Japan's Paper Culture

> I struggle to think of any moment in someone's daily life where they have to write something down.

I am finding that life without a smart phone in my pocket is palpably more pleasant — and without a smart phone, the utility of a notepad and pen increases quite a bit.

The reMarkable is a very impressive piece of hardware with unfortunately bad software and a business model that looks to be deteriorating (see recent moves to subscription services, etc.).

In physical/tactile terms, it's a really impressive writing experience, but I've found the utility of that so constrained by the absence of indexing and navigation features that I don't use it for much besides occasional drawings. It turns out that navigating a physical notebook works in ways that flipping through electronic pages can't keep up with without a lot of work on the interface.

As an e-reader, recent updates to the rendering have made it usable, though there are still sometimes hassles with display and getting documents onto the device. It's theoretically great to be able to annotate PDFs, but in practice not being able to easily navigate the annotations later makes it substantially worse than writing notes in the margins of a paper book.

I'm sure a lot of this can be improved with 3rd-party hacks, but it isn't designed as a platform and it feels only grudgingly open to modification, which seems like a huge missed opportunity. (Not to mention being yet another product built on open code that doesn't return the favor.) Being able to SSH to the device and poke around the filesystem is cool, but it mostly feels like a glimpse into how much more utility the whole thing could offer.

I'll use mine as long as it works, but I'm unlikely to buy another one and I can't in good faith recommend it for most users. I do know several folks who are happy with the narrow range of things it's good at, which is why I bought it in the first place. Personally, I'm placing my hopes for a more useful-to-me e-ink future on devices like the PineNote.

Your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they have a habit of breaking the site guidelines, getting involved in flamewars, or posting a lot of low-quality comments. You have a long history of doing that on HN, unfortunately. And are still doing it, unfortunately.

Rate limits apply to all posts, both comments and submissions. That's the technical answer to your question.

We're happy to remove rate limits when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future, but unfortunately, when I skim your recent posts, I see reasons to believe the opposite.

I realize the throttling is annoying, and am sorry about that, but it's one of the few crude software-based techniques we have to try to dampen the degeneration of this place; something to which you've unfortunately contributed more than your share.

If you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, take the intended spirit of the site to heart, and build up a track record of abiding by the site guidelines, we'd be delighted to take the rate limit off your account.

The one on Newbury St. in Boston is open. Just bought some pens the other day!

I have one and run KOreader on it. The stylus is good for highlighting passages, but as for being a contender to my paper notebooks ... I'd still take my worst pens over it. There's just something so ... one-dimensional about the navigation of pages on electronic devices. The ability to zip around and 'random access' bound pages just feels natural in a way nothing seems to be able to replicate for me on any kind of electronic device. Sometimes it feels like looking at the world through a straw.

EDIT:

Also the storage is just too tiny. It's really the thing that aggravates me about it the most. (No, I won't cloud. I operate too often in environments with no outside net access. And if the whole point is to have everything on one compact device, I want everything on the device.)