This is pretty refreshing to read. "Its just linux", seems to ship with SSH/root terminal enabled (over USB at least, with a simple way to enable networked access), built in webserver, just uses systemd for service control, etc.
Maybe other tablets are like that too, to be honest I'm too poor to swing the 700-1000$ for what I can cover with an paper note pad (with the bonus of being able to comfortably sit my coffee cup on it, use any pen or pencil, rip pages out, drop it, forget it somewhere, etc etc) to buy one but at least it seems like a product I would support.
> Maybe other tablets are like that too, to be honest I'm too poor to swing the 700-1000$ for what I can cover with an paper note pad (with the bonus of being able to comfortably sit my coffee cup on it, use any pen or pencil, rip pages out, drop it, forget it somewhere, etc etc) to buy one but at least it seems like a product I would support.
I have good news: they (RM2s) are often available on ebay for much less. People buy them thinking they're getting something like an android tablet, but they do nothing out of the box apart from showing docs and taking notes. Sometimes they're returned immediately for a full refund, but often they sit in a drawer, untouched, till they get offloaded on ebay for - comparatively - peanuts, letting us scoop them up and breathe new life into them (koreader rocks, to start with).
I have a Kobo that was kept unused in a similar state for a few years until I decide to build an SDK platform to develop and deploy apps on it. My Kobo does not support apps on its Linux platform.
I have been using it to read HN, as an RSS reader over my news and blog sources, generate audiobooks on topics I want to understand with ElevenLabs, Exa and OpenAI and listen via connecting its bluetooth to my speakers and even as a remote Claude Code & Codex approval sidekick.
It is amazing that a $100 device with a single core and 512mb RAM can do so much and run for so long.
Manually updating a config file to enable the web server was a wholly unnecessary step as that's just a toggle in the "Storage" section of settings.
reMarkable software has its faults, but I keep coming back to them for the best-in-class hardware, developer-friendly platform, which itself spawned an active developer community. Could it be an easier platform to develop on? Sure. But that hasn't stopped a huge number of supported mods being made available
This is the achilles heel of modern tech. Devices are just so brittle and if it is not online 24/7 on returning back online, you need to perform incantations to get things working.
Long shell life is a taboo in the tech world where 5 years is a long time.
Yeah it's kind of comical the framing is that a device needs to be "revived" after four years. As SWEs we should probably all be a bit embarrassed for our trade, even in the alleged golden era of LLM induced productivity.
I have all sorts of offline digital&analog mechanical/optical devices which just work decades and decades later. The weak point in any of my old tech is when theres a software component that needs to be reverse engineered and ported across multiple generations of CPU architecture / OS / API deprecations.
I have 60 year old records, 35 year old CDs, 25 year old minidiscs that all still work fine. Properly developed film negatives are still fine decades later.
Despite all the warnings about media impermanence and lifespans, it's always the software that screws it up first. I've lost more content from digital / streaming services because it simply vanishes than because a piece of physical media failed.
That was my initial reaction as well, when I first found the device not being able to update. But look what was the saving grace: SSH/USB/HTTP/Unix with root access, instead of closed systems, hardware that you own 100%.
As software is increasingly "solved" by AI I think this is what will become most important
No, this device was only discontinued this year, you can still buy accessories and it still receives software updates.
It just turns out their software has flaws that break the update process after a few years of sitting unused. Not great, but luckily there are workarounds, as this article walks you through.
Where is is obsolete? It's still receiving software updates and likely to for at least 3-4 years. Even after that it's not going to magically brick itself
LOL - agreed. I was a bit shocked by the title being the type that gets bonded with my devices. I still use my Windows laptop from 2017 and my M1 Macbook Pro from 2021 daily. Additionally, my Kindles are from 2010.
Really sad the official lack of proper support for using it as a general purpose device for the ones that would like time because otherwise the hardware is really great.
I like mine very much except the limitation that I can't do too much with it.
What exactly is a "general purpose device"? An eInk tablet is pretty far away from being "general purpose" as far as I can tell. Should I buy a Ford Ranger and demand that the company makes it easy to convert it to a lawn mover?
Examples: it sucks as an ereader, even though the hardware is super capable of it. It doesn’t have a built-in dictionary to look up words or check spelling. You can’t make links between documents or to different pages in the current document.
Their hardware is top notch, but I found the software to be so hamstrung that I returned mine after a few weeks. Basically, if you want to have exactly a physical paper notebook experience but with a computer, it’s great. If you’d like to transcend the limitations of a paper notebook and take advantage of the nice hardware to organize your work, or do literally anything but write or draw, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
I’ve heard this excuse for it plenty of times, and it rings hollow and/or Stockholm syndrome. People (rightfully) made fun of Apple for not including a calculator on iPadOS for the longest time. Imagine Apple claiming “we never advertised it as a calculator!”, which is technically true, but clearly silly because it’s an obvious use case that everyday users would want.
Well, same here: a Remarkable tablet is nearly identical to a Kobo or Kindle in form factor and basic capabilities. It even includes an ereader app. But the app, frankly, sucks. They could swapped in KOreader and called it a day. But instead of that, they — or rather, their supporters — give the laughable excuse that “it’s not an ereader”. Well, an iPad’s also not a calculator, and yet…
If your car has four wheels, room to walk around inside, and built in refrigerators that are mounted upside down for some reason, maybe the factory would say that they didn’t sell you an ice cream truck, but everyone else looking at it is going to wonder why they didn’t make it possible to stock popsicles while they were at it.
Similar in form factor and basic capabilities, sure. But. And it's a big one. The reMarkable tablets are aimed for content creation rather than consumption. Nobody realistically buys a reMarkable device when Kindles, Kobos, etc. all perform that task much better with all the connected ebook stores, whatever DRM keeps the publishers and authors happy, etc. etc. That's just not reMarkable's core business and likely never will be.
I'm not sure what the "ereader app" is that you refer to. reMarkables come with exactly one app "xochitl" that handles all user interaction. Sure, they let you access PDFs to annotate - but again the primary use case isn't to read them. ePub files are consciously converted into PDFs to support that premise.
KOreader, whilst an excellent reading app, doesn't support annotations. So it's not obvious why reMarkable would consider that an enhancement given the primary device purpose.
My car doesn't have space to walk around, nor refrigerators. That's why I bought it. Same with reMarkable devices. I buy and use them for the content creation functionality. I have a Kindle for the times when I want to swap to "consumer mode"
Well, nonetheless, those missing features and a thousand other papercuts led me to send it back and upgrade to a Supernote. It’s not perfect, but hasn’t deliberately kneecapped itself with some purity vision that just makes it frustrating to use. And honestly, I’d rather carry a Kobo and a paper notebook than a Kobo and a digital notebook that could’ve been an ereader, too, except “LOL we don’t make ereaders”.
I don’t use a remarkable but use an ipad and stylus for note taking a lot, so can totally get why people like remarkable even though I what I do is better for me[1]. The reasons for me:
1) I had a ton of paper notes, looking back, curating, finding old things etc is really hard.
2) An electronic device gives you the ability to cut and paste, move things around on the page, resize stuff, drop in screenshots (so I often screenshot a page of something I’m reading, drop it into a note and annotate it or make my notes about it all around the original) and (best of all) infinite erase with no skank left behind on the page and no surrounding myself with tiny little bits of eraser to clean up.
3) I have all my notes with me on my device even ones I made years ago vs in my study I have box folders and notebooks full of notes filling cabinet after cabinet, I couldn’t possibly carry all that around with me.
1 and 3 are nice, 2 is the killer app. Once I made the switch I find it painfully limiting to go back to having to make notes on paper.
[1] My system in case people are interested is Notability and a paperlike screen protector. It is fantastic. All notes back up automatically as pdfs in box (which I then copy to my linux laptop) and I can search them using AI just fine even though I’m writing equations and my handwriting is god-awful. The notes are all pdf so if notability gets bought out and becomes terrible I just drop it like a hot potato and move on to something else no loss of notes. I tried a colleagues RM2 and the screen didn’t feel as nice to write on as my paperlike screen protector. I also found the latency distracting - I couldn’t write as fast as I would like to.
Pencil and paper are very definitely better, until you need to carry them around or search through them.
The ease of filing/retrieving across a lot of notes is a huge advantage. Also the amount you can have with you. The sheer weight of paper is a huge pain. With this you can carry hundreds of books and search the notes you scribbled in the margins.
Because the fact that it is a tech gadget makes me more likely to write stuff down instead of believing I can remember everything. That’s about it , at least for my use case
i’ll address this as if it was a genuine question.
my handwriting is awful, not to mention that my physical notebook management is awful. i’ve considered a supernote nomad as a way to streamline some of those issues. theyre just so expensive that i cant really justify a $500 experiment.
I haven't tried it myself but I have heard that LLMs can be much better at handwriting OCR than previous tech. This opens the possibility of handwriting and then scanning and digitizing notes for organizing and search.
Honestly, this seems like a good opportunity to just write slower and pay closer attention to the tidiness of your handwriting. Using digital notetaking because your handrwriting is bad is just lazy. If you have parkinson fair.
I'm confused. Your physical notebook management is awful, ie. I guess you have live in a house without shelves or something. But spending time troubleshooting an electronic device from only 2022 is easier?
Maybe this will restore my faith in digital tablets.
I made notes, saved them. Only for the next morning to find my device out of battery and the notes missing. I don't get it, feels like I was zapped by some evil overlord that didn't want me recalling what I had written for the next part of my cartoon.
Easy to end up like this. Takes a lot of work to preserve. I had an Arch Linux desktop. Put it in storage to move to a different country and came back in a year. Booted fine, couldn’t upgrade. No feasible resolution. Reimaged it after a couple of hours (this was pre AI so you had to manually figure things out).
Indeed that is the case. I’ve been a Debian/Ubuntu user since Ubuntu came out. The Arch desktop was an experiment. Back to la salle de bian once again. But it is perhaps one of the few distribution (families) where this is true.
I'm running my remarkable on some ancient software version, and honestly for my use case (reading textbooks and occasional note taking) the old version is perfectly fine.
I don't connect it to the internet, just use the awesome RCU software (paid, but distributed with source code) to move stuff between it and my computer. I presume if I were to try to update it, I'll find the same fate! About exporting, the notebook format is relatively simple, I wrote a very bare-bones software that's able to convert the notebooks to PDF in a few hundred lines of Nim, or you could just use the integrated web UI.
Except it was able to be updated. Looks like mostly a time issue and having to restart the update service, possibly due to an old bug - or maybe a reboot would have fixed it.
The rm2 is still receiving software updates. The fact that this would have been impossible on more closed tablets, or indeed most mobile phones should show reMarkable in a positive light surely?
They even list it in the user guide https://remarkable.guide/guide/access/ssh.html along with an "developing software" guide https://remarkable.guide/devel/index.html.
Maybe other tablets are like that too, to be honest I'm too poor to swing the 700-1000$ for what I can cover with an paper note pad (with the bonus of being able to comfortably sit my coffee cup on it, use any pen or pencil, rip pages out, drop it, forget it somewhere, etc etc) to buy one but at least it seems like a product I would support.
I have good news: they (RM2s) are often available on ebay for much less. People buy them thinking they're getting something like an android tablet, but they do nothing out of the box apart from showing docs and taking notes. Sometimes they're returned immediately for a full refund, but often they sit in a drawer, untouched, till they get offloaded on ebay for - comparatively - peanuts, letting us scoop them up and breathe new life into them (koreader rocks, to start with).
I have been using it to read HN, as an RSS reader over my news and blog sources, generate audiobooks on topics I want to understand with ElevenLabs, Exa and OpenAI and listen via connecting its bluetooth to my speakers and even as a remote Claude Code & Codex approval sidekick.
It is amazing that a $100 device with a single core and 512mb RAM can do so much and run for so long.
Here is the open-sourced platform https://github.com/BandarLabs/Cobalt
reMarkable software has its faults, but I keep coming back to them for the best-in-class hardware, developer-friendly platform, which itself spawned an active developer community. Could it be an easier platform to develop on? Sure. But that hasn't stopped a huge number of supported mods being made available
I actually like that the RM 1 is plastic, it feels durable and light.
[0] https://github.com/rmitchellscott/reManager
Long shell life is a taboo in the tech world where 5 years is a long time.
I have all sorts of offline digital&analog mechanical/optical devices which just work decades and decades later. The weak point in any of my old tech is when theres a software component that needs to be reverse engineered and ported across multiple generations of CPU architecture / OS / API deprecations.
I have 60 year old records, 35 year old CDs, 25 year old minidiscs that all still work fine. Properly developed film negatives are still fine decades later.
Despite all the warnings about media impermanence and lifespans, it's always the software that screws it up first. I've lost more content from digital / streaming services because it simply vanishes than because a piece of physical media failed.
As software is increasingly "solved" by AI I think this is what will become most important
All that happened is they stopped selling it. Source: https://remarkable.com/products/remarkable-2
My kids still using thinkpad 430 from 2013
No, this device was only discontinued this year, you can still buy accessories and it still receives software updates.
It just turns out their software has flaws that break the update process after a few years of sitting unused. Not great, but luckily there are workarounds, as this article walks you through.
I like mine very much except the limitation that I can't do too much with it.
The limitation is the whole point, it does pen input very well.
Their hardware is top notch, but I found the software to be so hamstrung that I returned mine after a few weeks. Basically, if you want to have exactly a physical paper notebook experience but with a computer, it’s great. If you’d like to transcend the limitations of a paper notebook and take advantage of the nice hardware to organize your work, or do literally anything but write or draw, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
My car has four wheels, that doesn't make it a good ice-cream van
Well, same here: a Remarkable tablet is nearly identical to a Kobo or Kindle in form factor and basic capabilities. It even includes an ereader app. But the app, frankly, sucks. They could swapped in KOreader and called it a day. But instead of that, they — or rather, their supporters — give the laughable excuse that “it’s not an ereader”. Well, an iPad’s also not a calculator, and yet…
If your car has four wheels, room to walk around inside, and built in refrigerators that are mounted upside down for some reason, maybe the factory would say that they didn’t sell you an ice cream truck, but everyone else looking at it is going to wonder why they didn’t make it possible to stock popsicles while they were at it.
I'm not sure what the "ereader app" is that you refer to. reMarkables come with exactly one app "xochitl" that handles all user interaction. Sure, they let you access PDFs to annotate - but again the primary use case isn't to read them. ePub files are consciously converted into PDFs to support that premise.
KOreader, whilst an excellent reading app, doesn't support annotations. So it's not obvious why reMarkable would consider that an enhancement given the primary device purpose.
My car doesn't have space to walk around, nor refrigerators. That's why I bought it. Same with reMarkable devices. I buy and use them for the content creation functionality. I have a Kindle for the times when I want to swap to "consumer mode"
1) I had a ton of paper notes, looking back, curating, finding old things etc is really hard.
2) An electronic device gives you the ability to cut and paste, move things around on the page, resize stuff, drop in screenshots (so I often screenshot a page of something I’m reading, drop it into a note and annotate it or make my notes about it all around the original) and (best of all) infinite erase with no skank left behind on the page and no surrounding myself with tiny little bits of eraser to clean up.
3) I have all my notes with me on my device even ones I made years ago vs in my study I have box folders and notebooks full of notes filling cabinet after cabinet, I couldn’t possibly carry all that around with me.
1 and 3 are nice, 2 is the killer app. Once I made the switch I find it painfully limiting to go back to having to make notes on paper.
[1] My system in case people are interested is Notability and a paperlike screen protector. It is fantastic. All notes back up automatically as pdfs in box (which I then copy to my linux laptop) and I can search them using AI just fine even though I’m writing equations and my handwriting is god-awful. The notes are all pdf so if notability gets bought out and becomes terrible I just drop it like a hot potato and move on to something else no loss of notes. I tried a colleagues RM2 and the screen didn’t feel as nice to write on as my paperlike screen protector. I also found the latency distracting - I couldn’t write as fast as I would like to.
The ease of filing/retrieving across a lot of notes is a huge advantage. Also the amount you can have with you. The sheer weight of paper is a huge pain. With this you can carry hundreds of books and search the notes you scribbled in the margins.
my handwriting is awful, not to mention that my physical notebook management is awful. i’ve considered a supernote nomad as a way to streamline some of those issues. theyre just so expensive that i cant really justify a $500 experiment.
This is a platform to discuss all things related to tech. The suggestion that the OP discards their old tablet seems not in the true hacker spirit.
But, that's only my 5 cents.
I made notes, saved them. Only for the next morning to find my device out of battery and the notes missing. I don't get it, feels like I was zapped by some evil overlord that didn't want me recalling what I had written for the next part of my cartoon.
Now just use good ole paper and pen.
I don't connect it to the internet, just use the awesome RCU software (paid, but distributed with source code) to move stuff between it and my computer. I presume if I were to try to update it, I'll find the same fate! About exporting, the notebook format is relatively simple, I wrote a very bare-bones software that's able to convert the notebooks to PDF in a few hundred lines of Nim, or you could just use the integrated web UI.
The rm2 is still receiving software updates. The fact that this would have been impossible on more closed tablets, or indeed most mobile phones should show reMarkable in a positive light surely?