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Notes on my Remarkable tablet

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#71

Post by vsnf »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #60
dmitrygr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’ve worked at companies that ostensibly sell a hardware thing, and that thing was very poorly designed. It had everything to do with a combination of inexperience, hubris, and sloppiness, and absolutely nothing to do with malice. Some places are likely evil, but others are just dumb.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#72

Post by jfim »

chrisweekly wrote: post #4

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…

There's also https://recalendar.me/ that does something similar and is open source. It does struggle with larger documents, but everything happens locally.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#73

Post by mikebonnell »

I loved my RM2 but the pencil broke and without a warranty, it felt hard pressed to by another one. I replaced tips regularly, but the "tip-holding" piece shifted so it couldn't be reliably used any more. I wonder if any other folks hit this or if I just had a one-offf bad experience?

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#74

Post by rramadass »

Anybody have any experience on using the "Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra" to read books/papers and take notes on?

It is pricey but seems to have all the needed functionality, specifically; the large 14.6 inch screen helps you deal with A4 size properly.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#75

Post by m463 »

calamari4065 wrote: post #20

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…

> That said, Remarkable the company has been fairly shitty.

Except for the fact that they've released a product that you can do with what you will and use offline.

It seems most other products require you to create an account and log into someone's service to even use the device. They're so scared they can't monetize you!

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#76

Post by m463 »

dboreham wrote: post #6

I'd buy one if it supported reading books from the two platforms I use: Kindle and O'Reilly.

I think calibre will do what you want. Convert to pdf because epub on remarkable2 is significantly slower. You will want to tweak your pdf conversion settings to get the font sized for easy reading.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#77

Post by rapjr9 »

The things that stop me from buying a Remarkable or any similar products are:

* Too expensive. I want to have one everywhere in my house, all wirelessly connected so I can just pick one up and scribble a note anywhere. I may carry one also, but mostly I'd rather have something I treat as paper and keep them handy to places I frequent.

* Stores data in the cloud. I want to create personal notes, I do not want to share my personal notes with a cloud.

* Wireless sync is not trivially easy. I should not need to manually sync it, configure it for a wireless network, connect it to the internet, or make backups, or manage the network, or manage the device.

* Good organizational software for the notes. Many ways to sort notes/drawings, ways to search them, writing-to-text converters, drawing recognizers, all local and protected by good default encryption.

If you're going to replace paper in my life, it's got to be as ubiquitous and easy to use as paper, as reliable, and offer advanced features as well. Otherwise it's an unnecessary expense that is more difficult to use and requires maintenance time.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#78

Post by m463 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #48

It is positively bizarre that HN will scream blue bloody murder about "the apple tax", "apple spying", "poor repairability" and so on, and yet cannot shut up about a device that: * REQUIRES a cloud subscription and active data connection to do its most core functionality: OCRing text you write on it * costs more after a year or two than an iPad with Apple Pencil * is completely unrepairable; no parts availability, no…

I believe OCR as "the" core is just an opinion.

This device allows you to do all your work offline. You do not need an account to use it. You can ssh into it. You don't have to ask permission to transfer files to/from the device.

This device is the WORST e-reader... except for all the rest.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#79

Post by diffeomorphism »

whatisyour wrote: post #50
porcoda wrote: 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.

How is the support nowadays? It used to be that you needed custom kernels and some fiddling (e.g. see reddit's r/surfacelinux).

What software do you use for the note taking? On Windows there seemed to be OneNote (and nothing else) and on Linux xournal++.

Sorry for all the questions, but I am currently looking for a new laptop/tablet and thought I'd ask for experiences of others.

Re: Notes on my Remarkable tablet

#80

Post by poisonborz »

People write about Remarkable like about hardware company but my impression is that it's a very small venture, and pushing out RM2 took their strength financially. Preorders in 2017, released in 2020, and all they could do since is release a keyboard cover. The software is really restricted, updates abysmal, stillnbugs left. Most things come from the small diehard fanbase. Their edge is that somehow nobody really attempted to create a true competitor - there are epaper tablets with pens, but not with this quality or services. The industry kind of hates epaper. Pebble - a company that had much better relation to its community, and a larger portfolio of products - couldn't make it, I don't see how they could.
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