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The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

cfenollosa.com

81–90 of 283 posts

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#81

Having used this, it's fine, but not that great compared to similar products. I understand some people do like it. That said, has anyone else noticed the quantity of reMarkable posts here (about once per quarter) with hundreds of votes that are essentially ads for the product? reMarkable clearly has a large advertising budget given the amount of ads I/others see from them on social media. Is it possible that they're…

It's possible but I doubt it. It runs linux, is an e-ink device, can be sshed into and customized heavily, and it has a large following of nerds that write custom tools and reverse engineer the software and hardware. And on top of that it's a great device out of the box. To me that makes it likely to be of great interest to the HN crowd.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#82
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subscription mode is for syncing your content on their cloud storage. One of the nice features of the remarkable device is that they allow you to ssh on the device and run your software on it. There is a community who builds various tools that run on the device. I didn't check recently but I'm pretty sure you have one or more open options to sync your content to your remote storage of choice.

> The subscription mode is for syncing your content on their cloud storage. According to the website the subscription model is for syncing your content to ANY cloud storage No Sub: No cloud storage of any kind $5/mo: Unlimited cloud storage on their servers $8/mo: Google Drive / Dropbox support https://remarkable.com/store/connect Thanks but no thanks. I'm not paying anyone $8/mo for the privilege of storing my digit…

That's not entirely true, you DO get syncing with no plan, just not unlimited syncing. But yes, I agree it is expensive for just connecting to somebody else's service.

https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/44082491463...

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#83

Having used this, it's fine, but not that great compared to similar products. I understand some people do like it. That said, has anyone else noticed the quantity of reMarkable posts here (about once per quarter) with hundreds of votes that are essentially ads for the product? reMarkable clearly has a large advertising budget given the amount of ads I/others see from them on social media. Is it possible that they're…

You can buy those? I could use some!

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#84

I have one, and I find the writing part nearly perfect. But there are a couple of downsides mentioned in the article that mean I barely use it: - Searching and organisation is really difficult. I wish everything would be OCRed transparently and you could instantly search for it (while keeping the original graphics) - It's unfortunate that the OCR runs on their cloud. It would be really perfect if it was a web app tha…

I have the same issue with the OCR. I've been using it for taking notes for my masters courses, and ironically as part of the course just finished making a machine learning model for OCR on armv7 devices that works as well if not better then the proprietary OCR service they use, and could easily run on the device without needing the network at all.

My biggest issue with the rm2 is not any specific feature, but the total and complete lack of support for 3rd party software. The people behind the device make great hardware, and nice device drivers, but kind of suck at user facing software. They should stop trying to do the front end stuff, and just give us the ability to let the community do it ourselves.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#85
post #72
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be genuinely curious to know how many people do ssh based tricks instead of paying for a subscription. Is it really worth pushing away your initial tech-savvy crowd for those couple of people that are not annoyed enough to leave?

Surely it isn't, but it would hardly be the first time a company did something in that boneheaded vein.

Yeah, that's for sure. I was once very happy with a Fintech app (a bank), very techy, an API, modern and cool features, tight community. Then they pivoted and started targetting another more mainstream crowd. They incorporated their insta-feed into the app, and all kinds of social and greenwashing features. Reviews are still poor. I keep wondering if they could not somehow have kept the techy, early adopters happy and started targeting a more mainstream crowd. Is that very difficult? Two versions of the app would have done it. But maybe the tech group is so small it's worth pissing off this small group- that jumps on new stuff eagerly and helps you debug and grow in an early stage. Quite depressing.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#86
post #43
post #2

> They are moving towards a subscription model. This is the biggest minus point for me. I want devices that I own, that I can use like I want to. I don't want to be caught in another cloud and pay monthly for something I don't want to use. Currently I'm looking into getting a device from Onyx, because those support the Android App Stores, so I could set it up with Notion or my Nextcloud probably. Remarkable seems to…

Notably, and with a disclaimer that I myself unfortunately failed to live by ideals in this case and did buy, Onyx seem to have their own issue, which is violating GPL: https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/p9ztru/lets_help...

Yeah, it is annoying that there is so little competition. I was made aware of this after being a very happy Boox (A4 size; I use it literally for everything I used paper for before when reading, writing, sketching, flow charts, mockups etc) user for 6 months. I am not going to toss it away and so far, after trying the reMarkable from a friend, I would buy the Boox again instead... ...if not this gpl issue.

Edit: also, I believe one of the people in that reddit thread might have the correct answer; the eInk drivers (and probably more notably the waveform) will be proprietary and they do probably worry about losing their license if they publish anything they are not allowed to. Which would end their business immediately.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#87
post #53

I'm looking forward to the https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/ .

Hardware looks good at first sight. But a device like that depends so much on the software.

Yeah I'm keen to see what sorts of toolkits and programs are developed.

Are there toolkits/programs written by enthusiasts that could be used on Pinenote?

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#88
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subscription mode is for syncing your content on their cloud storage. One of the nice features of the remarkable device is that they allow you to ssh on the device and run your software on it. There is a community who builds various tools that run on the device. I didn't check recently but I'm pretty sure you have one or more open options to sync your content to your remote storage of choice.

> The subscription mode is for syncing your content on their cloud storage. According to the website the subscription model is for syncing your content to ANY cloud storage No Sub: No cloud storage of any kind $5/mo: Unlimited cloud storage on their servers $8/mo: Google Drive / Dropbox support https://remarkable.com/store/connect Thanks but no thanks. I'm not paying anyone $8/mo for the privilege of storing my digit…

This is about the features they enable through their easy to use UI.

You're free to not like it, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the fact that this is one of the few platforms where I can ssh onto the underlying Linux host and run my damn software and extend it in various ways, which includes syncing docs with whatever storage system I want. Surely, this is for "hackers" use only. This is what I like about this and I'm happy to accept the tradeoff.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#89

I bought one, then returned it. For the price they're selling it at, the following points were a deal breaker for me: 1. Custom file system: this means I can ssh into it, but I can't rsync my bibliography into it, since it won't display regular pdf files whose name is not hashed and registered in some sort of index. Moreover, the lack of a Linux client meant it was very hard to put my pdfs on it, or extract my notes…

> 1. Custom file system: this means I can ssh into it, but I can't rsync my bibliography into it, since it won't display regular pdf files whose name is not hashed and registered in some sort of index. Moreover, the lack of a Linux client meant it was very hard to put my pdfs on it, or extract my notes from it.

FWIW, rmfuse [0] allows you to mount the reMarkable cloud and you have easy access to sync with real filenames.

[0] https://github.com/rschroll/rmfuse

> RMfuse provides access to your reMarkable Cloud files in the form of a FUSE filesystem. These files are exposed either in their original format, or as PDF files that contain your annotations. This lets you manage files in the reMarkable Cloud using the same tools you use on your local system.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#90
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide more details? It's a bit unclear what happened. You bought it, asked for a return, and then what? I don't know what non-movement means.

They provided the label and picked the carrier (DHL). DHL picked the package up and promptly lost it or forgot about it or whatever happens with shipping companies that are trash. I waited about 2 weeks before I complained because COVID and all that. After 3 weeks of absolutely zero package movement (stuck in the same location) they refused to give a refund. I filed a dispute and finally got my refund after it sat ar…

Nah, that covers it. Thanks.

I was going to say that such things happen, but your chat with the service manager sealed my feelings on the matter. They could see just as well as you that DHL had the notebook, not you, and they should've eaten the loss.

The other comments here are reMarkably negative too. I was briefly tempted to get one, but I'll wait for whoever the Vive of this space turns out to be.

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