Title: reMarkable Tablet
Date: 20191228
Tags: gadgets
========================================
I haven't been as enthusiastic about technology gadgets as I was 15+ years ago.
Retro and simple have become more appealing to me.
However, a few things came together. I have been referencing more manpages and
PDF documents. I had the realization that coding on paper is better for me for
my Altair projects. And no sooner than I thought to myself that having scratch
paper to think things out on without having to flip pages, sharpen pencils or
make a mess with erasers, I saw a short review[0] of the reMarkable tablet[1].
I had heard about the reMarkable during it's crowdfuding campaign but forgot
about it as it wasn't relevant to me at the time. It's gadgety, it's expensive,
but I decided to try one. Reviews are pretty glowing, except for the people who
don't like something about it. It's a poor e-reader. No problem there, I have
minimal need for that. It excels at note taking. But even at that it lacks
some features which would be nice, like moving text or pages between documents.
It runs Linux and ships with SSH on it. Very hacker friendly[2][3]. And I had
30 days to try it out.
As I've said[4], I don't like tech appliances. So it's ease of access sold me
on trying it. I didn't have to sign up for their proprietary cloud service, it
has it's own internal web application you can turn on to upload/download
documents through.
I scribbled some thoughts on it, did some doodling. It feels great to write on.
Like paper and a marker or fine tip pen. When my epiphany about coding on paper
came to me, the reMarkable came into it's own. I pushed my Altair reference
documents and books to it and started using it to organize the thoughts on my
projects then writing some code.
I LOVE writing on this thing. It's great to be able to digitally erase, create
any number of "notebooks", and organize in folders. It does have its
shortcomings, though. Not being able to move text to another page or into
another document is rough. You can't move pages between documents, either. It
does allow you to move text around on the same page which is great for coding.
If I miss a couple lines of code, I can shift some text down and make room. You
can't go beyond the bottom of a page, though. It doesn't have on-device OCR so
your notes aren't searchable. Erasing, while better than a physical eraser
wearing a hole in your paper, is a multi-step process and gets annoying.
Working on computers all day means my handwriting has gotten pretty terrible and
I have the problem where my brain moves faster than my hand so I skip letters or
write a mash up of two of them. I'm erasing a lot. But it's nice to scribble
ideas and questions off to the side as I have them and then erase what turns out
to be untrue or not needed instead of crossing it out. It's also nice to mix
text and drawings on the same document which I can't do in vi. It supports up
to 5 layers on a page so I could write code on one layer and notes on another
then hide the notes when transcribing the code to my computer.
I don't know if I'd recommend a reMarkable, even to avid note takers. I think
the more serious you are about note taking, the more it's lack of features will
be an issue. Any less of a note taker and the price point becomes an issue.
Folks who do bullet journaling or other simple daily writing might like it.
It's a bit large to carry around, though. It's not going into a pocket. The
reMarkable 2 is supposedly coming soon, info is starting to leak, and may drop
the price on the first version to a more reasonable point. For me, the
reMarkable happened to fit right into my current needs and does a great job at
replacing my paper notebooks.
** UPDATE: You CAN move pages between documents. Even better!
[0]
https://artagnon.com/articles/rM
[1]
https://remarkable.com/
[2]
https://remarkablewiki.com/
[3]
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
[4]
gopher://kagu-tsuchi.com:70/0/phlog/appliances.txt
