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Notes on my Remarkable tablet

tomcritchlow.com

51–60 of 101 posts

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#51

Hi Tom, I'm a big fan of my rm2, too -- and am writing to respond to this: > "I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad (even if it doesn’t sync with your actual calendar!). A daily journaling / diary / planning format would be great. (Yes, right now you can select a day-planner template, but you can…

Oh so this is just a pdf with links embedded so you can jump around? That's pretty neat (and a very slick UI for creating and buying them!)

Hey, hyperpaper creator here! That's exactly what it is– a pdf planner that you can customize to your own needs, with lots of contextual links.

Happy to answer any questions, and thanks chrisweekly for the kind words and shoutout

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#52
post #9

I was a big fan of my RM2, but found the move to the subscription service a couple years ago to be off putting. Sure, I can turn off WiFi, or just use the network to ssh into it, but it felt less than great. I recently got a Supernote to replace it and so far love it. The company seems a bit more open and less likely to try to push me to some kind of subscription/cloud thing. They promote the “works great offline, no…

For this exact reason, I decided to instead buy Surface Pro 9 and installed Ubuntu Linux on it. It works amazingly well. Moreover, all my notes are automatically converted to PDF and syned to my gitlab.

ooo, tell me more. what is your workflow like on the surface to enable this?

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#53

Hi Tom, I'm a big fan of my rm2, too -- and am writing to respond to this: > "I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad (even if it doesn’t sync with your actual calendar!). A daily journaling / diary / planning format would be great. (Yes, right now you can select a day-planner template, but you can…

[deleted]

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. If someone can come out with a product I can sync to my own service, I’m buying it.

You can self-host rmfakecloud, an open-source reimplementation of the reMarkable cloud. You just ssh into the device and use a DNS trick to swap it out.

Oh! Awesome! I’ll check that out, thank you.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#55
I love the hardware and the feel but the software is terrible and the difficulty of putting templates on the device (you hack around and use ssh to copy a file in) really limits the usefulness. The subscription model is also pushed heavy with basic functionality you would expect not working unless you pay. Overall I regret buying one and I almost never use it.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#56
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m really excited for the upcoming Supernote A5X2. So many smart and community-friendly decisions in the design and software. My reMarkable 2 is still holding up, but I’ll be giving it a close look when the time comes for a replacement.

When is the A5x2 coming and what exactly are you excited about it?

End of Q1 2024, according to the Supernote website. Presumably it’s going to be very similar to the recently released A6X2, just larger. The specs are great (300dpi display and performance bumped SOC), the design is expandable and repairable (SD slot, replaceable battery, easy teardown), and the OS is based on Android (so you can install the Kindle app and more if you want).

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#57
post #5

Hi Tom, I'm a big fan of my rm2, too -- and am writing to respond to this: > "I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad (even if it doesn’t sync with your actual calendar!). A daily journaling / diary / planning format would be great. (Yes, right now you can select a day-planner template, but you can…

Is there something like this for iPad?

It'll work just fine on an iPad, several folks are doing so (Goodnotes and Notability are the most common apps people use for loading and annotating the pdf). I've done a little work towards color themes to better support the iPad, but for now it's just black & white since most customers use eInk tablets.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#59

The RM homebrew community has answers for some of the problems the author poses. I haven't tried it personally, but there is a VNC package that will let you use your tablet as an auxiliary screen. The hacking community is small but pretty dedicated. There's a few exciting projects in the works, like a complete desktop interface called Oxide. The RM tablets are kinda neat in that you get root access out of the box. Yo…

I think it's important to note the wider limitations of the homebrew community. I bought an rM2 relatively early on, enough to have lifetime free subscription access that I've never used, as I've always used homebrew arrangements instead.

There is a definite sense that the community is tired and diminishing. I think most packages are only compatible with the at this point quite old v2 software version, including the entirety of the toltec system. Some of the most important hacks, ddvk's packages, are both stagnant and closed source, with hints that being closed source comes from direct threats from Remarkable, not hypothetical concern over legalities. Toltec's maintainers, and others, respond with suggestions that they're going to be updating at some point, and that users are just being impatient, but it seems more likely that much of the homebrew infrastructure at this point will not be moving forward. The homebrew community was once small but dedicated, now I think it would be more accurate to just call it small.

And I somewhat understand that. As much as it has its defenders, Remarkable has been at worst hostile, and at best unwittingly unhelpful. It often provides exactly what it thinks is legally required. V3 changed the format and system enough to break all homebrew software. Whether intentionally, or in response to a well meaning but enormously damaging user suggestion, Remarkable changed its kernel configuration in a very non-standard, non-recommended way with the only significant impact being to make compilation of modules impossible without entirely replacing the kernel (they did, after years, finally change this back). Kernel sources are available, but good luck compiling then. Does the keyboard case even work unless you're using V3, and this break everything homebrew, including that terminal? Remarkable seems like a textbook case of a company respecting the letter but not the spirit of free software. And that isn't even considering the dark patterns they have more generally: the intentionally non-standard USB C port so that third party keyboards that would otherwise work without any problems don't work, the wonky Ethernet-adapter behaviour rather than a virtual mass storage device, the tendency of the USB web interface to repeatedly turn off... there are justifications given for many of these, but as a whole they paint a problematic picture.

And so those of us who use our modified Remarkables increasingly, at this point, are just using devices frozen in time, with everything working for us.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#60

I really liked my remarkable2, but I eventually got the issue where it just stops charging and now it's effectively a brick. Tried all the known workarounds I could find with trickle-charging etc. Someone had tracked the issue down to a malfunctioning temperature sensor preventing charging but I have no idea if that's the problem with mine. Remarkable support would like me to create videos showing every workaround I…

The issue is actually that your usb-c receptacle broke free from the PCB inside. Open and you'll see. I emailed them about it a while ago. They majorly fucked up the design. The connector is on the very edge of a very thin finger of a thin PCB. There is nothing holding it to the case, only the few solder points to a thin PCB. They did not care. I sent photos, explanation, and a rather long essay as to why this should…

> They majorly fucked up the design.

> There is nothing holding it to the case, only the few solder points to a thin PCB. They did not care.

Which is more plausible: that a company infamous for its shitty warranty/return policies accidentally/incompetently designed the USB connector to have weak physical support, or purposefully designed it to be weak so that people would be forced to keep buying replacements?

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