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The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

cfenollosa.com

201–210 of 283 posts

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#201

Slightly off topic, but what happened to "smart pens"? 15ish years ago,I had a pen that could draw on special paper, and do interesting things. I really thought that paradigm would have progressed by now. Sort of like the original optical mice needed a special pad but now can work on any surface. I like drawing on a paper notebook (I use one with a grid of dots). I'd be fine with all of the "intelligence" coming from…

15ish years ago,I had a pen that could draw on special paper, and do interesting things.

Anoto (https://www.anoto.com) holds the IP on the proprietary pattern of dots used on the paper. Sure, you can make your own pattern, but Anoto's technology allows the pen to not only know where it is at on the paper (allowing it to capture pen strokes), but it also knows which piece of paper it is writing on...out of the gazillion unique sheets of paper the technology allows. So, cool stuff, but all depending on the good graces of one company. I used to work for one of their partners (now out of business), and a large part of our secret sauce was allowing one to print any document, but with the dot pattern printed under your Word doc/map/PDF. IOW, print anything and now you can write on it. Imagine printing your city map from MapGIS/ESRI, mark it up with (for example) fire hydrants, dock the pen. Now your GIS database is updated with fire hydrant locations, and you didn't have to carry a pricey PC or tablet into the field.

You can still buy the technology via LiveScribe, but I don't know how it is used in enterprise scenarios, if at all anymore.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#202

Slightly off topic, but what happened to "smart pens"? 15ish years ago,I had a pen that could draw on special paper, and do interesting things. I really thought that paradigm would have progressed by now. Sort of like the original optical mice needed a special pad but now can work on any surface. I like drawing on a paper notebook (I use one with a grid of dots). I'd be fine with all of the "intelligence" coming from…

Or going back more, light pens on CRT monitors were neat. How did the pen work in practice for you?

It was a gift to my daughter years ago. She enjoyed it very much.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#203

Slightly off topic, but what happened to "smart pens"? 15ish years ago,I had a pen that could draw on special paper, and do interesting things. I really thought that paradigm would have progressed by now. Sort of like the original optical mice needed a special pad but now can work on any surface. I like drawing on a paper notebook (I use one with a grid of dots). I'd be fine with all of the "intelligence" coming from…

There are multiple things in this space. * The Lenovo writing pad device - https://www.lenovo.com/nl/nl/yoga-book/ This thing is different from all other devices on the market. You can write on the device itself, or you can put a piece of paper on top of it and write on that which will simultaneously be digital iirc. * A smart clipboard, I'm sure there are non-kickstarter variations of this out there somewhere as wel…

So still no smart pens that work on plain paper?

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#205

Can anyone recommend for or against buying a used reMarkable2 on ebay? I'm interested in this for daily work, happy to spend some time in SSH, and have a reasonably high risk tolerance for no-warranty. But I don't want to throw my money away.

I bought mine new. As someone who keeps there todo lists hand written, I use it every day several times a day. It’s also my e-reader for PDFs of research papers.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#206

The reMarkable dilemma is that they got the hardware right --modulo backlighting, but that will come--. It's the services around such a powerful device that people will find lacking. Open source enthusiasts will state that they want freedom, while people who care less about that freedom will get suspicious as to what happens if the company ceases to exist. The latter will probably consider an iPad a better value prop…

The lack of backlighting is the one and only reason I went with Onxy Boox Note Air 2 over Remarkable2. Is it really on the way? Is there an ETA?

Dont know, just i'm supposing it has to be on the roadmap for the next product revision. Otherwise I would be having one.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#207

Can anyone recommend for or against buying a used reMarkable2 on ebay? I'm interested in this for daily work, happy to spend some time in SSH, and have a reasonably high risk tolerance for no-warranty. But I don't want to throw my money away.

I bought mine new. As someone who keeps there todo lists hand written, I use it every day several times a day. It’s also my e-reader for PDFs of research papers.

Thanks! Academic here, also thinking about using this for notes and lots of reading research papers with not too much annotation.

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#208
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…

Or you could do like me, who never felt the urge to "sync to the cloud" any notebook, be it paper or e-ink based.

RM2 works great offline and does not need any network connection to do its main job. I think you will find you won't really need updates if you use it the same way as me.

And yes, as they mentioned it is enough FOSS friendly that there is quite a community of tinkerers around it

Re: The reMarkable as a notebook and eBook reader

#210
I bought a physical notebook recently and oh man it's so much better than an iPad. Especially when I'm trying to sketch out architecture or play around with ideas, a pen and paper is unbeatable. Maybe it's all the years of school making me hand write code, but I've started to like hand writing an algorithm or hand writing potential syntax for a language.
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