

And to add insult to injury the built in Pdf reader can't be used with the interactive (Pdf form) character sheets.

It can read a "printed" version and allows doodling on top - so it's not all lost. But the end result isn't machine readable, so you're almost better off with a paper sheet anyway.

Finally, reading a standard epub (like "The Star's my Destination") is painful because the limited font/margin/reflow, and the sluggish response for turning pages (a hw button would've helped here). In the end, my aging huawei phone [1] with oled display set to night mode is a better book reading experience both in Kindle and FBreader.

But again, the doodling is pretty good, and the screen is crisp - so I hope something can be done via software. Maybe even just adding a djvu-reader and do the conversion off device if the cpu is truly as underpowered for Pdf as it appears.

[1] p20 pro (wow, it really is a 2018 phone - thought it was older..) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#157

Post by michaelmior »

Arainach wrote: post #93
jason_slack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ReMarkable is sort of astonishingly expensive, I have been contemplating buying a ReMarkable 2 as I prefer to handwrite everything/annotate/. The price tag is a bit hefty given the cost of an iPad and pencil and the zillion other things it does. I'm curious if you are indeed going to buy one?

I've had mine for 4-6 weeks now. I'm not returning it, but I can't particularly recommend it - both the annotation and eReading experiences are significantly inferior to what you'd get with Onenote, Notability, or Drawboard on iPad/Surface. The reMarkable hardware is nice, but its stock software is frankly disappointing. The hackability is a "plus", but I don't want to have to resort to unsupported firmware tweaks to…

I don't have the reMarkable 2, but I preordered v1 and have been using it pretty regularly since then. I've really enjoyed it and greatly prefer it for my primary use case of reading and reviewing academic papers. I find it far superior to an iPad in this respect. Mostly because of the display.

The specific points of feedback you have are common with the v1 device. With the exception of pressure sensitivity. The pen for the v1 device was pressure sensitive. Has that been removed? Of the other points, the only one that I've found really bothers me is being unable to change the default writing implement.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#158

Post by [deleted] »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #118
ChuckMcM wrote: post #115

I am really enjoying the ReMarkable 2. I wish the display were more "actual" paper size of course (it's 10.3" diagonal (no margins) rather than US Letter's more typical 13.8" diagonal (no margins), or even a moleskin's 11" diagonal (no margins)) That said, sketching/writing are just as good as they are on the iPad Pro or Surface Pro. The pen/glass "feel" is no worse than those other two solutions either (but no bette…

You can disable auto-sleep. And you can modify the png for sleeping. Any transparent pixels will show the screen contents. I changed mine to completely cover the entire screen when sleeping. (I use a passcode and don’t want people seeing the screen contents)

[deleted]

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#159

Post by _underfl0w_ »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #44

I'm going to get my R2 soon. Does anyone know if it can open (read+write) basic Excel documents? I have a "Weekly Todo" XLS (it's just blank grids) that I always print for writing down notes in the grids, and by end of week, put those back to computer. Would be great if I can skip the print-transcribe loop.

To add to the sibling comment, there are multiple background images you can use when taking notes on the rM. Apparently you can customize them (from my research - haven't received my rM2 yet TBH) so you could likely drop in a grid image to use as a background.

Re: ReMarkable tablet open source tools and hacks

#160

Post by reginaldo »

I bought a reMarkable 1 a few weeks ago, with plans to give it to a family member and buy the reMarkable 2 once it's generally available. The set with the marker and the polymer folio was USD 299. For the sake of comparison, just the 10.3 inch display plus the driving board on Waveshare is USD 234 plus shipping, and it's kind of a pain to deal with.

The reMarkable, OTOH, "just works", as well as an i.MX6 machine with an e-paper display can.

It's a Linux machine with a framebuffer, with the added difficulty that you have to explicitly tell the framebuffer to update itself, unless you put the driver on auto-update mode. For my application, explicitly refreshing the framebuffer works better, though.

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