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I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

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Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#61

Post by NieDzejkob »

formerly_proven wrote: post #45
morpheuskafka wrote: post #10

I work part-time for my university's help desk and I was both impressed and disappointed the first time I came across one of these--one the one hand, its highly customizable and supports SSH access. On the other hand, there is shockingly no way to get the MAC address without connecting via SSH, even though this is popular among academics who often need to get onto MAC filtered networks. In hindsight, we probably coul…

I was under the impression that having the MAC address on the device's label was some kind of regulatory requirement for Wifi - I have never seen a wireless device without it.

Where does your phone have this sticker?

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#63

Post by [deleted] »

judge2020 wrote: post #60
formerly_proven wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that having the MAC address on the device's label was some kind of regulatory requirement for Wifi - I have never seen a wireless device without it.

I think that's for APs, given pretty much no smartphone has its MAC printed on it.

[deleted]

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#64

Post by formerly_proven »

judge2020 wrote: post #60
formerly_proven wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that having the MAC address on the device's label was some kind of regulatory requirement for Wifi - I have never seen a wireless device without it.

I think that's for APs, given pretty much no smartphone has its MAC printed on it.

Oh, true! I thought it was the MAC address in tiny print on iPhones but it's actually the FCC ID and IMEI. On the other hand, all smartphones have the MAC and serial number easily accessible in their settings menu.

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#65

Post by drfuchs »

NieDzejkob wrote: post #61
formerly_proven wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that having the MAC address on the device's label was some kind of regulatory requirement for Wifi - I have never seen a wireless device without it.

Where does your phone have this sticker?

In the battery compartment.

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#67

Post by ericcholis »

I had a very similar problem, although the root cause was a drained battery. After finally charging it, the device was stuck in a boot loop.

I wasn't able to create a proper connection via the pogo; but the community was amazingly helpful (and appropriately critical of my poor soldering skills).

Since the device hadn't synchronized to the cloud in some time, I had to send it out for data recovery. The cost was worth it for me. Happily, the data was fully recoverable and I was able to simply get a drive image and work with it locally using a mix of traditional OS tools as well as tools provided by the Remarkable community.

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#68

Post by jonny_eh »

kadoban wrote: post #43
colecut wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done it yet myself, but I've read it's fairly easy to install KOReader on the Remarkable 2 to provide a better ereader experience. Though when using this software, you wouldn't be able to mark up the text or add notes in the 'remarkable' way.

It is indeed easy and very worth it. The rm2 is the _best_ way to read text books and comics I've ever seen (using koreader), and separately it's great for taking notes. Those two uses don't really overlap for me so it's fine that they're in separate OSes, especially because it's one gesture to switch between them. The one and only thing that really bothers me about the device is the storage is pretty small. It's fin…

> The rm2 is the _best_ way to read text books and comics I've ever seen

Comics? I thought it was black and white only. I'd assume an iPad (or other tablet) was better for comics.

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#69

Post by jakeva »

pklausler wrote: post #56
Andrex wrote: post #4

Not trying to shill too hard, but it's rare I fall in love with a device the way I've fallen in love with my Remarkable 2. I can't say it was 100% worth the price (half was paid as a gift), but everything about it is refreshingly elegant and simple. Great to know recovering from a brick is possible too.

I'm glad that you enjoy yours. Mine has been sitting in my dead technology drawer since about two weeks after it arrived. The pen is too laggy, the contrast is too low for me to read PDFs comfortably, and the note-taking experience doesn't come close to what I get from a good pen and good paper. Nice try, but meh from me.

I spent the money only to find out I don't actually take notes in any form other than with a keyboard. I have used it to do some sketching though, but I don't really do that much either.

Re: I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2

#70

Post by kayodelycaon »

Oh boy do I have opinions with this one. This seems like a lot of work to avoid using a perfectly good package manager on the device.

They could have used rsync without installing rsync on the device. The target device doesn't need to have rsync for rsync to be used.

They could have installed the package manager and left it. It doesn't run anything in the background on my device. It's easy enough to verify you don't have a systemd service or timer running it. (cron isn't installed, iirc)

They could have compiled rsync with all of the libraries bundled with it. (Maybe this is beyond their expertise?)

Their solution is using Docker to use the package manager and then overwriting system files on the device in the worse possible way, without understanding what they are doing. At that point, they verified in Docker. Should be safe to run it on the tablet then, yes?

What attack vector are they worried about? :/ Toltec is actively worked on, odds are someone would notice someone else fucking with repository.

The cherry on top was completely not understanding how the remarkable works. There are two partitions for a reason. The inactive one is used for software updates. When the reMarkable downloads an update, it downloads it to the inactive partition. When you "install" the update, it flips which of the two partitions is active. If the update fails to boot, it flips back to the known good state. All they had to do was switch the active partition, the next update would overwrite the broken partition. https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable2-recovery/issues/6

This looks like a bad case of tunnel vision, combined with a lack of understanding. I'm glad they managed to figure out how to fix it.

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