15 ms·

ReMarkable MicroSD (2019)

368 points by devnonymous 6y ago

davidhyde 6y ago
I'd like to buy their v2.0 model but I was turned away by their up sell tactics. You want a pen that can also erase? - Of course you do and it doesn't cost them anything extra. Another 50 bucks please (marked down from 100 so you think its a deal). The default cover it comes with is comically inadequate because a quarter of the device sticks out. Want a cover that covers the entire screen? 80 bucks please.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  I personally felt pretty happy to pay them more for more functionality. It didn’t feel like upselling to me at all, it felt more like they are a “little guy” doing limited manufacturing of a tablet in a crowded market, and they have to be really careful about not missing monetization opportunities that a lot of their target customers (people for whom the overall price of the device and all the add ons is pretty trivial) would be fine with. It’s not like they are generating some insane profit margin on these things.
  - mosselman 6y ago
    You can get a normal stylus for $0.36 on aliexpress. I know these ReMarkable are probably not the same, but they aren't $99.64 or $49.64 more complex than a stylus from aliexpress. So the margin is probably pretty big. Which is OK, you don' t have the right to use a cheap ReMarkable product or something, but lets not pretend they are doing people any favours by 'letting' them buy their things. They are a company that wants to make a profit, good for them.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      It's a Wacom stylus with nib detection on both ends. Not $0.36.
      - mosselman 6y ago
        I never said that it is. Did you only read the first line of what I wrote?
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      $49 seems like a perfectly low price for a well designed stylus for a limited manufactured tablet. I don’t see any sense in which it’s useful or fair to compare that with $0.36 commodity stylus mass manufactured for commodity tablets.
      - tedunangst 6y ago
        It's $49 until you lose it, then it transforms into a $99 stylus.
      - mosselman 6y ago
        I was just highlighting that ReMarkable isn’t a charity and they don’t need to be.
    - ascar 6y ago
      The regular stylus comes for free in the current presale. The eraser stylus is additional 40€, requires additional sensors and required additional R&D. Cost of a product is in the end a function of manufacturing, distribution, expected number of sales and R&D cost with some profit at the end. Considering an Apple stylus retails for 90€, Samsung S Pen for 40€ and Wacom Bamboo stylus for 50€ the current 40€ extra seem absolutely fair for me in a premium niche market.
      - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
        > required additional R&D Only because Remarkable retardly decided to not go with side buttons in order to preserve the "feel". If I wanted paper I'd use paper, the side button on the Lamy on my remarkable 1 is vastly superior to RM2 back eraser
        samatman 6y ago
        There are places on the internet where that particular slur is commonplace. HN is not among them. Please don't.
    - tonyhb 6y ago
      Maybe you can go with the iPad Pro and pay $129 for the "Apple Pencil": https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/ https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/. You don't have to buy the $49 Remarkable eraser stylus. You could also get the free one that comes with it.
      - mosselman 6y ago
        Did I offend you when I noted that they make a profit on the stylus? Your comment looks very defensive.
        tonyhb 6y ago
        No, you didn't, apologies if it came off that way :) I do find it uh... "remarkable" that people are offended at a $49 upsell from a small company, given $2 trillion + companies do this all of the time at a higher price. That's all I was getting at.
irjustin 6y ago
This is super cool. Love the hacking mentality. I fantasize about owning one of these. Used to go into meetings where a key member had one and would take notes on it. To me, he looked so damn cool. But alas, it's not for me - I tried moleskins and other things, but I always get frustrated at writing and I never looked back at any notes I took.
- tweedledee 6y ago
  For me it’s the process of writing them that is important. I normally throw out my notes not long after writing them.
  - pidg 6y ago
    I believe there is evidence that the action of writing by hand forms memories more strongly. Since all my meetings are video calls now, I've reverted to writing notes, simply because I can't feign concentration on the call and type into a different window at the same time. I finish my days surrounded by scraps of paper to be typed up. Can't wait for my ReMarkable 2 to arrive.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I keep my notes in notebooks and never need to bother typing them up - with numbered pages, I can reference them from my notes file, and with my notes file split into dated sections, I can reference the other way too. And I look after my notebooks, so losing my paper notes isn't all that much more likely than losing my laptop, anyway. I used to try to take meeting notes electronically, with a laptop or an iPad or whatever. Paper turns out to just work a lot better, for me at least. It doesn't take me out of the flow of a discussion the way dealing with a computer does, I never have battery problems, and I think there's really something to the idea that the process of writing by hand helps fix memories in a way that typing doesn't. edit: I can also vouch for the value of fountain pens in making the process of writing pleasant in its own right. A well-designed pen requires only the pressure of its own weight under gravity to deposit ink reliably; much of learning how to write with such a pen is thus unlearning the forcible hand required to use more conventional writing instruments, with the very pleasant side effect of making finger aches and hand cramps largely a thing of the past. For the same reason, most people find their handwriting to improve as a result of the switch - without the need to ram the nib into the paper just to get a line at all, you find yourself more able to write neatly without having to overcontrol the way you do with a pencil, ballpoint, or even a rollerball. Developing a beautiful, personal hand is a pleasure all its own, and nothing else I've ever tried has helped me do that nearly as well as using a fountain pen has. And, with a little practice, taking notes quickly is easier than ever before, too - it's amazing how much of a difference it makes when your hand doesn't start to hurt after just a page or two! It's a practice I'm happy to recommend, and not at all difficult to start; a Pilot Metropolitan in medium or fine should run you somewhere between $12 and $20, with Pilot Namiki replacement cartridges usually about 50 cents each in packs of six or twelve, and almost any Moleskine-type notebook will do. That's where I started, and while I've since moved on to a system more tailored to my specific purposes, that's definitely the starting point I'd recommend as an inexpensive way to get a sense of fountain pens' strengths and weaknesses in general. As I think must be very evident by now, I'm happy to talk about this stuff! It's become a bit of a hobby in its own right for me, so if you have questions, feel free to hit me up and I'll do my best to give useful answers.
nudpiedo 6y ago
ReMarkable is one of the most exciting Linux eInk tablets out there. I am still waiting for my ReMarkable 2 preorder since it got with some covid delay, I hope it will be easy to develop for it since it does include a USB-C and an Accessory port.
- Waterfall 6y ago
  How many Linux eink tablets or tablets with Linux are out there? I'm not being sarcastic I don't know of any other ones unless you count Android as linux and I don't even know if there are any aside from the pine tablet and I dont think it's out yet either.
  - diffeomorphism 6y ago
    Aren't all kobo devices linux?
    - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
      Yes, I think they're all running some 2.6 version of the kernel. (or at least mine are.)
  - neolog 6y ago
    Onyx Boox
    - nicolimo86 6y ago
      I own an Onyx Boox Max Pro 13 inches. I was happy with it, until the battery died completely after 14 months and the device started freezing continuously.
      - jabirali 6y ago
        This is a bit concerning. I have a Max2 myself, and have been satisfied so far. But it cost a lot, and I don't use it that often, so I was hoping to get 5-6 years of use out of it for the device to be worth the investment... Did you get any free reparation or replacement?
smcleod 6y ago
This is awesome! I have a ReMarkable and really love it, mainly for taking it to meetings where I felt it was inapropriate to be stuck on a laptop infront of other people, it just feels more natural making notes on it as if I had paper and with the low latency it's great to write on. I haven't had issues with the internal storage not being enough - but if I do, this is really interesting and I hope the hacker community around ReMarkable stays vibrant as it's such an interesting device.
- secfirstmd 6y ago
  Yeh the ReMarkable is one of my all time favourite purchases. I've been there since the beginning and watched as they really refine their software. I do wish however the new version had a bigger hard drive option.
- rwmj 6y ago
  How is it better than taking a (paper) notebook and pen?
  - ninjin 6y ago
    In my experience, I am an academic and supervise numerous PhD/MSc students and interact with many different projects. With paper notes I always found it challenging to maintain a single line of notes for a specific topic (multiple notebooks? I would need 20 of them…). For the reMarkable I just have a virtual notebook for each project/student with a date at the top of each page as to when the meeting took place and it becomes trivial to keep track of. Not to mention that I can carry a whole library of research paper PDFs with annotations…
    - throwanem 6y ago
      Not that it'd scale to your rather impressive needs - but I've found numbering pages in my books, and maintaining an index, to work well for keeping track of multiple subject threads in a single series of notebooks. It can get a little complicated with references across multiple volumes, since unless you copy the entire index into each later volume, you have to check each book - but what I frequently find myself doing is referencing other volumes by page number in the actual content of notes, to simplify later lookups. That and knowing which volume contains which page numbers (I use a single type of notebook and they're 160 pages each, so e.g. page 210 is easily identified as being in volume 2) makes it pretty easy to keep track of the whole thread and retrieve whatever context I need at any given time. Granted, this gets a little more complicated when you work sometimes from home and sometimes at the office; unless you carry all your notebooks from place to place, you can find yourself unable to follow a reference. But it's pretty rare in my experience to need to look back more than one volume, and in any case I intend to be strongly remote-first for the rest of my career, with all the money and effort I've put into setting up a maximally productive workspace in my home office during COVID.
ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
Amazing work, I'm going to try and replicate it with mine. The ReMarkable has an amazing writing-feel and the software is just enough to fulfill its core function but it could be so so much more. Disappointingly the company doesn't want to open-source their code and isn't focused on the software side of their product so we're left to patch the binaries ourselves at a snail's pace. On the plus side it's given me an excuse to up my Ghidra skills. Another thing I've I've noticed is that the userbase is highly skilled, people on the subreddit and discord are constantly publishing hacks and patches and discussing customization options. It's a very cool community.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Pointer to the discord?
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    https://discord.gg/JSSGnFY https://discord.gg/JSSGnFY Also available in the sidebar of the subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/), in case the invite expires.
Waterfall 6y ago
This reminds me of the hacking community of the Amazon Kindle. The firmware developers said they could have blocked it out harder but didn't because they didn't want to cripple the device for hackers. Apparently the Kindles run awesome windows manager. I used to be into eink displays but the contrast ratio is too low and it looks too blurry for me so I went back to screens. Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain. Turns out it's the DPI or PPI, so essentially an iPad with retina is less eye strain. I use AMOLED to read since I read that the wavelengths of blue light also are bad.
- moonchild 6y ago
  > Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain This is tautological. Do you mean 'front lighting'?
  - Waterfall 6y ago
    Sorry it was late I'll check better next time
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Contrast varies a lot between devices. I haven't received my ReMarkable yet but it is a custom panel, supposedly better contrast than the average screen, and being fully matte probably helps.
  - Waterfall 6y ago
    The contrast is a problem of eink screens. There is not much besides grayscale. That is why even if it's 1080 it looks like crap compared to an LCD at 720.
- Nursie 6y ago
  It's not DPI or PPI for me, the lack of a backlight and the finish on eInk seems to be the thing. I'm not saying it's that way for everyone, but if I'm going to be reading for a while then my kindle paperwhite is much better for my eyes than any backlit screen I've used.
MayeulC 6y ago
I'm tempted to do just this, but I don't really need the extra capacity just yet. I might wait for a few people to perfect the technique. I hope there's going to be a write-up of the different attempts on the remarkable wiki [1] Since the remarkable has a micro USB port, does anyone know if it supports OTG devices? It's such an awesome device. 90% of its awesomeness comes from the fact that they respect the GPLv3 license and give you root access to it trough ssh out-of-the-box (random password and requires activating it). If I get enough time on my hands, I'm probably going to port postmarketOS on it. [1] https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start
- joezydeco 6y ago
  From looking at the board, it looks like it's mostly copied from the iMX6 reference design and Hobbitboard. The iMX supports an OTG port in it's stage 0 ROM for device recovery, and it can be lit up as a USB gadget. It's just a question if it's padded out on the PCB. Seems like there's a number of pogo pin pads near the edge of the board and it's probably in there somewhere.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    Yeah I actually used this years ago on a Sabre Lite clone that I bricked on my very first embedded Linux project.
- xaqfox 6y ago
  The story link may have been hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20200821083714/https://www.davisr.me/projects/remarkable-microsd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200821083714/https://www.davis...
- Evidlo 6y ago
  It does support OTG. e.g https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter
- notpublic 6y ago
  It does. You can connect USB flash drive for e.g. You have to ssh and manually mount the drive though. Unfortunately, the existing xochitl app doesn't seem to show additional mounts. However, you can write your own scripts/code to take advantage of it. The OS has udev and systemd support and it's very easy to cross compile code with arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc. I was able to build static binaries of packages with just the following option: ./configure --target=arm-linux-gnueabi --host=arm-linux-gnueabi --build=x86_64-linux CFLAGS="-static" make LDFLAGS="-static" You have low level access to buttons, framebuffer, touch events etc as well. You can do all kinds of interesting things with that.
heroin01 6y ago
> I have not yet determined what melts this glue, or how to “properly” take the back off. One trick is to heat the device to 60-70°C. You can use heated bed of a 3D printer.
rowanG077 6y ago
I saw the remarkable before and thought it was cool. But now that I know it runs Linux and we have full acces it's a must buy.
- bajsejohannes 6y ago
  One really cool thing about it is that you can ssh to it over USB. No setup or installation, just find the IP-address in on the tablet and connect.
Pyrodogg 6y ago
Still waiting for my Remarkable 2 to arrive (now sometime in October). So frustrating to keep getting so many ads for it.
- lxchase 6y ago
  In the same boat as well. I'm starting to think to file a chargeback as I gather they are using preorder money to fund advertising like a Ponzi Scheme.
  - hoistbypetard 6y ago
    Why would you need to file a chargeback? They say they'll give you a refund any time. Have you asked for one and been refused?
    - throwanem 6y ago
      If you haven't, there's not much point to filing a chargeback; that'll be grounds for the acquirer to reject it, and your issuer probably will tell you to ask for a refund first before they'll file.
- xondono 6y ago
  I’be been convinced to buy one since the first time I saw the ad. I’ve not made the purchase because I try to avoid backordering, specially for products over 100-200$
martopix 6y ago
Allow me a slight OT, I've just finished cleaning up a simple tool for syncing Zotero with your reMarkable and would love some feedback: https://github.com/martinosorb/zoteroRemarkable https://github.com/martinosorb/zoteroRemarkable Note that this is a fork of previous work from Oscar Morrison, no copyright infringement intended (I have contacted him).
castratikron 6y ago
Oh, man. I'm surprised that card works at all with that wiring. High speed single ended signaling does not do well off-board. Have you done any kind of integrity testing, like writing a GB to the disk and then reading the checksum? If anyone is looking to do this mod, at least consider using a shielded ribbon cable like so: https://www.amazon.com/LANMU-Extension-Flexible-Monoprice-Raspberry/dp/B01D9JIUU0 https://www.amazon.com/LANMU-Extension-Flexible-Monoprice-Ra...
- davisr 6y ago
  Hi, I'm the author of this hack---the card works at 50 MHz with no errors.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  SD cards typical aren't run on a very high speed bus. A couple of MHz is pretty typical and this sort of wiring is no problem at those speeds. Definitely no need for a shielded cable either.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    Was going to say, I’ve run the stuff with whatever bits of cat5 cable I had on my desk, they’re not that fussy.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      They're not that fussy at low speeds. You will have problems getting UHS cards to run at full speed.
- q3k 6y ago
  Data transfers in SD cards are CRC checked. In addition, the card will by default start in a 12.5MB/s mode at 3.3v, which is 25MHz per lane. That's not DC, but it's definitely slow enough to run on some pretty dodgy wiring. It will only switch to higher speed modes if requested, and if it actually works (falling back to lower speeds otherwise).
- 6y ago
lpcam33 6y ago
Regarding closing the case with glue, I have an iPod Classic 5Gen and there are a lot of mod's but I don't see one that change the case to be easily open. Remarkable don't apply to this because they are extremely thin but it should be a good feature to have in other devices.
vinniejames 6y ago
Are folks generally happy with the tablet? I just pre-ordered the new one!
- ericcholis 6y ago
  It seems that everybody who has the first one loves it. I also pre-ordered the new one, based on that fact alone.
- klauserc 6y ago
  I have a first-gen ReMarkable and I love it. I use it mostly to take notes in meetings and as a scratch pad. The small vertical separation between the surface and the screen and the replaceable tips make it feel _very_ close to writing on real paper. For PDFs, I found the first-gen processor to be too slow to be practical. I doubt this has improved much. The e-Ink screen can make flipping through past notes a bit of a pain. For reading/later reference, I prefer opening the notes on a real computer via the desktop app/cloud sync. I did not order the ReMarkable 2 because I felt the upgrades were not worth the price. While I would love to have an eraser tip and USB-C, it _is_ still a very expensive gadget.
- codpiece 6y ago
  Yes, I love it. I have tried numerous workflows to keep notes including Evernote, NValt, Devonthink, Bear, Agenda, Moleskine, paper... This beats them all. Yes, there are software quirks, some huge gaps in the system (cut and paste between notebooks), but it's always available with no friction.
- mennis16 6y ago
  I love mine, it is a great motivator for doing more reading in addition to helping keep my notes organized. Especially for reading academic papers, it is great to be able to easily annotate and then actually keep my annotations, which I haven't found any other good solution for. I also decided to preorder a 2 because the thing that breaks immersion for me the most currently is having to switch to eraser mode. I may still keep my 1 as well though, because as another commenter mentioned the biggest slow down is trying to flip back through notes on the device (even using the zoomed out view it can be quite slow with larger documents). I have been working through a few math textbooks and am actually looking forward to being able to have problems open on one tablet and the book on the other.
ezoe 6y ago
He did it for "without wearing out the internal eMMC". Does it wear out that fast?
- float4 6y ago
  I'd say it's very unlikely. In super cheap eMMC the controller usually has the largest chance of dying early, but a proper 8GB eMMC modules really isn't that expensive, so I don't think they saved money there. If the controller doesn't die, then the next reliability issue for your eMMC module is probably NAND wear. The ReMarkable has an 8GB eMMC module. Such a module can probably manage at least 1TB TBW (Total Bytes Written), and you won't reach that too quickly: the OS will eat a significant chunk of that 1TB, but apart from that all you do on this device is reading, writing and drawing. Those tasks do not require many program/erase cycles on the NAND at all, so I'd say it would take many years before you've worn out the NAND blocks.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    > In super cheap eMMC the controller usually has the largest chance of dying early Why is that? One would assume the NAND was the most likely point of failure.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      On SD Cards at least, I've seen the software bugs in the FTL lose track of sectors more often when I've had the tooling to tell the difference. There's some terrible code in those things.
      - cptskippy 6y ago
        I had heard that SD cards were bad but I was under the impression eMMC was in a completely different class.
achn 6y ago
Can the remarkable tablet (or 2nd gen) be used as a epaper monitor? I would love to be able to code on an epaper screen, even if only in a simple text editor with minimal visual change/animation.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  I would pay a silly sum of money for an eInk laptop so I can code outside in the sun. We get so little sun here in the UK that my side project productivity plummets in good weather because I was to sit out and enjoy it. It doesn’t need to have a high refresh rate, it just has to be able to display text and browser the internet in some semblance of reasonable.
  - feteru 6y ago
    What do you think is the lowest acceptable refresh rate to make typing feel smooth? If you're a 60wpm typer, that'd be 60hz to display every character as you type it, might feel disjointed otherwise.
    - IceyEC 6y ago
      60 wpm == 1 hz
      - sangnoir 6y ago
        1 hz per word - but people type a character at a time. A word per second isn't great.
    - simonbarker87 6y ago
      I guess the letter rate is more important with this than the word rate, I would say 0.5 seconds would be the low end of reasonable (so 2 hz), if it could get to maybe 5-10hz that would be super
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      This screen is a different kind than you are used to. The pixels actually wear out after a remarkably small number of changes (~10k). So "60Hz" doesn't mean much. It can update the small number of pixels you actually want changed pretty quickly, but it takes a noticeable fraction of a second. The key is changing only those and leaving all the rest the hell alone. Running Gnome on it is possible. But you do not want to.
eigenvalue 6y ago
I preordered the Remarkable 2 and I’m excited to get it. I’m a bit surprised by everyone here talking about how they use it for note taking, because my entire purpose for getting one is to read and annotate pdf files with it. Does it do a good job for this compared to an iPad (which I use currently with iAnnotate)? Someone mentioned that the processor is too slow to render pdf pages quickly enough. Is this true only for high resolution rasterized PDFs or also for native vectorized ones? Hopefully the new version has a faster chip.
- johnday 6y ago
  In the case of ReMarkable 1, there are almost no issues with vectorised PDFs - when changing pages the screen update is usually the limiting factor, and that's relatively quick. For rasters, though, it does take a while to render out (>1 second for particularly complex pages). I think this is mostly a software limitation - some time is given over to drawing and saving the small thumbnail.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Increasingly stoked I put in my order for a ReMarkable 2 (November batch), it'll be my first such device.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I'm waiting for v3. Version 3 is always the best version of anything ;)
Teknoman117 6y ago
I'd love it if someone managed to reverse engineer the Remarkable such that we could run our own Linux distro on it with access to all the hardware. The Remarkable is an awesome device, but it's so very limited by the software. It's extremely difficult to use it in a enterprise scenario due to lack of at rest encryption (on device) and no (official) private cloud options.
cdbattags 6y ago
ReMarkable should hire this person and make a "v2.1".
guyzero 6y ago
Having cracked e-ink displays by looking at them wrong, this person is a lot braver than I am.

368 points by devnonymous 6y ago

I'd like to buy their v2.0 model but I was turned away by their up sell tactics. You want a pen that can also erase? - Of course you do and it doesn't cost them anything extra. Another 50 bucks please (marked down from 100 so you think its a deal). The default cover it comes with is comically inadequate because a quarter of the device sticks out. Want a cover that covers the entire screen? 80 bucks please.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I personally felt pretty happy to pay them more for more functionality. It didn’t feel like upselling to me at all, it felt more like they are a “little guy” doing limited manufacturing of a tablet in a crowded market, and they have to be really careful about not missing monetization opportunities that a lot of their target customers (people for whom the overall price of the device and all the add ons is pretty trivial) would be fine with. It’s not like they are generating some insane profit margin on these things.
- mosselman 6y ago
  You can get a normal stylus for $0.36 on aliexpress. I know these ReMarkable are probably not the same, but they aren't $99.64 or $49.64 more complex than a stylus from aliexpress. So the margin is probably pretty big. Which is OK, you don' t have the right to use a cheap ReMarkable product or something, but lets not pretend they are doing people any favours by 'letting' them buy their things. They are a company that wants to make a profit, good for them.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    It's a Wacom stylus with nib detection on both ends. Not $0.36.
    - mosselman 6y ago
      I never said that it is. Did you only read the first line of what I wrote?
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    $49 seems like a perfectly low price for a well designed stylus for a limited manufactured tablet. I don’t see any sense in which it’s useful or fair to compare that with $0.36 commodity stylus mass manufactured for commodity tablets.
    - tedunangst 6y ago
      It's $49 until you lose it, then it transforms into a $99 stylus.
    - mosselman 6y ago
      I was just highlighting that ReMarkable isn’t a charity and they don’t need to be.
  - ascar 6y ago
    The regular stylus comes for free in the current presale. The eraser stylus is additional 40€, requires additional sensors and required additional R&D. Cost of a product is in the end a function of manufacturing, distribution, expected number of sales and R&D cost with some profit at the end. Considering an Apple stylus retails for 90€, Samsung S Pen for 40€ and Wacom Bamboo stylus for 50€ the current 40€ extra seem absolutely fair for me in a premium niche market.
    - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
      > required additional R&D Only because Remarkable retardly decided to not go with side buttons in order to preserve the "feel". If I wanted paper I'd use paper, the side button on the Lamy on my remarkable 1 is vastly superior to RM2 back eraser
      - samatman 6y ago
        There are places on the internet where that particular slur is commonplace. HN is not among them. Please don't.
  - tonyhb 6y ago
    Maybe you can go with the iPad Pro and pay $129 for the "Apple Pencil": https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/ https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/. You don't have to buy the $49 Remarkable eraser stylus. You could also get the free one that comes with it.
    - mosselman 6y ago
      Did I offend you when I noted that they make a profit on the stylus? Your comment looks very defensive.
      - tonyhb 6y ago
        No, you didn't, apologies if it came off that way :) I do find it uh... "remarkable" that people are offended at a $49 upsell from a small company, given $2 trillion + companies do this all of the time at a higher price. That's all I was getting at.

irjustin 6y ago

This is super cool. Love the hacking mentality. I fantasize about owning one of these. Used to go into meetings where a key member had one and would take notes on it. To me, he looked so damn cool. But alas, it's not for me - I tried moleskins and other things, but I always get frustrated at writing and I never looked back at any notes I took.

tweedledee 6y ago
For me it’s the process of writing them that is important. I normally throw out my notes not long after writing them.
- pidg 6y ago
  I believe there is evidence that the action of writing by hand forms memories more strongly. Since all my meetings are video calls now, I've reverted to writing notes, simply because I can't feign concentration on the call and type into a different window at the same time. I finish my days surrounded by scraps of paper to be typed up. Can't wait for my ReMarkable 2 to arrive.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I keep my notes in notebooks and never need to bother typing them up - with numbered pages, I can reference them from my notes file, and with my notes file split into dated sections, I can reference the other way too. And I look after my notebooks, so losing my paper notes isn't all that much more likely than losing my laptop, anyway. I used to try to take meeting notes electronically, with a laptop or an iPad or whatever. Paper turns out to just work a lot better, for me at least. It doesn't take me out of the flow of a discussion the way dealing with a computer does, I never have battery problems, and I think there's really something to the idea that the process of writing by hand helps fix memories in a way that typing doesn't. edit: I can also vouch for the value of fountain pens in making the process of writing pleasant in its own right. A well-designed pen requires only the pressure of its own weight under gravity to deposit ink reliably; much of learning how to write with such a pen is thus unlearning the forcible hand required to use more conventional writing instruments, with the very pleasant side effect of making finger aches and hand cramps largely a thing of the past. For the same reason, most people find their handwriting to improve as a result of the switch - without the need to ram the nib into the paper just to get a line at all, you find yourself more able to write neatly without having to overcontrol the way you do with a pencil, ballpoint, or even a rollerball. Developing a beautiful, personal hand is a pleasure all its own, and nothing else I've ever tried has helped me do that nearly as well as using a fountain pen has. And, with a little practice, taking notes quickly is easier than ever before, too - it's amazing how much of a difference it makes when your hand doesn't start to hurt after just a page or two! It's a practice I'm happy to recommend, and not at all difficult to start; a Pilot Metropolitan in medium or fine should run you somewhere between $12 and $20, with Pilot Namiki replacement cartridges usually about 50 cents each in packs of six or twelve, and almost any Moleskine-type notebook will do. That's where I started, and while I've since moved on to a system more tailored to my specific purposes, that's definitely the starting point I'd recommend as an inexpensive way to get a sense of fountain pens' strengths and weaknesses in general. As I think must be very evident by now, I'm happy to talk about this stuff! It's become a bit of a hobby in its own right for me, so if you have questions, feel free to hit me up and I'll do my best to give useful answers.

nudpiedo 6y ago

ReMarkable is one of the most exciting Linux eInk tablets out there. I am still waiting for my ReMarkable 2 preorder since it got with some covid delay, I hope it will be easy to develop for it since it does include a USB-C and an Accessory port.

Waterfall 6y ago
How many Linux eink tablets or tablets with Linux are out there? I'm not being sarcastic I don't know of any other ones unless you count Android as linux and I don't even know if there are any aside from the pine tablet and I dont think it's out yet either.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Aren't all kobo devices linux?
  - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
    Yes, I think they're all running some 2.6 version of the kernel. (or at least mine are.)
- neolog 6y ago
  Onyx Boox
  - nicolimo86 6y ago
    I own an Onyx Boox Max Pro 13 inches. I was happy with it, until the battery died completely after 14 months and the device started freezing continuously.
    - jabirali 6y ago
      This is a bit concerning. I have a Max2 myself, and have been satisfied so far. But it cost a lot, and I don't use it that often, so I was hoping to get 5-6 years of use out of it for the device to be worth the investment... Did you get any free reparation or replacement?

smcleod 6y ago

This is awesome! I have a ReMarkable and really love it, mainly for taking it to meetings where I felt it was inapropriate to be stuck on a laptop infront of other people, it just feels more natural making notes on it as if I had paper and with the low latency it's great to write on. I haven't had issues with the internal storage not being enough - but if I do, this is really interesting and I hope the hacker community around ReMarkable stays vibrant as it's such an interesting device.

secfirstmd 6y ago
Yeh the ReMarkable is one of my all time favourite purchases. I've been there since the beginning and watched as they really refine their software. I do wish however the new version had a bigger hard drive option.
rwmj 6y ago
How is it better than taking a (paper) notebook and pen?
- ninjin 6y ago
  In my experience, I am an academic and supervise numerous PhD/MSc students and interact with many different projects. With paper notes I always found it challenging to maintain a single line of notes for a specific topic (multiple notebooks? I would need 20 of them…). For the reMarkable I just have a virtual notebook for each project/student with a date at the top of each page as to when the meeting took place and it becomes trivial to keep track of. Not to mention that I can carry a whole library of research paper PDFs with annotations…
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Not that it'd scale to your rather impressive needs - but I've found numbering pages in my books, and maintaining an index, to work well for keeping track of multiple subject threads in a single series of notebooks. It can get a little complicated with references across multiple volumes, since unless you copy the entire index into each later volume, you have to check each book - but what I frequently find myself doing is referencing other volumes by page number in the actual content of notes, to simplify later lookups. That and knowing which volume contains which page numbers (I use a single type of notebook and they're 160 pages each, so e.g. page 210 is easily identified as being in volume 2) makes it pretty easy to keep track of the whole thread and retrieve whatever context I need at any given time. Granted, this gets a little more complicated when you work sometimes from home and sometimes at the office; unless you carry all your notebooks from place to place, you can find yourself unable to follow a reference. But it's pretty rare in my experience to need to look back more than one volume, and in any case I intend to be strongly remote-first for the rest of my career, with all the money and effort I've put into setting up a maximally productive workspace in my home office during COVID.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago

Amazing work, I'm going to try and replicate it with mine. The ReMarkable has an amazing writing-feel and the software is just enough to fulfill its core function but it could be so so much more. Disappointingly the company doesn't want to open-source their code and isn't focused on the software side of their product so we're left to patch the binaries ourselves at a snail's pace. On the plus side it's given me an excuse to up my Ghidra skills. Another thing I've I've noticed is that the userbase is highly skilled, people on the subreddit and discord are constantly publishing hacks and patches and discussing customization options. It's a very cool community.

jonahbenton 6y ago
Pointer to the discord?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  https://discord.gg/JSSGnFY https://discord.gg/JSSGnFY Also available in the sidebar of the subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/), in case the invite expires.

Waterfall 6y ago

This reminds me of the hacking community of the Amazon Kindle. The firmware developers said they could have blocked it out harder but didn't because they didn't want to cripple the device for hackers. Apparently the Kindles run awesome windows manager. I used to be into eink displays but the contrast ratio is too low and it looks too blurry for me so I went back to screens. Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain. Turns out it's the DPI or PPI, so essentially an iPad with retina is less eye strain. I use AMOLED to read since I read that the wavelengths of blue light also are bad.

moonchild 6y ago
> Eye strain was the first reason they said eink was good for eye strain This is tautological. Do you mean 'front lighting'?
- Waterfall 6y ago
  Sorry it was late I'll check better next time
ricardobeat 6y ago
Contrast varies a lot between devices. I haven't received my ReMarkable yet but it is a custom panel, supposedly better contrast than the average screen, and being fully matte probably helps.
- Waterfall 6y ago
  The contrast is a problem of eink screens. There is not much besides grayscale. That is why even if it's 1080 it looks like crap compared to an LCD at 720.
Nursie 6y ago
It's not DPI or PPI for me, the lack of a backlight and the finish on eInk seems to be the thing. I'm not saying it's that way for everyone, but if I'm going to be reading for a while then my kindle paperwhite is much better for my eyes than any backlit screen I've used.

MayeulC 6y ago

I'm tempted to do just this, but I don't really need the extra capacity just yet. I might wait for a few people to perfect the technique. I hope there's going to be a write-up of the different attempts on the remarkable wiki [1] Since the remarkable has a micro USB port, does anyone know if it supports OTG devices? It's such an awesome device. 90% of its awesomeness comes from the fact that they respect the GPLv3 license and give you root access to it trough ssh out-of-the-box (random password and requires activating it). If I get enough time on my hands, I'm probably going to port postmarketOS on it. [1] https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start

joezydeco 6y ago
From looking at the board, it looks like it's mostly copied from the iMX6 reference design and Hobbitboard. The iMX supports an OTG port in it's stage 0 ROM for device recovery, and it can be lit up as a USB gadget. It's just a question if it's padded out on the PCB. Seems like there's a number of pogo pin pads near the edge of the board and it's probably in there somewhere.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Yeah I actually used this years ago on a Sabre Lite clone that I bricked on my very first embedded Linux project.
xaqfox 6y ago
The story link may have been hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20200821083714/https://www.davisr.me/projects/remarkable-microsd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200821083714/https://www.davis...
Evidlo 6y ago
It does support OTG. e.g https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter
notpublic 6y ago
It does. You can connect USB flash drive for e.g. You have to ssh and manually mount the drive though. Unfortunately, the existing xochitl app doesn't seem to show additional mounts. However, you can write your own scripts/code to take advantage of it. The OS has udev and systemd support and it's very easy to cross compile code with arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc. I was able to build static binaries of packages with just the following option: ./configure --target=arm-linux-gnueabi --host=arm-linux-gnueabi --build=x86_64-linux CFLAGS="-static" make LDFLAGS="-static" You have low level access to buttons, framebuffer, touch events etc as well. You can do all kinds of interesting things with that.

heroin01 6y ago

> I have not yet determined what melts this glue, or how to “properly” take the back off. One trick is to heat the device to 60-70°C. You can use heated bed of a 3D printer.

rowanG077 6y ago

I saw the remarkable before and thought it was cool. But now that I know it runs Linux and we have full acces it's a must buy.

bajsejohannes 6y ago
One really cool thing about it is that you can ssh to it over USB. No setup or installation, just find the IP-address in on the tablet and connect.

Pyrodogg 6y ago

Still waiting for my Remarkable 2 to arrive (now sometime in October). So frustrating to keep getting so many ads for it.

lxchase 6y ago
In the same boat as well. I'm starting to think to file a chargeback as I gather they are using preorder money to fund advertising like a Ponzi Scheme.
- hoistbypetard 6y ago
  Why would you need to file a chargeback? They say they'll give you a refund any time. Have you asked for one and been refused?
  - throwanem 6y ago
    If you haven't, there's not much point to filing a chargeback; that'll be grounds for the acquirer to reject it, and your issuer probably will tell you to ask for a refund first before they'll file.
xondono 6y ago
I’be been convinced to buy one since the first time I saw the ad. I’ve not made the purchase because I try to avoid backordering, specially for products over 100-200$

martopix 6y ago

Allow me a slight OT, I've just finished cleaning up a simple tool for syncing Zotero with your reMarkable and would love some feedback: https://github.com/martinosorb/zoteroRemarkable https://github.com/martinosorb/zoteroRemarkable Note that this is a fork of previous work from Oscar Morrison, no copyright infringement intended (I have contacted him).

castratikron 6y ago

Oh, man. I'm surprised that card works at all with that wiring. High speed single ended signaling does not do well off-board. Have you done any kind of integrity testing, like writing a GB to the disk and then reading the checksum? If anyone is looking to do this mod, at least consider using a shielded ribbon cable like so: https://www.amazon.com/LANMU-Extension-Flexible-Monoprice-Raspberry/dp/B01D9JIUU0 https://www.amazon.com/LANMU-Extension-Flexible-Monoprice-Ra...

davisr 6y ago
Hi, I'm the author of this hack---the card works at 50 MHz with no errors.
reportingsjr 6y ago
SD cards typical aren't run on a very high speed bus. A couple of MHz is pretty typical and this sort of wiring is no problem at those speeds. Definitely no need for a shielded cable either.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  Was going to say, I’ve run the stuff with whatever bits of cat5 cable I had on my desk, they’re not that fussy.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    They're not that fussy at low speeds. You will have problems getting UHS cards to run at full speed.
q3k 6y ago
Data transfers in SD cards are CRC checked. In addition, the card will by default start in a 12.5MB/s mode at 3.3v, which is 25MHz per lane. That's not DC, but it's definitely slow enough to run on some pretty dodgy wiring. It will only switch to higher speed modes if requested, and if it actually works (falling back to lower speeds otherwise).
6y ago

lpcam33 6y ago

Regarding closing the case with glue, I have an iPod Classic 5Gen and there are a lot of mod's but I don't see one that change the case to be easily open. Remarkable don't apply to this because they are extremely thin but it should be a good feature to have in other devices.

vinniejames 6y ago

Are folks generally happy with the tablet? I just pre-ordered the new one!

ericcholis 6y ago
It seems that everybody who has the first one loves it. I also pre-ordered the new one, based on that fact alone.
klauserc 6y ago
I have a first-gen ReMarkable and I love it. I use it mostly to take notes in meetings and as a scratch pad. The small vertical separation between the surface and the screen and the replaceable tips make it feel _very_ close to writing on real paper. For PDFs, I found the first-gen processor to be too slow to be practical. I doubt this has improved much. The e-Ink screen can make flipping through past notes a bit of a pain. For reading/later reference, I prefer opening the notes on a real computer via the desktop app/cloud sync. I did not order the ReMarkable 2 because I felt the upgrades were not worth the price. While I would love to have an eraser tip and USB-C, it _is_ still a very expensive gadget.
codpiece 6y ago
Yes, I love it. I have tried numerous workflows to keep notes including Evernote, NValt, Devonthink, Bear, Agenda, Moleskine, paper... This beats them all. Yes, there are software quirks, some huge gaps in the system (cut and paste between notebooks), but it's always available with no friction.
mennis16 6y ago
I love mine, it is a great motivator for doing more reading in addition to helping keep my notes organized. Especially for reading academic papers, it is great to be able to easily annotate and then actually keep my annotations, which I haven't found any other good solution for. I also decided to preorder a 2 because the thing that breaks immersion for me the most currently is having to switch to eraser mode. I may still keep my 1 as well though, because as another commenter mentioned the biggest slow down is trying to flip back through notes on the device (even using the zoomed out view it can be quite slow with larger documents). I have been working through a few math textbooks and am actually looking forward to being able to have problems open on one tablet and the book on the other.

ezoe 6y ago

He did it for "without wearing out the internal eMMC". Does it wear out that fast?

float4 6y ago
I'd say it's very unlikely. In super cheap eMMC the controller usually has the largest chance of dying early, but a proper 8GB eMMC modules really isn't that expensive, so I don't think they saved money there. If the controller doesn't die, then the next reliability issue for your eMMC module is probably NAND wear. The ReMarkable has an 8GB eMMC module. Such a module can probably manage at least 1TB TBW (Total Bytes Written), and you won't reach that too quickly: the OS will eat a significant chunk of that 1TB, but apart from that all you do on this device is reading, writing and drawing. Those tasks do not require many program/erase cycles on the NAND at all, so I'd say it would take many years before you've worn out the NAND blocks.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  > In super cheap eMMC the controller usually has the largest chance of dying early Why is that? One would assume the NAND was the most likely point of failure.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    On SD Cards at least, I've seen the software bugs in the FTL lose track of sectors more often when I've had the tooling to tell the difference. There's some terrible code in those things.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      I had heard that SD cards were bad but I was under the impression eMMC was in a completely different class.

achn 6y ago

Can the remarkable tablet (or 2nd gen) be used as a epaper monitor? I would love to be able to code on an epaper screen, even if only in a simple text editor with minimal visual change/animation.

simonbarker87 6y ago
I would pay a silly sum of money for an eInk laptop so I can code outside in the sun. We get so little sun here in the UK that my side project productivity plummets in good weather because I was to sit out and enjoy it. It doesn’t need to have a high refresh rate, it just has to be able to display text and browser the internet in some semblance of reasonable.
- feteru 6y ago
  What do you think is the lowest acceptable refresh rate to make typing feel smooth? If you're a 60wpm typer, that'd be 60hz to display every character as you type it, might feel disjointed otherwise.
  - IceyEC 6y ago
    60 wpm == 1 hz
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      1 hz per word - but people type a character at a time. A word per second isn't great.
  - simonbarker87 6y ago
    I guess the letter rate is more important with this than the word rate, I would say 0.5 seconds would be the low end of reasonable (so 2 hz), if it could get to maybe 5-10hz that would be super
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    This screen is a different kind than you are used to. The pixels actually wear out after a remarkably small number of changes (~10k). So "60Hz" doesn't mean much. It can update the small number of pixels you actually want changed pretty quickly, but it takes a noticeable fraction of a second. The key is changing only those and leaving all the rest the hell alone. Running Gnome on it is possible. But you do not want to.

eigenvalue 6y ago

I preordered the Remarkable 2 and I’m excited to get it. I’m a bit surprised by everyone here talking about how they use it for note taking, because my entire purpose for getting one is to read and annotate pdf files with it. Does it do a good job for this compared to an iPad (which I use currently with iAnnotate)? Someone mentioned that the processor is too slow to render pdf pages quickly enough. Is this true only for high resolution rasterized PDFs or also for native vectorized ones? Hopefully the new version has a faster chip.

johnday 6y ago
In the case of ReMarkable 1, there are almost no issues with vectorised PDFs - when changing pages the screen update is usually the limiting factor, and that's relatively quick. For rasters, though, it does take a while to render out (>1 second for particularly complex pages). I think this is mostly a software limitation - some time is given over to drawing and saving the small thumbnail.

chrisweekly 6y ago

Increasingly stoked I put in my order for a ReMarkable 2 (November batch), it'll be my first such device.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I'm waiting for v3. Version 3 is always the best version of anything ;)

Teknoman117 6y ago

I'd love it if someone managed to reverse engineer the Remarkable such that we could run our own Linux distro on it with access to all the hardware. The Remarkable is an awesome device, but it's so very limited by the software. It's extremely difficult to use it in a enterprise scenario due to lack of at rest encryption (on device) and no (official) private cloud options.

cdbattags 6y ago

ReMarkable should hire this person and make a "v2.1".

guyzero 6y ago

Having cracked e-ink displays by looking at them wrong, this person is a lot braver than I am.