Steve Troughton-SmithMy finger has been hovering over the buy button on the reMarkable Paper Pro page all day 😫
Nothing quite matches the kind of digital paper device I yearn for, but it gets pretty darn close. I wish I could build my own…
I knew the reMarkable had a developer mode with SSH, but I wasn't aware it had an actual official Qt Quick SDK and cross-compiler toolchain
A cute little official guide to sketchnoting on the reMarkable. Sketchnoting is one of those things I really wish I'd learned to do, because every time somebody posts their sketchnotes — usually after conference talks or WWDC sessions — I'm in awe
Visualize your thoughts with sketchnoting
I appreciate the YouTuber economy, but writing 'This is a test' and drawing some colored highlights on a page doesn't really constitute a valuable review of a drawing tablet, eink or otherwise 😂
Give it to people like this Redditor a month ahead of embargo, perhaps, or mind-mapping/sketchnoting pros
/via https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1fidzm9/my_2_cents_about_the_paper_pro/
There's no reMarkable OS emulator, so I abused ChatGPT to help me format, patch, and boot the rootfs from the software recovery image in qemu-system-aarch64. Whether I'll be able to get the GUI running is another matter…
I've spent a lot of time experimenting, and I think it's failing in xochitl, the primary UI binary, which has a bunch of device checks I might just need to patch out. Getting the right size framebuffer has been a challenge…
I think I'm giving up here; xochitl has a long try/catch block on init for setting up the hardware, like the epaper controller, and there's only so much I can nop by hand before I'm deep in the weeds and causing higher-level crashes.
It would be nice if reMarkable provided a qemu environment for their OS, because it wasn't hard at all for me, an idiot, to get the basics booting on a generic target with a random kernel I found lying around
I don't think there's value in trying to document what I did to get this booting, it was a mess.
I grabbed and ungziped the reMarkable ferrari firmware from https://archive.org/download/rm110/RM110/
I stole a kernel Image and device tree (imx8mp-evk.dtb) from https://yocto.dave.eu/desk-mx8m-l-6.0.0-rc0/image/imx8mp-lpddr4-evk/
I masked out a bunch of system services including remarkable's emergency recovery through the boot args in my mess of a qemu script, with a lot of guidance from ChatGPT: https://gist.github.com/steventroughtonsmith/a6c8c6b2c776dc10cc0fa31169ea0db5
And after that byte-patched xochitl
Somebody with a lot more time on their hands could recompile the reMarkable kernel instead of the one I used, and use the actual ferrari-rev-c.dtb device tree from the rootfs. And even better, with patches to qemu to stub in any of the hardware reMarkable OS is looking for.
I ain't that guy 😅
And here's boot console output, just for kicks
https://gist.github.com/steventroughtonsmith/ffb3cffae607fe8d2576800bd523645e
You know you've made it when your products are being used in space
Astronaut Jannicke Mikkelsen | reMarkable
It's a bit ridiculous that reMarkable has a screen mirroring feature but no way to take screenshots
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit missing from reMarkable OS, that much is clear from the moment you start using it. Documents have infinite vertical scrolling, but finite horizontal scrolling, so a traditional mind-map layout doesn't really work here without jumping through hoops (like using pinch-zoom to write tiny text). There are so many things they should be putting engineering effort into before nonsense like 'AI', but alas these are the times we live in
I'm not sure what reMarkable is basing their '2 weeks' battery life claims on; absent-mindedly doodling on two pages for an hour, with the backlight off, was enough to burn through 10% of the battery on the Paper Pro. I wouldn't call that heavy usage at all
My thoughts on the reMarkable Paper Pro so far are complicated, and still evolving. ePub support is non-existent — it has zero support for the graphically-rich kinds of ePub 3 FXL you might want to display on an 11" color screen — and PDF text rendering is really low resolution unless you turn on high contrast mode, which blows out anything like colored backgrounds. Magazines, thus, are a no-go. I think beyond handwriting/doodling or plain-white-background PDFs, this is not the device for you
They sell a €250 keyboard accessory for this reMarkable tablet, which I'm totally fine with — I didn't buy one, but it seems like a nice addon for writers.
Except the OS doesn't support text files, never mind something like markdown. You can only type into documents you can draw on. It's a bizarre corner to back yourself into, especially /when you sell a keyboard/
Do note: I will have lots of observations like this as I explore reMarkable OS. Do not over-index on negativity; I really like the writing and drawing features on this thing, which is the point of it. But I consumed nearly every YouTube video out there on the RMPP and the Move, and there are still plenty of surprises and head-scratchers here
Exploring the different brushes (I wish there were more) and colors (I wish there were more) and templates (holy hell they have hundreds on their free reMarkable Methods marketplace, how do I make some?). There is a lot to like. Shape recognition is really nice, too. Some of the color reproduction is dramatically different on the desktop, so using color on the Paper Pro is a bit like being temporarily colorblind
While the reMarkable Paper Pro is thin, at 5.1mm, I would still halve the thickness if I could, and dramatically decrease the weight. There is a line between technology and magic that it doesn't quite cross, today
The screen light, too, is not for me. Personally, I want my ePaper without a light shining in my face. And while the reMarkable's feels a lot less like a cheap, nasty LED light than my Kindle, it still looks awful
There are a lot of templates here, before you start adding 'systems' and 'planners' from the marketplace. I now feel woefully under-equipped to choose templates to include in my own notebook app 👀
Torb@stroughtonsmith While I haven’t used it properely, many descriptions make me believe that the reMarkable 2 is still the superior device. Clear, crisp black and white. Simple. The perfect size.
Joachim Bondo@stroughtonsmith Super curious to follow along in your observations, because you go that extra level deep. Have eagerly used reMarkable 2 for two years (sketching, mostly UI, and reading, PDF only).
Dagaloni@stroughtonsmith Okay, I'm completely cured of wanting a Remarkable. 😅
Mutesplash@stroughtonsmith This is where I went "no." Too much money for not enough features.
@Mutesplash @stroughtonsmith Focus and less features is literally the point though. I love my reMarkable 2 for it’s simplicity. More features would probably make it worse for it’s intended purpose.
@torb How does bad ePub and PDF support make it worse for focusing on... books and documents?
@Mutesplash Well, I think they focus on note taking and writing (i.e. better response time for pens than other pen eink tablets etc).
You’re not wrong, it *does* make it worse for books and documents, I just don’t think that’s their focus either. Remarkable isn’t good for those things.
They’re almost maniaically focused on eink pen writing at the expense of… well.. everything else. But also: has a better pen experience than everybody. It’s IMO *really* good if that’s what you care about (as I do).
Shaunkoh@stroughtonsmith apparently it’s possible to sideload KOreader which does a better job dealing with epubs