How I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing code for it. I find I’m using it a lot.
Unfortunately, the fact that I can ssh into it leads to the first part of this post.
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How I Bricked then Recovered my "reMarkable 2"
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday September 27 2021, @08:08PM (19 children)
Let alone v2. Never heard of it, why should I care?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Informative) by weilawei on Monday September 27 2021, @08:21PM (2 children)
Feels like paper when you write. Excellent accidental touch rejection. Eink works great in sunlight. It's a writing/sketching first device, unlike others whose primary function is to be an all in one media tablet or an ebook reader.
In other news, graph paper is now so expensive, it's cheaper to buy a reMarkable and have infinite (not really, but, a lot) graph paper.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @01:34AM (1 child)
LOL [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by weilawei on Tuesday September 28 2021, @08:52AM
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday September 27 2021, @08:25PM (6 children)
It was so UNremarkable, that the story submission left out the links that were in the original... and I failed to notice that omission until *after* the story went live on the site.
Please accept my apologies!
See?! =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday September 27 2021, @08:49PM (2 children)
"""
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to operand.ca.
SSL received a missing_extension alert.
(Error code: ssl_error_missing_extension_alert)
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
"""
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday September 29 2021, @12:16PM (1 child)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday September 29 2021, @01:05PM
"""
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to operand.ca.
SSL received a missing_extension alert.
(Error code: ssl_error_missing_extension_alert)
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
"""
Gotta love HTTPS. If the solution to a problem is a bigger problem, then perhaps it wasn't the solution after all. Currently it's not even delivering confidentiality, because there's no availability. Then again, with no data communicated, there's no integrity being delivered either. Final score: 0/3. This is not delivering any of the promises of security, therefore it is not security.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by stretch611 on Monday September 27 2021, @10:31PM (2 children)
So this Bytram user... sounds to me like a sock puppet account. :P
What are your thoughts about this MartyB?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:10AM (1 child)
I created an account ("martyb") on SoylentNew before the site went live. That's how I have a 2-digit UID: 76.
I used the same nick on IRC. A month or two later I got on IRC and was immediately commanded to change my nick! I asked, "Why?" "There are too many people who have a nick that started with the letter 'M'" I was told. "There are NO exceptions! Change your nick!"
Grrr.
So I changed my nick from "martyb" to "Bytram".
Subsequent to that, I embarked on a campaign of testing the site's (still relatively unstable) code. And was regularly finding bugs. Lots of bugs.
When something broke on the site, people started (good-naturely) blaming me. That became immortalized in a "bot" command which I quoted, verbatim, in my first post at the top of this thread.
To this day, go into the main "#soylent" channel on IRC [soylentnews.org], and if you type a line containing only "=blame" you will see a reply "* systemd points at Bytram".
So, now you know the rest of the story. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @02:04AM
Good Day.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @08:35PM (5 children)
The Remarkable was* the most open (but still closed bits) e-ink e-reader/note taking tablet available. It runs gnu linux and is moderately hacker friendly (the remarkable 1 had a non-manufacturer distro (commercial too) available for it as well as the manufacturers software.
* The PineNote is here now. Super early stages, and not general availability yet. But, it is/will be a far more open / user respecting device than the Remarkable. Both the remarkable and the PineNote include a Wacom digitizer, so annotating and note taking with them is/should be much nicer than capacitive only digitizer devices. The PineNote also has a capacitive touch sensor as well, so finger touch should work well too. Not sure if Remarkable also has a capacitive digitizer, it may. PineNote is also a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Remarkable has good writing latency and good battery life-- these are still unknown for the PineNote.
https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote/ [pine64.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday September 27 2021, @09:34PM (1 child)
PineNote should also have the most powerful hardware ever put in an e-ink device, possibly including the YotaPhone 2 which packed a Snapdragon 801 [notebookcheck.net] and 2 GB of RAM (4 GB in PineNote).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @09:53PM
Yeah, that relatively powerful processor and all that RAM are contributing factors to the unknowns about battery life. But, make it pretty attractive as a sunlight readable netbook replacement for text work (curious if screen update latency will be acceptable for this use-case).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Monday September 27 2021, @10:40PM (2 children)
How do you figure the PineNote is a couple hundred dollars cheaper? You got me all excited - my GF has a Remarkable2, which I have mostly avoided using because I can tell I'd quickly fall in love with it and the $400 price tag is a bit steep for me.
But then I follow your link and see the same price, in bold even:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:54PM (1 child)
Brain fart. I incorrectly remembered the Remarkable being more expensive than it is.
Sorry. But, it is still a more freedom respecting device, so still worth getting excited over. I hope it doesn't have any fatal flaws after it is released.
The new quartz SBCs from Pine64 have e-ink controllers on them. And, they say they will offer the panels as an accessory after the SBCs are GA. Maybe the price for DIY will be lower? Probably not when you add battery etc. (one of the Quartz boards has a built-in charging circuit, so most of the hardware is there). But, you may not get the digitizers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 29 2021, @03:10AM
Rats.
I do love me some some freedom-respecting hardware. Though I'm not enough of a purist to go for an incremental improvement in freedom if there's a substantial user experience gap. Not when the competition is pretty respectful already, and is as polished as the RM2. We'll see how the usability, and feel of the PineNote compare. With luck it will be out before I finally give in and get myself something. The RM2 certainly has some major functional shortcomings I'd like to see addressed
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday September 27 2021, @08:46PM (1 child)
"a relatively device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing code for it."
... it sounds awesome!
However, I would add pedantically that you can't "brick and then recover" something. If you brick something, definitionally, it can't be recovered - if you can recover it, it was never a brick.
I found an unhack on the TI power-management chip that accompanied most TI SoCs on many mobile phones and tablets where you would enable and disable the set of wake-up events. It was perfectly possible (if you had secure bootloader permissions, or a custom kernel) to assign the value 0 to that register. Once the power went, it wouldn't look for the pressing of the power key. Nor the insertion of a charger. Nor the insertion of a battery. Nothing would wake the device up for longer than the time it took to check the flags and decide that waking up shouldn't occur (so the CPU itself *never* got woken up, not one byte of bootloader was ever read - not surprising, the roms weren't even given power). That's as close to a brick as I've ever seen.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @02:16AM
Bad ROM flashes will do it sometimes. I've flashed embedded devices with release firmwares and had them brick. These were signed and everything, just a mispack of the wrong device's code under an incorrect name in one case, and a sequential reflash process that wasn't documented in another.
IMO anything that requires a chip de/resolder is fair to call 'brick'ing to a consumer. Even needing a capacitor swap ('recap') means that to a layperson, the device is no more than a paperweight, even if a high school student could open it, spot the popped cap, and replace it in that case.
I've had charging hardware brick itself by frying a line.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:58AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @09:11PM (4 children)
30 years ago, doing all that work to recover a device would have seemed incredibly cool. Today it seems incredibly laborious.
I love eInk devices, and when my current Kindle fails (battery life is diminishing noticeably) I'll replace it with a non-Amazon eInk reader... but damn it all if I'm going to buy something I might need to ssh into to fix.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:05PM
> but damn it all if I'm going to buy something I might need to ssh into to fix.
Hard disagree. I don't want devices that prevent me from ssh'ing into them nor devices that prevent me from fixing them. My device, I'm root-- not Google, Apple, Samsung, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:35PM (1 child)
Why not replace battery in Kindle? AliExpress has then for under $10.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 28 2021, @07:16AM
Maybe because a new battery won't turn the Kindle into a non-Kindle?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday September 28 2021, @08:20PM
That's right. It's telnet or nothing.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 27 2021, @09:28PM (16 children)
This product would have been perfect 20 years ago when the nearest competition were Palm Pilots.
Now there are too many alternatives in the form of iPads and the like.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @09:39PM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:25PM (1 child)
There isn't a single device like it that runs 100% free (libre) software. It has no competition.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:40PM
Sorry, was thinking pinenote from unrelated thread above. Remarkable is not 100% free software, but it is better than its competitors, and the closest thing to a competitor the pinenote will have. It will be the pinenote that is without competition with entirely free software.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @04:28AM (12 children)
Spoken with the conviction of someone that doesn't know what they're talking about and determined to let others know it.
iPads and other tablets with active pens, like Microsoft's Surface line or Samsung's now-defunct Galaxy Note tablet line [engadget.com] (or the Galaxy Note phones) are completely different to write on. Glassy screens that the plastic nibs glide across are functional but not very pleasant to use (or too rubbery in a desperate attempt to "fix" this), and their UIs are touch-centric, which leads to annoying issues with accidental inputs from the palm or fingers while using the pen. The latter is an inherent flaw of any device that's just adding an active digitiser to a touchscreen device, because the UIs are built around touch interaction first and foremost; attempts at doing things like palm rejection, or turning off touch input when the pen is detected near the screen, are half-assed at best and lead to frequent frustration because of unwanted "taps" on other parts of the UI. They also tend to have a pretty noticeable parallax effect due to the glass (or plastic) surface between the display and the pen, which is a pain in the ass for writing accuracy.
I'm speaking from experience here: I've been following, buying, and using these kinds of pen display devices since around 2010. I have two traditional pen displays, a rebranded Huion pen display from Monoprice (e.g. a bootleg Cintiq) and a Wacom Cintiq, and I've owned multiple pen display tablets, including Lenovo's N-Trig based ThinkPad Tablet running Android 3.1 [wikipedia.org], two Galaxy Note phones (Note 4 and Note 10+), the Galaxy Note 12.1 linked above, and more recently a Chromebook with an active pen. (And long before any of that that I owned two Palm devices, though I can't remember the models; one was in the Tungsten line, though.)
Over the past decade using pen display hardware, a few standard things have held true regardless of device:
1. There's always too much parallax. This has been improving a lot as of the past 2-3 years, but prior to that the screen thickness, especially on the tablet devices, has been way too much for a good writing experience.
2. Too slippery or too rubbery. It's like trying to write on an ice cube, and it sucks. Sometimes the device maker "fixes" this by using a rubbery pen nib with more friction, but that just makes it even worse. Then it's like trying to write on a sheet of glass with an eraser.
3. Touchscreen devices fucking suck to interact with. Touch only gets disabled if the pen is within a few cm of the screen, but I lift the pen higher than that frequently while writing or sketching, which means I'm frequently at the mercy of the "palm rejection" detection, which is universally awful. Turning off the touch input completely is sometimes possible but the software's usually built around using touch features too, so that adds its own annoyances. The only way I've been able to avoid unwanted palm presses was to buy and use so-called "art gloves", which are gloves that only cover the last two fingers and the side of the palm. Some of them have extra material on the side to help block inputs, and that's what I had to resort to just to prevent obnoxious things like triggering pinch-zoom or two-finger rotate gestures, or clicking random bits of UI.
4. Latency. This hasn't been as big a deal for the past 2-3 years either, but noticeably high latency between creating a stroke and having it appear on-screen has long been an issue with the portable devices. One of the oldest devices in this sort of "portable note computer" class that I recall was the Asus EEE Note [laptopmag.com] seemed really promising (especially for the price), but the latency was not pleasant at all. And that was only ~10 years ago.
5. The screens are not great to stare at while writing/drawing for a long time. Especially if you want to lean in close while using them. It can't be helped, they emit light like any other typical display, and it sucks to stick your face up close to them because of it. You could solve this with e-ink, but e-ink has been really bad about high latency, which goes back to the problem of #4.
Points #4 and #5 are why writing/sketching devices like the reMarkable are starting to appear now. Thanks to newer e-ink displays being able to do partial refreshes, it's possible to have a e-ink device with low enough latency to not be jarring and unpleasant when writing. For example, there's also the Onyx Boox line of devices, except those rely on using android, except those devices have been found to be phoning home to servers in China, and the company that makes them is intentionally in violation of the GPL.
Anyway, what makes the reMarkable especially nice is that it's addressed all five of those issues: the pen/screen distance is so small that there's almost no parallax; the screen surface and pen nibs give it a more natural, paper-like feel (at the cost of nibs wearing down faster, that natural-feeling friction isn't free); they use partial refresh and some other software tricks to get the lowest latency I've ever seen on a pen display; the e-ink screen is large and easy on the eyes; and the custom UI is made for pen-first interaction. To elaborate on the last part some, I haven't had to wear my stupid art glove with it yet, because the custom UI is specifically made with the writing/drawing as the focus. The UI elements are placed to be out of the way, and on-canvas touch interactions like resizing and page flipping have delays, which makes touch interaction "laggy" but eliminates unwanted palm touches.
The device isn't perfect, of course. The software is lacking some features I'd like to see, they've been slow to add things, and a lot of times what they do add seems like it's not completely done. But I'd rather have the reMarkable's slightly rough-around-the-edges UI and amazing writing/drawing feel, than another Android or iOS device with a slick UI that feels like shit to write on. It's not a general-purpose device, but it's good at the thing it focuses on. Plus it's hackable, they don't even try to hide it from you; ssh is open by default and you can get the info from the device info screen in the settings.
It's basically the device I've wanted for 20 years, and it's taken that long for all the pieces to come together. It couldn't have existed in a pleasantly usable state 20 years ago. Or 10. Or even 5.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:52PM (6 children)
Setting your gratuitous jab aside for a moment--I respect how much you have explored and thought about this class of devices, but this product seems like trying to introduce betamax to a market that has already gotten used to VHS.
You like pencil and paper. That's the experience that's the sweet spot for you. But for younger people, iPads, Galaxy Notes, and all of those are what they're used to. For people who need more, there are the wacom pads.
For me the reMarkable would have been great 20 years ago, before I acquired the carpal tunnel from practicing Chinese characters thousands of times which I've never been able to shake. To avoid it, I internalized vi commands and have mapped that onto as many other programs as I can, and have internalized general keystroke commands for the places vi keybindings won't go so that I don't have to touch mice, either. It goes without saying that the stylus format does not attract me.
Enjoy the reMarkable, though.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @04:54PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @08:11PM (4 children)
First off, sorry about that first line, it came off harsher than intended. I've been encountering kind of dismissal-without-familiarity in various topics a lot lately, and your comment just ended up being the one I snapped at despite being milder than most.
Anyway, I think it's actually trying to do the opposite: bring the good parts of paper to the pen-display-tablet types of devices to improve the general writing/sketching experience. It still doesn't quite feel like paper, which I've seen some die-hard pencil&paper fans complain about, but it's easily the most natural writing surface I've encountered, and e-ink is really easy on the eyes. Some might not like the focus on it being a distraction-free device (e.g. no apps and stuff) but that's also arguably a benefit, considering how easy it is to get distracted by an Android or iOS device because every app is made by someone trying to grab your attention, notify you about something, or sell you something.
If we had Android e-ink devices with proper app support (the Boox has some weird limitations in that regard) and the same feel as the reMarkable I'd never have considered it, probably, because the distraction-free aspect isn't a big deal to me and I'd love having access to things like LayerPaintHD or Krita. But that's not feasible currently, and likely won't be for a long time (if ever) because e-ink falls short of Google's requirements for devices to get Play Store access, plus other issues with Android in general.
Funny enough, I actually don't like pencil and paper. I'm a lefty and have spent my whole life avoiding it because of annoying smudging and hand cramps caused by having to hold my hand and the paper in weird ways to keep my palm running across the writing. That dislike is why I type something like 150wpm, because I learned to type everything, everywhere, whenever possible; it's also what got me into pen displays and pen tablets in the first place, because a mouse (or later, touchscreen) just isn't good enough sometimes, so I wanted something I could use instead. Preferably something better. But the limitations of the available options, especially for mobile devices, has been a pain in the ass.
If this were a perfect world I'd have a tablet running a Linux DE with a full colour, high-refresh e-ink screen that has the latency, parallax, and physical feel of the reMarkable (or better). But we don't, so I take what I can get. This is finally a device that doesn't make my horrible lefty chickenscratch writing even less legible than it already is, and that I can sketch on smoothly and naturally, with the kind of document organisation I expect from using PCs my whole life: everything on one device with quick swapping and no dealing with physical bullshit.
And it's not an iPad or Galaxy Note, but the interaction is similar enough that nobody's going to get lost or confused by it. In addition to the pencil&paper diehards, it's arguably perfect for someone that's primarily familiar with mobile devices because the whole UI is very mobile-app-like in design and discoverability, just with an emphasis on pen instead of touch. Same kinds of gestures and UI layout as an art or note-taking program on Android or iOS, should be immediately familiar to anybody that's used either. The device is basically an attempt at bringing the good parts of pencil&paper forward in time, and from what I've seen/heard it seems to be especially popular with college students for that reason.
If anything, I'm probably the weird one because I like the device despite not being in their intended markets. I don't love pencil & paper, and I learned to type properly and am faster and more comfortable typing most things. But I like sketching, and for the times I must write something instead of type it I'd rather use it than my Note phone because the experience is so much better. It's a great device to work with whatever else you have if you can get it.
I think long-term the reMarkable-esque idea of a single-purpose writing device won't last, except maybe as a boutique kind of niche item, unless the technology becomes dirt cheap. Eventually, we'll likely see normal Android (or some successor down the line) tablets that come with active pens, a natural-feeling screen surface, and some kind of e-ink-esque colour screen that's eye friendly. Everything else the reMarkable brings to the table could be replicated by apps on the device so there would be no reason for it to exist. But that'll be a long way off most likely, because screen tech isn't there yet, parallax is still usually too high unless a lot of effort is put into it, and the screen surface has to be made with writing/pen use in mind. Mostly the screen that holds it back.
I can see a reMarkable-esque, single-use device becoming a cheap commodity product at some point, though, once we end up dirt-cheap SoCs that are fast enough, and the necessary screen quality becomes possible at lower prices. Then it might be more appealing for the masses to just grab one to throw in a bag and carry around. The problem with that right now is e-ink, because the displays are ridiculously expensive. Trying to buy a single 10" e-ink display is like $600; even considering bulk pricing, most of the price of the reMarkable is probably the fucking display, between the thin screen, natural surface, and e-ink panel.
Wacom's in a weird sort of place right now market-wise. They've owned the art tablet market for decades, but I think they're in a precarious position because of the rise of a mobile-first generation. The regular art tablets without a display work well if you're accustomed to them, because there's both pros and cons to the disconnect of drawing on a pad on your desk while watching the results happen on a screen in front of you, but people accustomed to touchscreens and iPads and Android tablets are more likely to be comfortable with a pen display. Except Wacom's offerings in that market are typically expensive, large, require a computer, and aren't very mobile.
If it weren't for them licensing their pen tech out, the mobile market would probably have obliterated them because people were opting for the convenience of mobile tablets and shitty rubber styluses, even for art, despite it costing them pressure sensitivity and more accurate strokes. That's why they have a product, called the Wacom One [wacom.com], now. It's a low-end Cintiq, similar to my Cintiq 16 (another more affordable, portability-friendly version of their high-end offerings) except a bit smaller and capable of connecting to Android phones for use as a larger, pressure-sensitive pen display for use with Android art and writing programs. Instead of having to buy a PC and a tablet or pen display, they created a new kind of market option where a phone-only user can just buy a slightly-more-expensive monitor ($400 USD) that can work with the phone and, maybe later if they get a PC, continue to use it there.
(Wacom has been pretty smart about following the market. They've stayed ahead through R&D and patents, sure, but they also seem to adapt well.)
Yeah that puts you way out of the target market for these kinds of devices. Like all of them. That's a shame, because carpal tunnel fucking sucks :/ I've been lucky to have avoided it so far despite heavy keyboard/mouse use, possibly because I've always been aware of it and cautious, and like I said I've avoided paper writing because of being a lefty.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 29 2021, @01:22PM (1 child)
I think your journey with tablets really points up the many factors involved in getting a technical solution right. I know artists who use iPads to work. I know a professional cartoonist who draws for the New Yorker using a wacom pad. My wife edits, crops, retouches photos on her iPhone. The waters in the mobile market have been quite muddied by all those variants, none of which have crystallized all the considerations you've mentioned.
I don't know if the mobile manufacturers pay you for your rich insight into their market, but they should. Maybe a lucrative sideline for you?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday September 30 2021, @01:07PM
Exactly. You've got products converging on the same basic use case from 3-4 different directions (PC pen displays and art tablets, mobile tablets with active pens, paper-but-better devices like the reMarkable, and the "fuck it I don't care" rubber stylus on phones/tablets if you count that), with wildly different trade-offs. I think mobile tablets are currently the worst sort of compromise, in the "a good compromise means nobody's happy" meaning, because the use-case isn't being treated as first-class. It's a niche thing that gets sort of mistreated, though there's still a convenience factor to it that almost makes it worth it. It was cool that it got supported at all and there really wasn't any other option for a while, except for tethered-to-the-PC Wacom (and off-brand) devices, but the compromises started bugging me.
Right now I think "Wacom device for the big work on a PC, reMarkable for sketches/notes elsewhere" is probably the best option we have, at least for the moment. Especially since the Wacom 16 and One are small enough to be decently portable, so you could hook either up to a laptop, or the One to a phone, if you ever need more than the reMarkable when you're not near your PC desk.
Nope, nobody does, it's just something I've been interested in for a long time (like I said, lefty that desperately wants to stop having to write anything on paper ever) and I have a tendency to analyse things.
I wish I could get paid to be opinionated about shit like this to people, though. :)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:25PM
Someone praise this user into +5 for being a good community member.
Maybe we could have a 'best intention expressed' daily award?
Hmm.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:44PM
Write on paper in mirror-image script, like DaVinci.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:14PM (1 child)
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I haven't used tablets other than Wacom and knockoff matte pads for any amount of time because of the issues you list (and the Wacom hand-to-screen disparity is its own special lousiness!), but I haven't looked in the last 5+ years either, so your post saves me an hour+ of research.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday September 30 2021, @12:54PM
I don't know if you'll come back and see this since you're AC, but in case you do, I'll try to sum up my thoughts on the options:
If you just want a nice not-quite-paper-but-close experience and don't care about anything else, the reMarkable is probably the best you'll find right now. There's also a similar product called the SuperNote that I've heard is pretty good but not quite as nice. This won't replace your (not-)Wacom art tablet because it's an entirely different use case, but is great for note taking or initial sketches. You know how some people sketch on paper and then move to digital for cleanup, linework, colouring, etc.? The reMarkable fills that sketch phase niche, but with some extra goodies like undo and region-select erase.
If you'd like to get rid of that hand/eye disparity that comes from the normal (not-)Wacom art tablets, consider either the 16" Wacom Cintiq ($600ish USD), or the 13" Wacom One [wacom.com] (around $400 USD). I have the 16 and it's really good, with only slightly more parallax than the reMarkable and a bit smoother screen. Not quite glassy, a little bit of texture, and it has standard VESA mounting holes if you want to put it on an arm instead of using the little kickstand or holding it in your lap.
I haven't used the One, but it seems to just be, basically, a slightly smaller Cintiq 16 with the extra gimmick of being usable on Android devices as well. Judging by the product page, the One seems to use the same tech as the licensed stuff, possibly because it makes Android compatibility easier, because they specifically advertise its compatibility with a couple well-known reMarkable/s-pen/etc. compatible pens: the Staedtler Noris Digital and the fountain pen-esque Lamy AL-star. So that's the trade-off for Android support, I guess, though it still has 60° tilt and 4096 pressure levels so it's not too bad. (the Cintiq 16 has 60° tilt and 8192 pressure levels.)
The reason I suggest those instead of the huge 22" and higher models is partly price, and partly size. Just going by memory here, but assuming an Intuos Pro Medium is still about the same size as my old Intuos 4 M (from before they renamed Bamboo->Intuos and Intuos->Intuos Pro), the One is probably comparable in size, and the Cintiq 16 should be closer to the Intuos Pro Large. That might make it feel more familiar and comfortable than trying to mount a giant screen and dealing with a different scale for screen and movement. Also, don't know if it would work on Windows or macOS, but on Linux at least, you can be a wiseass and map the pen input to a different screen and use it like an Intuos if you ever need to, if you ever want to revert to that way of doing things temporarily. I think the Cintiq 22 is built the same way now, but the weight and size would probably drive me crazy. (Plus it's like twice the cost of the Cintiq 16.)
If you're willing to give the Chinese "knock off" pen display products a chance, they've actually come a long way and some of them are supposedly pretty nice now. I've heard Huion's good, and saw good remarks about a recent XP Pen one. This stuff is just hobby level and relaxation for me, but I still mostly stick with Wacom and just avoid the higher-end high-price products, so I don't have a lot of input there. From what I've seen from others for non-wacom options is "hardware can be good, cost is great, but the drivers suck", and it matches my experience with the one early Huion one I had. The driver situation is reason enough for me to stick with Wacom, especially on Linux where it's a mature and safe choice. Plus the Wacom stuff seems to just last for-fucking-ever, which means it retains resale value, too.
If you want an all-in-one device instead, uhhh....Good luck. I really liked my Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 but that stopped receiving OS updates years ago, and still managed to get unusably slow despite that thanks to Google's play services continuing to update itself, getting hungrier for CPU and RAM with every change. They never made a proper replacement, the closest thing was the Chromebook Plus v2, but Android apps on ChromeOS have a lot of issues and ChromeOS itself sucks ass in tablet mode. Hell, they've talked about abandoning the Galaxy Note phone line completely as well, in favour of a separate purchasable pin, so that avenue is going to shit. Plus like I said, touch-first UI with a pen sucks without an art glove.
Surface is still stuck with N-Trig pens I think? Which may be better now, but I still have a bad opinion of them for their weird fucking nib design. Plus the god damn AAAA (not a typo) batteries. Fuck those things so much. No idea how Windows does on those things. Finally, can't speak of Apple's offering, iOS is even more locked down than Android and I hate it. Oh, I nearly forgot that there's an attempt to upset Wacom's domination of the active pen tech market with the "USI pens". Universal Stylus Initiative or something like that. Basically a way to have a non-Wacom, cross-device standard so pens can work from one thing to another. It's touted as being more consumer-friendly, but it just sounds like a way to get out of licensing fees to wacom to me. I don't know what uses it currently beyond a couple Chromebooks so I have no idea how the pen itself works or feels in comparison to anything else.
If I had to pick a portable pen display-capable device today I'd probably get a Wacom One instead and just attach it to my fucking phone just out of disgust for the available options right now. Android pen displays were a hot trend for a while and now it seems like, while there are more options, they suck more than they did. :/ Except maybe the Wacom MobileStudio products, but those are too ridiculously expensive ($2600 for the 13" one, $3500 for the 16". FUCK THAT. They're not made for personal use, period.)
TL;DR: reMarkable is great for non-PC-connected sketching and notes. Wacom One and Wacom 16 feel like a natural upgrade from the Intuos-style art tablets for PC-connected use. Mobile device options I'm feeling kind of burned on, rather just go between reMarkable and PC-connected tablet and skip the mobile device right now.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 01 2021, @02:10PM (2 children)
Aside from the slip-and-slide surface issues... how do you like the Huion offerings?
I ask because their refurb store has the large model for under a hundred bucks.
(I bought a lightbox from them that works great, but it's a different animal.)
I don't use a drawing tablet enough to justify Wacom prices, but I'd like to have a workspace bigger than a postage stamp. (I have a 9" Wacom I got for cheap, and it works fine but it's a little cramped.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday October 01 2021, @04:20PM (1 child)
The only one I had was a rebranded version of their first Cintiq-alternative released by Monoprice, so it was early tech. It had some driver annoyances and some wicked parallax, but worked well enough otherwise. Newer ones are more expensive but also higher quality from what I hear.
If you're talking about a basic art tablet, no display, it should be fine, just the same "driver is kind of rudimentary but works" issues. On Linux, they made the driver with an option to masquerade as a Wacom device, which made it send and receive the same events as a Wacom tablet, so you could even use xsetwacom with it to configure things like rotation and display mapping. The only real issue I had was I had to compile it myself there and I had some phantom inputs sometimes. On Windows the driver actually had more issues, but that was because of Windows having that stupid Ink shit causing problems more than anything.
I get what you mean about wanting a larger work area. The first tablet I got was a Graphire 3 from wacom and that thing was so tiny and made my hand hurt to use in the tiny little space it had. Made sure to never get anything that small again, even if it meant waiting and saving up more to get bigger.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 01 2021, @05:41PM
Thanks, that sounds promising. I don't need display on the tablet (I seem to still have my high school skill from 50 years ago, of copying from the overhead projector without looking at the page), tho I can see the advantage.
My smaller Wacoms, I didn't install a driver; just plugged 'em in on WinXP and PCLinuxOS, and they're seen as an HID mouse. Work fine in CS2 and Krita; Corel PhotoPaint doesn't see 'em, but my copy is from 2003 and is a little dopey about USB inputs.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @09:40PM (7 children)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:23PM (3 children)
It uses a wacom digitizer. You should be able to re-use a pen from a wacom tablet, if you have one / can find a used one on ebay. I grabbed two old wacom tablets with pens from an e-waste bin. I Assume they were no longer supported on mac/windows, but both work fine with linux (if this is correct about them no longer working with mac/windows, prices should be cheap on ebay). So, $0-$cheap + some luck.
Make your own case? Shouldn't be too hard to make something functional. This is probably the route I'll go-- there are 6 sewing machines at the hack space, and the local fabric store has four that customers can use (at no charge). With an insert made of poly sheet up-cycled from an old 3-ring binder, it should be pretty equivalent in protection to a commercial case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:44PM
Left out a few words. "This is probably the route I'll go [with the PineNote]."
I was still thinking PineNote from an unrelated thread above.
But, nothing keeping you from making your own case for the Remarkable too.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:03AM
Clarification: it uses the same licensed wacom technology that other pen displays typically use, such as the "s-pen" pens from Samsung's Galaxy Note line, so anything compatible with that will work, like Staedtler's Noris Digital "pencil". It WILL NOT work with pens from normal wacom products like the ones from their Intuos, Intuos Pro, and Cintiq line-ups. Those are different and incompatible, which makes sense, because they tend to have more/better features and specs. I guess Wacom doesn't license their best stuff out, preferring to save it for themselves. Or maybe it's a compatibility thing, where they're trying to stick to a single spec for licensed digitisers so that manufacturers can take advantage of cross-device compatibility, but they don't have to follow that with their own hardware.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 01 2021, @02:17PM
Wacom pens are frequently specific to the model of tablet, and Any Old Tablet may not speak to Random Pen from eBay.
Here's a compatibility list... it's four pages long:
https://machollywood.com/blogs/news/wacom-pen-compatibility [machollywood.com]
and more info:
https://machollywood.com/blogs/news/wacom-tablets-and-cintiqs-with-compatible-pens [machollywood.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Mockingbird on Monday September 27 2021, @10:26PM (1 child)
So this is just a cleverly disguised advertisement, after all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:27AM
It's generated a reasonable discussion and it is certainly a technology/hardware topic. The fact that some comment are comparing prices with its rivals does not make this an advertisement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27 2021, @10:46PM
Gets better... they're moving to a subscription model so you can pay monthly to use all the exciting features. No thanks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:42AM
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:50PM
Can I get it without systemd?
Can I install a different Linux system?
Can I get more RAM or so-called disk?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 30 2021, @01:13AM
Does it do sshfs in both directions?