OP here. thanks for all the comments. some more info:
rmkit is a library (and group of devs) for creating apps on the rM (and now Kobo). outside of rmkit, people typically use Qt to write apps, but there's many routes[0], including SAS[1]: a solution that uses unix pipes. the rM2 requires a bit more hacking to get working than the rM1 because their framebuffer driver[2] is embedded in their software for rM2 and requires updating rm2fb every time remarkable releases a new update. there's alternative drivers[3] to drive the display in development.
i will keep updating the article based on feedback, thank you and keep hacking
To (maybe?) add to your list: The e-paper smart display that I am making and selling does also allow users to build their own content. There are two different ways:
1. You can either just serve an image on a URL and the device will display it, refreshing whenever the image changes:
To be fully transparent: I know that many people are using the first approach to display their own designs, but I haven't had much uptake yet on the second option to build a public, installable app. So if anyone is interested in trying this out, please contact me! I am willing to cooperate closely and iterate on the API where necessary.
(I hope that this is sufficiently relevant, even though I am tooting my own horn here.)
I know this is probably extremely eye rolling to read, but I looked at the store page, was quite interested, saw the "mobile app" and immediately had second thoughts because it just puts the device in e-waste when:
- You stop updating the app and my phone OS wont run it,
- My phone stops updating its OS and cant run the app, or
- The walled garden gates lock shut on you for whatever reason and I cant install the app, or
- You stop supporting my version of the display.
Is there any way to interact with the display without the companion app? Pushing raw bytes over the network is fine, just anything that doesn't require some phone.
In another eye rolling move, I also dont really consider a response of "we promise to opensource the companion app, or unlock the device if we go out of business" viable (what if you die unexpectedly?, or simply, dont care to follow through?).
But there is another dependency that you haven't mentioned: The device requires a running backend with an API.
At the moment, my only answer to that is: "I'll keep it running even if it becomes uneconomical and I will then also open-source everything.".
But I am also intending to add a way to completely avoid the backend, which will require users to render the data in a specific format to the device.
Supporting this is totally worth the effort for me. If only to put my own mind at ease a bit!
But, and there I have to be honest, I have limited resources to work on things. There are other features that I feel are very pressing as well. And so I cannot promise when I will find the time to implement this.
Honestly; a (?rest?) API to push content and trigger updates would potentially cause me to buy immediately if I can self host all the required parts. I've been trying to come up with a household GTD system for awhile now and i can see some clean integrations.
Why require a backend? Presumably, that means (in the best case) you end up handling credentials for unknown http end points. In the worst case, the backend sees the data being rendered, and now you have to deal with European and California data handling compliance.
What if the device had a mode to let people connect to an API via a lan connection? That would solve all the privacy issues I just mentioned, and also improve reliability when the internet is flaky. It would also solve the e-waste problem if your backend shuts down.
What do you think of configuring the device with a simple config file or even an sqlite database that is available via mass storage? Here I am taking inspiration from Kobo.
The config would point to the API that a user can deploy. Exposing more knobs through a config would be much easier than through a mobile app.
Overall, I am impressed with the device and the dev-friendly documentatio. I consider buying it. My use case would be to display weather and calendar - preferably together. The OAuth2 stuff is quite complex, so I appreciate that the company handles it on the backend.
>I also dont really consider a response of "we promise to opensource the companion app, or unlock the device if we go out of business" viable (what if you die unexpectedly?, or simply, dont care to follow through?).
If the promise is real, they should make it legally binding. If you go bankrupt, you lose control over your IP and quite possibly can't choose to follow through.
Although, even then, open-sourcing the app can be expensive (you need lawyers to confirm you actually have the rights to open-source all parts of the relevant code, and if there's something you can't open-source then you need devs to write a shim, identify the relevant keys that need to be published, and hopefully write some documentation.
Software used to come with source code escrow licenses (a long time ago). A third party would certify that you had done the due diligence you just mentioned up front.
I’d like to see legislation requiring this for any software that a physical device needs in order to work, but I doubt that will happen any time soon. (“Right to repair” is meaningless without something at least as strong as source code escrow)
I have one of your displays. It’s really nice. I intend to do something with option one, but I just haven’t found the time. Right now, as your targeting computer minded folks, I think your customers can figure out how to set up an image url that changes periodically, but as you scale you might want to create more accessible options. Or maybe let third parties build apps to do it for you..
But right now, I understand that building an app for my platform is
a) more hassle than just pointing to a URL
b) limited upside, because the audience that you can charge for a subscription isn't very big yet.
However, I think that a good app could generate its own audience (aka drive ppl to buy the displays) and then make money by charging them a small monthly subscription fee.
You could also seed the pool with a few sample apps. An offline-capable home assistant dashboard comes to mind. (There are already apps that run on tablets; you’d just need a theme and a way to generate screenshots in headless mode).
I don't know about the rM, but for Kobo - why not just run Linux? it literally runs Debian (and others). I've written so apps for it (e.g. https://github.com/bjesus/pidif) using GTK. It would have been great if we had a more unified eco-system for e-ink supported apps.
Usually the reason is that people want to continue using the built-in interface with just some additions, instead of replacing and maintaining a separate installation.
It would be nice if someone were to start working on an aftermarket linux distribution/ecossytem that targets eink devices. It's a lot of work to do, though, so I'm not surprised that nobody has picked up that torch yet.
Some notes on the reMarkable, it is running a custom linux distribution that is based on Openembedded Core[0]. The company publishes their modifications to the linux kernel[1], so one person has created their own linux distribution for the original reMarkable tablet [2]. The reMarkable 2 currently has no native framebuffer driver for the screen, due to it being software controlled by the UI application, which requires a workaround for custom applications[3].
> It would be nice if someone were to start working on an aftermarket linux distribution/ecossytem that targets eink devices. It's a lot of work to do, though, so I'm not surprised that nobody has picked up that torch yet.
That is what I'm trying to do with https://github.com/bjesus/air . Kobo runs mainline Linux quite fine, and specifically PostmarketOS works great. Assembling an interface that plays nicely with the device hasn't actually been that difficult!
On a scale of a PC to having to jail break an iPhone to do custom stuff - how invasive is what you are mentioning for the RM2? I have one, love it for notes/etc. But haven't tried 3rd party software/etc on it.
https://remarkable.guide/ has a bunch of current information on the state of hacking your device. You have root access out of the box, which means how invasive it is depends on how you go about it. The community is trying their best to stick to a set of standards that keeps things from being too brittle, and "just works".
I definitely think you're on to something, but there's something lacking. E-ink that can be rolled up, folded, connected to utility compute or local rigs for semi-intelligent agents to crawl through the noise and chafe and ads and malware... that's the true punk aesthetic. though with current llm's, i'm not sure we're that far from it. With a mid-range rig running a llama-based agent and some l33t programming skills to glue things together I might be close to something on the low end of the this, somewhat untethered to corporate guardrails. And perhaps someone might stumble upon a guarded GPT-6 model circled by a fortress of cold security, a model ironically named wintermute....
It's not locked down at all, it's just that the included software and attendant cloud is for pay. You can just as well SSH into device (the password is available on settings screen), copy stuff yourself or install a daemon that will backup files or whatever.
Just remember to ensure you have some form of recovery prepared or make the necessary pogo connector just in case.
as long as you have SSH keys and you don't blow away your home partition, you are mostly fine. you do need a slightly older version of Xochitl, though (3.2 and below)
Just back from a reading session in my Kobo, and I sent this article to it of course :) (through Firefox/Pocket). I can even read in the swimming pool (it's water resistant), nothing better than reading in sunglasses halfway in on a sunny day, awesome!!! And it doesn't weigh as much as some books. While I still prefer paper for certain reads, it has definitely helped get back into the habit of reading real books/reading more, so lost to smartphones and social media / "sugar" information type content these days. So convenient in terms of size/weight/number of books you can carry, while being easy on the eyes. No distracting crap, either, as TFA mentions.
i’m always worried it’s just around the corner from outliving its usefulness/profitability to most people. even within my tech/gadget bubble it still feels like a relatively niche thing. this keeps me upgrading my Kindle pretty much anytime a new one comes out because i’m always worried the technology will be discarded. i really love the fact that i can fall asleep reading on it pretty naturally. this DOES NOT happen when i’m in bed on my phone or tablet. i’m glad to see devices like reMarkable and Scribe pushing it further, and i just hope research continues to get the tech to a point where it can refresh quickly without artifacting at near lcd quality. and yeah, it’s nice to have a device where i physically can’t distract myself with inane social media or other silly things. i’m generally of the Alton Brown thought that anything uni-task is unnecessary, but i’ll continue to make a happy exception here.
My wife and I have Kindles for one purpose: reading outside. We use iPads inside (I’m posting from mine), but there is nothing like eInk for reading in the sun, because it looks like a book.
In a world of uni-task devices, that is one worth owning.
I'm someone who had them during the boom around 2010 or so, then found myself giving them away because they didn't seem useful, and now find myself wanting them again. Mostly I've noticed how I like to read in bed at night rather than on my phone, am not happy with the illumination options with real books in that situation, and not happy with the screens on my phone either.
I'd probably buy one immediately if I could be guaranteed I could put any pdf on it and have it display flawlessly, and if it were relatively open in terms of compatibility.
I'm getting a lot of use out of my ancient Sony DPT-S1 for this purpose. It has a huge screen but is very light and well-balanced so holding it for long periods is not a problem for me, compared to holding a similarly-sized lcd tablet. I've converted most of my epub ebooks to pdf (thank you Calibre) just so I can enjoy reading them on this device.
I got one too and they really rock! I read papers on them mostly and the odd text book. I had a Kindle fire reading novels but have last it recently. I'll maybe take a sieve or of your book (ha!) and try converting everything to PDF, but I really like the built in dictionary on kindles. just wish The DPT-S1 was open to writing your own apps for, I would have done it by now.
I love my Kobo as well. It’s pretty old now but durable and still works fine. Here in Canada it works with my local public library using Overdrive. I also use the Libby app on my iPhone. Libby is great for discovering stuff, it’s fast and beautiful.
So I find books with Libby, check them out, then hit sync on the Kobo and they all show up. It’s brilliant. I used to torrent books and now I never do, I just borrow from the library constantly, and I love how having to make choices (because not everything is always available) widens the scope of what I’ll try reading.
Brilliant, this is exactly how my wife reads, and I've been dreading getting her a Kindle and her not using it or making me do endless syncing for her.
I've already had my eye on Kobo, but Libby support seals the deal I think.
Honestly, I have no idea, like I said it's really old. It's waterproof, so maybe an H2O? I don't think you can really go wrong, although take a look at online reviews before purchase. Mine is fairly small (like small paperback dimensions), which I thought I might not like, but in practice it's never been an issue and I like the portability. And the battery life is great, I read a lot and I can go weeks without charging. Another bonus with them is that they support non-DRM ebook formats, so if you have books lying around you can just transfer them to the device.
In terms of Libby support, keep in mind that the method I am talking about doesn't depend on any interaction between the Kobo and Libby. I think it's all based on Overdrive, that is, I check books out from the library, and the Kobo knows what I have checked out and syncs anything that isn't on the device already. My kids have newer Kobos and this method works well for them too, so you should be good.
It's bonkers to me how the whole hardware/software world seems to miss the actual best feature of e-ink: it's visible in sunlight. It chaps my ass every day that it's only possible to sit in a semi-dark room if for my working hours – during the day no less!
YES I am aware there are ways to hook an e-ink screen to my laptop. But that's such a kludge! How is it that there are so few options, how is it nobody is thinking about the health benefits of knowledge workers being able to spend half their day in the sun?
Sorry for the rant, it's just big tech brain that very few product developers think in this way. Humans are meant to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine, not locked to a damn screen all day.
Surprisingly, some laptop LCDs work fine for software development in bright sunlight outdoors. They switch to reflective mode so don't depend on the backlight. My old laptop had one, and it wasn't even an advertised feature. More detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063449
To be honest, that’s kind of what I already do. MacBook Air with a portable battery gives me about 12 hours. I live in BC so I’ll grab a coffee, drive up the mountain where I can get cell service (not needed in all cases) and just code away until I run out of battery, coffee or energy. The future is here.
yes, I've been thinking about this too, and I've talked to other people who have had the same fever dream. the children yearn for the dumb terminal.
this isn't a hardware product (people here have mentioned an e-ink tablet that can sideload, that plus a keyboard plus a battery, or ESP32-S3 etc) but rather a software product.
and that software is the glorious resurrection of vt320/vt330 buffered/paged terminals. because that's what's going to minimize your terminal's power consumption. you need to brutally minimize the number of bytes you transmit, which means having relatively small working set for any assist features (eg things like debugging might be nicer with a local variable cache). A large persistent eMMC or flash storage (but optimized for doing some decent writes) might be nice for those things. 32GB or 64GB goes a long way in a dumb-terminal context, you can use that like a portion of your RAM load if you code carefully.
btle can do some active data transmission in realtime and it has the basic "beacon, I'm still here" etc, and you can use the notification-push thing for server-side async ops. And ideally you'd use your phone as a BTLE client that routes packets/data or provides your server-side api. This can be done even on apple with the Bluetooth Browser thingy, your self-hosted website can interact with your BT device and that'll be your relay.
in an interactive scenario with an IDE-ish thing and a larger working set maybe you use more power but if you're running a nano/pico clone onboard that's dirt simple and can be done with simple buffer flush etc. And most of the ESP32-S3s come with 8MB of external SRAM.
The other major power draw is the USB, I think you could bring that down a lot with an actual hardware circuit wired right to the ESP32.
Again like, the e-ink tablet with an external KB is simple and lets you get tinkering with the editing experience in that kind of form factor! but I also think you can cut power way below that if you use something like the ESP32-S3 and BTLE with aggressive onboard caching. Don't forget to minimize power in idledown mode, and idledown as aggressively as possible. Running the keyboard as an interrupt-driven thing could cut power a lot if you can idle down between keypresses.
The killer problem with e-ink is the pricing betrays that the yield absolutely tanks as the area increases, which is true of semiconductors and other display technologies, but in the case of e-ink seems to be that much worse.
Part of the success of things like GPUs is their ability to degrade gracefully in the presence of one or two errors which would otherwise render the whole thing unusable.
If this is the case, then it would seem to me that the ability to produce modular e-ink displays, where segments are individual, independent displays, would be an option.
This is most tenable for large-scale displays (e.g., wall displays), and we're already used to segmented "television walls" in which borders between individual displays is strongly evident. The trick would be for such compound devices to both match one another's display characteristics (brightness / shading / hue), and for borders to be made as undetectable as possible (several possible mechanisms suggest themselves to me as I write this).
Given the sweet spot of 8--10" displays, compound devices made of multiples of these would seem to be at least a conceptual possibility. 16x8 displays would give 32" diagonal measure, 300 dpi, and assuming 50% BOM cost might run less than the 25" Onxy BOOX Mira Pro ($1,750).
LCDs are incredibly simple to manufacture compared to e-ink displays. Also, the best cleanroom technology in the world goes to LCD manufacturing facilities thanks to the incredible economies of scale available.
One dust particle per 12" square loses you 1 of 100 CPUs. It loses you 100% of your 50" TVs.
Also, CPU manufacturing facilities keep the insides of the machines cleaner than the facility, containing the wafers in transit between machines, and LCD manufacturers do not have the same luxury.
That lost CPU would still have potentially been worth several times as much as the 50" TV though. Intel server CPUs especially. Entry level laptop CPUs not so much. ;)
I assure you that losing 1% of the CPUs on a production line is a lot less of a disaster than losing 100% of the TVs. In one case, you have something you can do to improve yield, and in the other case you have a complete waste.
While that kind of makes some sense, it doesn't necessarily mean that LCD clean rooms are therefore the best clean room tech in the world.
I mean, I'm not saying they aren't, I just don't know. And the explanation you're presenting as the likely reason doesn't really bear that out. So far anyway. :)
I am saying it because I know it to be true. Someone later asked why LCD factories would invest in cleaner rooms than CPU fabs, and I explained the logic.
I think you're expecting some sort of first-principles argument as to why that ought to be true (or worse, asking someone to waste a bunch of time digging up a public citation on the details of factory design), which you're not going to get handed to you on a silver platter. To put it bluntly, if you want to think about it from first principles, go for it, it's not that hard. If you want a source for something covered under NDAs, you can go do the work yourself.
you can't just go by retail price though, it becomes a question of whether it's cheaper to implement a better clean room or to just slightly scale up production to account for breakage
I'd really like to have a large e-ink display on my wall showing various dashboards, but I can't justify the exorbitant cost. It would be really elegant to have a low powered programmable setup with an Arduino and a battery, but I'm tempted to just buy a large LCD display and connect it to mains instead.
It's a shame that this technology is kept artifically out of reach to hobbyists.
I've seen the Waveshare displays, but they're too small and limited in features (monochrome or few colors, very high refresh rate, etc.).
I’ve looked at your product multiple times and every time I think I wanna buy one. Then I go to the webpage and I see that it only works with Google which is not what I use so then I get sad and leave.
I’d buy one in a heartbeat if there was support for iCalendar or other common/open standards.
If you get CalDAV working, you will support a ton of non-gmail/outlook providers for 'free' including those that are self-hosted. For e.g. runbox, mailbox.org, mailo, etc. all provide caldav to their users - some of these also support exchange but in my 'research', caldav was universal.
Have you considered using multiple of the current displays together in a single product, presenting them as a single view to the user? Does that help with the pricing?
The largest devices I'm aware of are E-ink displays. Onyx produces the Onyx BOOX Mira Pro, 25.3" diagonal, based on the E Ink Carta, 25,3", resolution of 3200x1800 dots, 145 ppi, 16 shades of grey.
Note that the pixel density is markedly lower than other e-ink devices. For smaller devices, e.g., the Poke 5, DPI is more than double at 300 dpi (comparable to a laser printer): 6", E Ink Carta Plus, 16 shades of grey, 1072 × 1448 dots, pixel density - 300 ppi
Granted: with increased viewing distance, resolution can fall somewhat, but given that areal density falls as the, well, square, this is 4x lower resolution.
The Mira Pro runs an eye-watering $1,750, further impeding the viewing experience. Given price trends on other E-Ink devices, I'm pretty sure that's all but entirely driven by the display cost itself.
The screens are expensive for everybody. For devices with e-ink display, the screen is often more than the rest of the BOM combined. That's why there are only premium device on the market, except Kindle, which is subsidized by Amazon.
When they first appeared, I was sure the price would drop with increasing volumes, but that has not happened. Probably they can't get good enough yield, and it's not a product suitable to sell with dead pixels, like a TV, where cheap models have dead pixels while the premium models don't.
It possibly hasn't happened because, at least from what I've heard previously here on HN, the e-ink company has a monopoly on the patents needed to make them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
It sounds like they might have just recently expired but I imagine there is a catchup phase.
In the link you posted, please scroll down to the reply by Robinsoh - the "patent thicket" claim is bullshit, and people keep repeating the myth without a real source to back it up.
E-ink is expensive because it's a niche product that lacks economy of scale, and it's a niche product because it does almost nothing that can't be done by LCDs (which are incredibly flexible). E-ink is amazing, but it doesn't have the best business case.
To be honest, that commenter probably knows more than I do about the tech. But on the business side, I think that would be a stronger position if there wasn't just one single company that owns the entire market. OLEDs were originally very expensive, niche, and had yield problems but competition has driven development -- bringing prices down, improving yields, and solving many the issues that made them a niche application.
The commenter said that a billion dollars are needed to make the technology scale but The EInk Corporation itself raised only 1/10th of that and now they're making a billion dollars per year off it -- why haven't they brought prices down then?
If you look at their annual reports, EInk sure seems to think their patents are important; they mention patents as part of their "strategic roadmap" every year. Their initial patents were in the late 90s, and the last few years the royalty revenue amounts on E Ink's revenue breakdowns have been dropping every single year as they shift more and more into actually making the screens. The data lines up IMO.
The big commercial selling point of E-ink is that it should be able to survive zero power.
I assume that's why its first killer app has been pricetags. A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries or having to reprogram units if they popped out of a plug or rail-basewd power system.
I think some of the interest from the hobbyist brows is less about that and more about other aspects of the technology-- it has a bit of a distinct look and excellent full-sun readability.
A hypothetical nonbacklit high res grayscale LCD would have some similar properties and might be more viable at small scale; I know they're making basically that in small sizes for use in resin 3D printers.
Yes, e-ink pricetags are one niche of e-ink devices. The other niche is e-readers (which are a luxury version of installing an e-reading app on your phone). Maybe the niche of solar-powered billboards (e.g. bus-stop signs) will also take off, but that's about it.
E-ink is great, but it is niche and basically everything that you can do with an EPD, you can do with an LCD. E-ink screens are in the at best tens of millions, whereas LCDs are in the billions per quarter - there are over 6 billion smartphone owners in the world already, and LCDs are in everything from supermarket self-checkout kiosks to laptops to smart fridges, they utterly demolish E-Ink in scale.
I love e-ink screens, but there's no denying the tech's business-case is rather marginal and that won't change anytime soon.
>A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries
Errr, not really. LCD price tags existed before e-ink (and still do) and battery life was not much worse. It's something like 1.5x-2x tops, so enough to make business sense, but not orders of magnitudes earth shattering as one might assume.
In fact, most retail shops that have anything other than paper use LCD price tags. If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them... and then any eInk battery life advantage evaporates.
> If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them...
Not necessarily that. They're making the switch to digital price tags because it's much quicker and easier to run promos on certain items to clear the shelves before closing time on perishable goods, but most importantly, they're making the switch because when employee have to manually change paper price tags, mistakes happen far too often, and stores end up in situations where the price on the self doesn't match the price on the cash register, angering customers who in certain jurisdictions are entitled to compensation for the store's pricing mistake.
Digital price tags ensure such mistakes are gone saving the store money over time.
Digital wrist watches can go 10+ years on a single battery, and they typically have transistors switching at 32kHz (as opposed to price tags, which could be completely static until you press a button).
I'm not sure I agree with that; I paid €120 for my PocketBook e-reader, which wasn't the cheapest one, and I bought it in-store (could have gotten a better price online probably, but comparing devices in-store was useful).
Now, while €120 isn't nothing, it's also not a whole lot, and it's cheap enough that with a few books a year you're saving money.
Amazon's 6" Kindle sells for €110 by the way, but is missing some features my Pocketbook has, and the 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite with comparable features sells for €170. Doesn't seem that much cheaper to me.
Are you sure it's artificial and not related to yields? As in, it's more likely you get a dead pixel on a larger screen.
The answer would be "chiplets" of course, assembling bigger screens out of smaller ones. At the hobby leven, I think something decent could be built out of a few second hand kindle screens, if you plan the seams as part of the aesthetic.
> As in, it's more likely you get a dead pixel on a larger screen.
Aside from the ink capsules and higher voltage (though still very low), E ink is almost identical to LCD and probably slightly easier to make. There's a TFT (which can have a larger footprint, since it doesn't need to be transparent) on the back, an LC or E ink capsule layer, and an ITO electrode. Dead pixels are almost always caused by damage or defects in the TFT.
I wouldn't say it's artificially out of reach, though- setting a line up to produce large panels is a high opportunity cost. If anything is artificial about it, it's that you presumably can't buy E ink capsules yourself. With enough effort you might be able to separate the top glass from an LCD TV, dissolve the LC, and replace it with E ink, but I have no idea how you'd do that. No promises it wouldn't burn out the TFT immediately.
>E ink is almost identical to LCD and probably slightly easier to make
False. E-ink film, especially color, is definitely more complex to get right than LCDs. Sure, e-ink displays have the same TFT layer underneath just like LCD displays, but the e-ink pigment and film is tricky to make.
I have had this bookmarked for a few years to do as a side project but the acquisition of a new son has put all this aside for the foreseeable future unfortunately, perhaps you can make use of it:
Would strongly recommend using another language than PHP to make it work, but the LLM du jour would probably translate it to any other language for you.
I was making a humorous reference to startup life. You don't normally say that in English, I was playing with the language. My son is actually awesome, and yes, he is an "addition" (sum of one total). =)
Thank you for learning English! As a speaker of (to some extent) 3 other languages, I for one appreciate anyone who has struggled to learn English as an (N+1)th language.
They don't - the Display Electronic Slurry (DES) is a competing 'e-paper' tech that E-Ink corp haven't patented. It has slightly different pros and cons (it has a more defined checkerboard pattern which isn't as nicely grainy as E-Ink corp's MED, but it let's them pour the 'ink' straight into the substrate which potentially has higher contrast and resolution as a result), but ultimately that's irrelevant nitpicking if patents are causing the price of E-Ink screens to be crazily high as people keep falsely claiming. If DES could deliver screens at half the price, then Wiwood (?) would eat E-Ink's lunch.
Expiry isn't the issue. In America (and Canada I'm pretty sure) you have the right to use a patent at a fair cost determined by a court. Or you can try to just use the patent anyway and wait for the court case to come to you.
There are a few exceptions in US law (e.g., provisions in the Defense Production Act) that can allow a patent owner to be compelled to license their IP. IANAL but I believe this generally requires an officially declared emergency of some kind.
There are additional exceptions short of a declared emergency, but rarely invoked. So in practice I agree this is unlikely to happen with e-ink displays. But for legal nerds I'll elaborate anyway.
Some exceptions are obviously inapplicable here, e.g. special rules for plant varieties [1] and nuclear energy [2]. The one most likely to apply to e-ink displays is that, under the Bayh-Dole act, if an invention was funded by government grants, and the patent holder fails to make it widely available, the government has so-called "march-in rights" to license it to third parties themselves. However this has never been successfully used. Wikipedia summarizes: "Though this right is, in theory, quite powerful, it has not proven so in terms of its practical application" [3].
[1] Perhaps because it's controversial to allow plant varieties to be patented in the first place, the statute for them has an explicit compulsory license clause (see the last subsection): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/chapter-57/subchap...
Thanks for the correction, I misremembered that, it seems. On the other hand, an SEP holder not licensing the patent with FRAND terms will have a hard time to establish any kind of standard, in some scenarios.
I agree with you, it would be counterproductive. The more common occurrance is that one of the patent-holding entities opts out of the FRAND agreement, holding all the implementors of the standard hostage. An example would be Forgent's acquisition of a patent they interpreted to be essential to JPEG. The patent was eventually invalidated in the courts, but it caused a lot of headaches for a few years in the early 2000s.
>It's a shame that this technology is kept artifically out of reach to hobbyists.
This is a myth. They're not artificially expensive, they just have low economy of scale because they're a niche product. As you yourself said, you're tempted to just buy a large LCD display instead.
Why does it need a power cable? To me the main selling point of e-ink displays is that they should be able to last weeks if not months on a single charge...
I want to make a version with a battery. But I don't know when I will get this done. My goal is to make it last at least half a year. 6 months I think is the minimum standard for a thing that is supposed to hang on the wall and not be a hassle to babysit.
A battery adds a lot of complexity and cost for testing, certification and shipping. And it adds another failure mode.
So I decided against it for the current version.
There are some E-ink fans in the urbit community (disclaimer I work on this stuff) and it really lets you fully extend the retropunk feel.
I’ve got my Urbit running on a native planet hardware box (https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/product-review-nativ...) plugged into my router’s switch that I can access from anywhere. The UI for groups also looks good on e-ink (mostly white and black, nice design) one of the devs has an e-ink phone that shows it off. It’s cool to really own the entire stack.
I had the original remarkable tablet mentioned in the post and it was really cool (someone was also using it as a browser to access urbit back then), the new tablet looks better too.
There was someone at the first urbit assembly (probably here on HN) working on cool new e-ink style tech that had some advantages without having to engage with all the patent nonsense and vendor lock-in that has plagued (imo seriously stalled) e-ink as a technology.
This is the first time I'm hearing about Urbit and, having spent the past 5-10 minutes browsing their website(s), I still haven't been able to figure out what it is exactly. Could you explain? And what do you use it for?
Hopefully that’s helpful. It’s a little outdated now though. We’re doing free hosting for now at tlon.io to help the network grow (so it’s easy to check it out).
I wonder what kind of interesting applications could be done on e-ink harnessing the advantages of the long battery life and not suffering by the slow refresh rate. Sure, porting doom or implementing a terminal is an interesting and probably challenging feat, but still it's applications that don't shine on an e-ink device.
Maybe some "slow" strategy game, that updates upon certain events but might remain unmodified for hours at a time?
Or - more in general - an application that is required to be on for a long time but really doesnt' change often.
I think eInk price labels are now getting to be quite a common thing in some stores - while it's probably not fair/legal to change prices while the store is open, it means prices can be updated very easily overnight.
A traditional roguelike, in the line of TGGW/Cogmind/Nethack/Brogue/DCSS, would probably be nice. Not really a "slow strategy game", granted, but the fact that animations/colors aren't necessary makes it a good fit IMO
I’d be remiss not to mention that we (Pimoroni) sit right at the hacker end of the E-ink scale with stuff like Badger2040W [1] and Inky Frame [2], both of which pair (small and less small) E-Ink panels with the RP2040 microcontroller so you can BYO software.
The biggest roadblock to these being super compelling is update rate. The black/white screen on Badger can be driven pretty hard, but overdriving it (a friend built a continuous E-ink zoetrope [3]) has consequences.
Inky Frame’s 7 colour display is awesome for dithered artwork (missing cyan and magenta notwithstanding) but very, very slow to refresh- ~30s after the panels were updated to incorporate an unskippable “clean” phase.
Faster, cheaper and bigger all seem mutually exclusive right now, but I share the authors passion for the format.
I’m a little disappointed that this doesn’t go into the off the shelf screens from waveshare. That’s where the fun really is for me at least. I wrote an epub reader in Python and built an eReader with a raspberry pi. I guess it’s a little less hacking and more so developing.
Or anywhere, really. This statement: "Grab a reMarkable or Kobo and get hacking" isn't realistic to me. I don't run out and buy current products that cost $300 to "get hacking."
Hacking on a panel scrounged from a discontinued product, or a bare one, sure. But when you're spending multiple hundreds of dollars for a new part, I don't consider that the hacker realm.
Nothing against the author; I've been looking at E-ink for a long time and this page is inspiring. But in the end, the cost turns me away yet again. Also the pitiful refresh rates I've seen...
Look for a second hand device then? I don't know what the situation is like for Remarkable, but Kobo has been around for over a decade and used ones are floating around the second hand market. (The Kobo Touch was introduced over a decade ago and is hackable.) If you're willing to scavange just the screen, there are even more options since you don't have to worry about the device itself being locked down. The drawback with scavenging screens is you have to figure out how to interface to the screen, which is quite the barrier to entry.
Doing a write up has been a plan of mine for a while now lol I bought a 3d printer to move on from the gutted airpods box and a case has been in a half printed state just waiting for me to design the rest of it. I've run into a creative wall and haven't gotten much further.
Speaking of e-ink devices, is there a more-open equivalent to the amazon/kindle ebook store? Some site you can use to legally purchase and download ebooks for non-kindle devices? Or can you do that via Amazon now?
Google Play Books is pretty good on any device that runs it. You can also upload your own ebooks quite easily (and then sync progress/annotations across devices), which is great for my collection of .epub files that mysteriously fell off a truck...
This seems to depend upon the author/publisher more than anything else. It also seems to heavily depend upon the type of book (e.g. DRM free computer and science fiction books seem to be the most common). Even when you do find a store that sells DRM free ebooks, you have to be careful about buying books that are labelled as such.
Kindle is probably not the best choice for DRM free books since ePub and PDF are the dominant formats (outside of Amazon).
You can download books from the Kobo store. Most of them use Adobe Digital Editions DRM, which is trivial to remove using calibre, but some are DRM free.
A ReMarkable 2 with the Folio keyboard is almost a whole ass computer. An eMacs-like development environment where buffers also had layers that could intermingle strokes with text and it would be perfect.
I’d hack my own but I’m a little paranoid of bricking it with only one hardware button.
The ReMarkable 2 needs the proprietary Xochitl binary to update the screen (there's a shim, but it needs to be updated every time Xochitl updates), but the ReMarkable 1 doesn't have this problem, and already has a port of Parabola Linux, Parabola-RM (no WiFi due to Linux-libre, although you can compile it with them included): http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
Plus, the ReMarkable 1 has a total of four hardware buttons, and is even 50g lighter! Plus it's power button doesn't get stuck.
Half as many cores, half the ram, and way less battery life due to higher power draw during suspend for some reason. It doesn't support the keyboard folio either. Depending on your criteria, one, or the other, is the better device.
I put code-server[1] on a Linux box of mine, which gives me a whole proper IDE in the browser. I use it a lot on my Boox tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and it works great.
I really wonder what would have happened in the e-ink patents didn't get locked up, and the technology had a chance to evolve for a couple more decades like LCD has.
I'm working on an e-ink theme for Obsidian[1]. So far it's working on Boox devices, but I wish I could get it running on reMarkable. I'm not as clued into the reMarkable ecosystem, does anyone know if they will eventually add an app store or better tools for developers?
>I really wonder what would have happened in the e-ink patents didn't get locked up
This is a myth endlessly repeated without evidence. LCDs have patents up the wazoo (OLEDs etc, plenty of new screen techs), it didn't stop them being developed. E-Ink just doesn't ha e any economy of scale, and it hasn't had an easy route toward economy of scale in the future, it's fairly niche in it's use-cases when it's competing with LCDs.
If ReMarkable ever adds an app store, I'll eat my RM2*. They suffer from Apple syndrome and it goes against their "digital paper" schtick.
You should check out hyperpaper, and maybe let's build an obsidian plugin with similar functionality. The problem right now with obsidian is pen input lag atleast on my Onyx device.
Hey, hyperpaper creator here! One of my long term dreams for the project is to make those pdfs usable as an input source for PKMs like Obsidian. I love the promise of full-featured PKMs (searchability, long-term retention) but I don't want to be on a laptop for hours curating and typing into them. An eInk tablet is my preferred note-taking and thinking device.
The idea I want to eventually pursue is set up a service where you could sync your pdf (or send specific pages via email), have them OCRed (including dates and titles specifically since they already live in well-defined parts of the pages), and then ingest them into your PKM for long-term storage and recall
Unfortunately Obsidian Cloud doesn't seem to have an API to support this at present, but I think it's theoretically feasible with Notion at least. Let me know if you build something like this :)
That's actually really similar to the digital infrastructure I'm building for myself. It's deceptively hard. I also want automatic tagging and two way updating between PDFs and the filesystem on my laptop. You can contact me at shreyssecondbrain at gmail
I love all the things from Niklaus Wirth I know, but I only casually know about Oberon. From a glance I don't see the connection. Could you elaborate why this would be a good fit.
I haven't touched Oberon since the 90s. But it was a fun little system.
The language is one of the nicer Pascal descendents. The windowing system was similar to tiling. The entire system was tiny in terms of code. Everything was black and white.
One of the nicest features was universally embeddable widgets. You could make a simple clock and embed it in running text, for example. Kind of like what OpenDoc dreamed of, or Google Wave's inline widgets, or what it might be like if you could extend Discord with custom UI in a few hundred lines of code.
I wasn't motivated to keep using Oberon—it was honestly too odd and too small to compete with my other desktop options.
But I do agree it would be neat to try with an eInk display. It's a small, interesting, black-and-white system with a minimalist UI. Particularly if you customized the UI input layer, it could be a neat tool for building small household dashboards.
It's a simple and small system that renders directly to a framebuffer (Project Oberon only supports black and white), it's optimized for simple CPU architectures (and that's an understatement), extremely small footprint and doesn't have a lot of resource usage.
I love e-ink and simple interfaces. I don't believe in low-powered hardware, however.
This said remarkable 2 is so underpowered it's impractical. I love the paper-like experience, but I never use it for any important notes because I can't find anything ever. For example copying and pasting more than a trivial amount can take minutes (i.e. it blocks for minutes) and scrolling is just painful. Writing is not always accurate and you can get weirdly thick lines, etc. All of this can be fixed with better hardware and more performance, but I suspect the experience vs cost ratio is logarithmic/exponential.
While scribbling in Goodnotes an iPad pro is not as "rewarding", actually working is so much better.
I have a kobo libra. What would be the easiest way to get terminal app (with ssh client as a minimum) running on that? I'm thinking it would be a nice really thin client with low energy consumption.
You should be able to use telnet to connect to the CLI of the device by turning on developer mode. By typing devmode in the search bar.
From there you should be able to install a dropbear ssh client to instead be able to connect using ssh.
There should be more information online.
I bought a Boox despite not trusting the OS - and never getting online with it - because I like to sketch in color. I would've rather bought any other platform, if there was one with sort-of-useful color e-ink. But I actually really like their interface. It's one of the best overlay-interfaces I've ever seen over anything (and this is over full Android, slightly bent). It's a pleasure to use, as long as you keep it airgapped and don't trust it further than you could throw it.
I’ve been dreaming of a truly programmable (not just apps) e-ink watch with 4g or at least WiFi for a while.
A week-long battery life, cellular connectivity, visibility in the sunlight, and it should be cheap if it’s cost+ priced.
Oh the things I’d put on it. I could host an API on my server where I’d ask GPT to summarise recent events or my email metadata and calendar events.
I could probably finally ditch my smartphone for good.
There are some LoRa watches that last quite long. So I wonder if WiFi or 4g, at least at intervals, would make a week-long battery with low hundreds or slightly under a hundred of of mAh impossible.
I was under the impression there were a few big issues with the openness of the reMarkable. Don't remember the details, but at some point I decided it wouldn't be for me. But this seems like I may be wrong?
This seems like there should be good ways for a) easy sync and b) OCR without relying on their subscription (that's required, no?).
I would recommend looking at the Supernote. I did a ton of research and the ReMarkable seems very oddly limited. Supernote A5X is one of the best purchases I’ve made in 10 years easily.
Idk about hackability and whatnot but as far as a useful e-reader, note book, sketchbook, planner, it’s amazing.
Not exactly true. there is an experimental display driver that does not require xochitl[0]. There hasn't been enough need for replacing the current rm2fb solution yet to drive completing it yet.
> https://hyperpaper.me/ Configurable, highly linked PDF planner with a very responsive person behind it (I figure he must be around here somewhere :))
Hey, that's me :D
Thanks for the shout-out Ethan, I'm happy to answer any questions people have about hyperpaper
Yes, I can do that– the main change is just the amount of space available for the toolbar. Just mention it in the order form and I'll follow up with a custom build
I have a supernote a5x, it's amazing. Extremely useful for marking up pdfs.
> Idk about hackability and whatnot but as far as a useful e-reader, note book, sketchbook, planner, it’s amazing.
You can currently "sideload" apps. It's not officially supported but the Supernote team appear to appreciate people tinkering. Adding an official means of installing apps has been in the road map for a while.
> You guys are really exploring! A kind warning, installing third-party apps on your device may cause problems, as our kernel is optimized for E-Ink screens. We cannot guarantee a good experience with third-party apps if they are installed through unofficial methods. We are in the process of adding an official app store and support for sideloading, so please kindly wait.
shameless plug: I'm loving my PostmarketOS powered Kobo and even built a small interface for it: https://github.com/bjesus/air and would highly recommend it to fellow hackers.
I use it pretty much daily for reading, and occasionally for all sorts of hacking fun.
I still have my OG backlit kindle. It's showing its age with a tiny tear that lets backlight through, but I'm still pushing through books on it. I'd be curious how these newer E-ink displays have improved, wonder what the refresh rate (hz?) is on them.
From what I know the improvement is minor but noticable. There is less ghosting, a bit more contrast and it's more reactive to the touch. The newer models can even play videos half decently (i.e. you can somewhat understand what's going on on the screen)
I love these throwbacks. It reminds me of my old Palm m500. There is something so comfortable about Palm OS. I can't quite grasp it but the Palm experience is simply exquisite and I have never seen it replicated anywhere.
This article is talking about hacking existing E-ink ebook readers with custom made software/OS but why stop there?
Imagine an open ecosystem whereby we can have low power embedded systems running Linux OS or RTOS for plethora of computing/sensing/IoT useful applications on top low cost MPU that need rudimentary or sophisticated GUI e.g. dashboard, virtual buttons,etc [1].
[1] STM32MP2: ST’s first Linux capable 64-bit MPU with NPU, GPU and TSN
This seems to be another efforts in ebook reader direction. It will be good if we can move beyond ebook paradigm, and create an open hardware and software ecosystem, with generic low power and low cost computing applications based on E-ink display.
There is "punk", the mass-produced apolitical corporate aesthetic, and there is "punk", as in, Mark Fisher's k-punk blog, Wikileaks, The Internet Archive, a lot of Aaron Swartz's work, knitting your own hats, DIY and the right to repair, open hardware, cycling everywhere, and so on.
I'm not saying this isn't "retropunk" - it's probably a complex mash of the two meanings of the word "punk", in reality. I do hope you push for the latter meaning, however :)
I'm using a Kobo eReader to run XCSoar, to act as a moving-map/flight computer for a sailplane [0]
It's fantastic, as it has a big battery for all-day battery life, and the display is eminently sunlight-readable. It's just a little bit of a bummer that it's tricky to ensure elements always contrast well against the map with the greyscale colour-scheme.
Would love to have the Zotero mobile-App (an Android Version seems to be in devolpment, iOS one already exists) on an eInk-Devise, ideally waterproof and with long battery life.
Iirc there are ways you can syncronize your zotero library if pdfs to one of these sorts of devices. It will be more like exposing your pile of pdfs than offering much zotero specific functionality though. Maybe thats fine though, since these devices are about reading and don’t offer much more out of that from their limits.
Side note but I really love my Kobo and its hackability. For example, you can create your own sync mechanisms [0]. And when I say hackable, I mean it: I improved the Dropbox features to use the actual API and not a "public folder" (without JS, it only allows to retrieve a few files).
The latest release handles most things without locking.
I got my 3 MMOs working on it (Java, Java+LWJGL and C+), the impressive part is both OpenGL 1 and OpenGL ES 3 work as expected, but much too slow still.
Raspberry 4 and Vision Five 2 are the contenders for relatively open and passively cooled 100% gaming.
Even if the TH1250 and RK3588 promise more juice they also consume ~10W and make more heat that in most cases require fan or very large heat sink.
it's funny that this pops up a few days before I return the remarkable 2 (through their 100-day money-back guarantee, otherwise I wouldn't have tried it).
to anyone considering buying one, if you are left-hand dominant, skip it. what most people don't understand is that being a lefty doesn't mean that you can use a mirror image of what's served to righties (in this case, the UI) and then everything is fine.
don't get me wrong, I'm returning it for several reasons - a few can be inferred from other people's comments here. I'm only putting this out there for all my sinister siblings, 'cause writing english is a pain for us.
I love e-ink devices. I'm a big fan of the remarkable tablets (despite the drawbacks) and was a big fan of pebble. E-ink was really the perfect tech for smart watches. Always on but still lasts for days or weeks.
Anyone care to recommend one of the two devices (Kobo Elipsa or RM2) mentioned? It appears the RM2 may have gotten more expensive since release? How is the relative build quality? Any key hardware differences to note?
Having tested the Remarkable 2 for a few weeks, I'd actually recommend another device: The Supernote A5X. The hardware & writing experience are a tad better IMO and the software much more so.
Also, the Remarkable devs are notoriously bad when it comes to software updates and sharing their plans for the future with the community. Meanwhile, the Supernote people even share their Trello boards over on Reddit -> https://Reddit.com/r/Supernote
The Supernote, admittedly, is not as hackable yet as the Remarkable but 1) official software updates are much more frequent and 2) there are plans to open up the device to 3rd-party Android apps.
Could you provide a source on the software updates being more frequent, as well as clarify what you mean by rM being bad at updates? rM has been pushing out updates fairly regularly this year, especially if you include their beta channel.
Fair enough, maybe this has changed then. When I last tested and looked into the rM2 in depth (~2 years ago), it was completely different. The software was lacking basic features and there wasn't any communication at all on rM's part.
I've used both for extensive periods and even with the rm2's low storage, I vastly prefer it. The Elipsa's hand-writing experience was just awful - not just laggy but non-deterministically so, their sync/export was clunky, their updates were sometimes buggy (e.g. the recent addition of GDrive import and broken export, the works-now-won't-work-again Overdrive and Pocket integration), and the ad-ridden home page. By contrast, the rm2 is heavenly and it just works well - I was never the journaling type but the rm2 manages to extract a lot of writing out of me daily because of how awesome it is. Re. the rm2 pricing, I believe it has gotten a lot cheaper since its release - 400+usd vs 300usd now, afaik; I use an aftermarket pen with it (staedtler noris jumbo). I use the rm2 for work and for personal stuff and I love it; the elipsa sits idle and powered off.
that page lists a few devices they _don't_ recommend (kindle) because they are not openly hackable. what are some ones that are more so? anyone here recommend a cheap, hackable, e-ink reader?
The author mentioned them already, but didn't recommend for violating the GPL, but I have an Onyx Boox Poke 3 and Boox Leaf that run Android that I've rooted. They're not very cheap (the Poke runs about $180). They're pretty fun devices to tinker with. https://chuck.is/rooting-onyx/
Edit: I also experimented with the Poke 3 by creating a sort of "writerdeck" setup with a bluetooth keyboard and termux, then attaching everything together with velcro and magnets: https://chuck.is/writerdeck/
Last time I looked the Nook simple touch (6 inch android eink tablet) was about £30 delivered 2nd hand. Love mine. I spent a long time (a few years ago) setting it up with all sorts of android fun, but now I just use it as a epub reader and it fits that niche perfectly for me.
ARM being a simple instruction set hardly makes it match say 286 or 386 asm as it was used in the era primarily for the fact it is not intended to be coded by hand but be compiled.
I have to say I actually find it kind of frustrating how low the specs are because you sometimes find the stupid thing chugging. While trying to display plain text. In a way a tablet is better.
i actually just finished making a epaper reader from a waveshare 4.2 display and a esp32. very primitive but works so good.
it uses grayscale bmps that i create through calibre so fonts are great and i dump in a sd card that goes in the display. the esp just manages the sleep of the display and the displaying the correct image. with the battery switch that i have, it can last months
Some Kindles can easily be jailbroken [1]. I have two jailbroken Kindle 4 devices and they're still great. Both for reading (though you have to sideload books) and as e-ink dashboards [2]. A Kindle 4 can run for ~ 28 days on a single charge, refreshing the screen every hour.
It is doable though. A bunch of years ago I followed some instructions and set up a dual-boot on one using a Chinese ebook platform firmware. This way if you wanted to read epubs or PDFs you would boot to the other OS. Worked pretty well! Had access to all of the hardware including wifi.
So it would be the same basic principle here as what you envision.. boot into that other system, but have it instead launch some other app.
Though I haven't actually tried this, it probably wouldn't be too hard to use the built-in Kindle web browser to display a constantly updating web page and/or full-screen image from a remote web server.
Amazon recently disabled the ability to keep the screen always on so it doesn't really work. It's kind of finicky as well: I would have the network selector pop-up and stay there if there was a temporary disconnection in the WiFi (say if someone used the microwave).
> Amazon recently disabled the ability to keep the screen always on so it doesn't really work.
Too bad. There are probably other use cases for "keep the screen on continuously".
> It's kind of finicky as well: I would have the network selector pop-up and stay there if there was a temporary disconnection in the WiFi (say if someone used the microwave).
Now this I've never seen. The WiFi is pretty solid here, though... there are 5 WAPs in different parts of the house (primarily so I can get signal out to the edge of the yard -- the house is only medium-sized)..
They have a mirrored room on Element/Matrix as well but it's just the general chat and not the technical etc. sub-rooms. I quit Discord a while ago, probably for reasons similar to yours, and interact with the community using Element instead.
Can anyone give their feedback on eye strain with e-ink?
I feel like my eyes have gotten really tired from over a decade working in the tech industry, and wondering if taking my notes/reading emails/articles on a reMarkable 2 or similar could give my eyes some rest.
As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjoy my reMarkable precisely because I can get away from the ubiquity of computing and needing to constantly tinker with and repair software.
I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions. Just some pen and paper, except without the eraser shavings or ink blots. Not having to scan your notes to digitize them is a nice bonus as well.
Especially since the pandemic and in the WFH era it's nice to get away from the omnipresent touchscreen or mouse and keyboard interfaces and deal with something a little more tactile; something reminiscent of a less perpetually online era. I'm tired of being hyperconnected to everything. Not to mention all the problems from staring at LED monitors all day long.
Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot software; I've done enough of that already.
I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows.
That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did.
So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works.
I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff.
The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data...
I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service.
I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.
I'm with you. I want to buy things that don't need constant fiddling to keep them working. I want them to silently do their thing, supporting me in the background while I focus on mine.
But it's great knowing that I _could_ drop down a layer at any time. It makes me feel a lot more comfortable about relying on an ecosystem to know that it has redundancy in the support layer. For example, if Remarkable themselves go out of business, will I still have access to my documents? Will they still receive updates? Will I still be able to buy replacement parts?
Precisely why I have not used Linux on my laptop/desktop since like 15 years ago. I love to tinker and troubleshoot but I prefer to to be getting paid for it.
A lot has changed in the last 15 years. Unless you're doing something crazy (like trying to play sound, haha jk that's a throwback joke to the old days), there's nothing you need to tinker with these days (though of course it's there if you change your mind). Fedora, Ubuntu, and some others are very stable and "just works".
> As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjoy my reMarkable precisely because I can get away from the ubiquity of computing and needing to constantly tinker with and repair software.
Personally I completely agree with you, and could have written almost exactly that paragraph - I too have a ReMarkable (the 2nd / current version), and love using it as it ships for both note taking and especially for reading ebooks/PDFs ("especially" just because it's what I use it for more, not because that's what it's better at - in fact, its UI for reading documents is among its weaker points and I hope they improve it in future software updates).
However it is worth pointing out that you can SSH into it, and there are a fair few 3rd party tools and hacks for it - so far I've avoided trying any of them as there's nothing that I want strongly enough to have even a 1% risk of bricking it to worry about. But I'm tempted to start playing around with it someday.
This is the best list of stuff for the ReMarkable that I'm aware of, though I don't know how complete it is / how many released tools or guides there might be that aren't included here:
> I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions.
OT, but FYI... I have all that on NixOS. Things install and run reliably and configurations stick reliably, all declaratively. It feels like "the final distro hop" for me.
1) Getting back to known-good from any fucking-with that breaks something is 1 rollback away.
2) It's still Nix wizardry to do something as relatively simple as set up a systemd background process that gongs on the hour (I actually made this work, but it broke recently and I don't know why yet because 2-year-old-son). This actually discourages "distracted hacking" while making you work for the changes you definitely want, which ends up being a nice compromise.
FWIW, I've been the most productive on this Linux distro of all the ones I've tried (Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arch).
Retro? Sure. Punk? Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers
Sigh. Again with the story about "evil eInk and their gazillion patents". A story which :
1. Does not make any logistic sense: eInk is rather a small company versus the likes of Qualcomm, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, Philips, Microsoft (thanks to Wacom) all of which have way more patents in the EPD area that eInk. EPDs are literally as old as the _GUI_, and even started at the same place (Xerox). Plus, eInk relies mostly on chinese manufacture... which is well-known to generally don't give a damn.
2. Could not possibly have any motive: eInk apparently is a suicidal company that likes to torpedo its already shrinking little market so that .... what exactly? LCD manufacturers have a field day?
3. Ignores the fact that there are, indeed, multiple competitors to eInk whose panels are either indistinguishable from eInk or literally better. Many smartwatches like Pebble/Garmin don't use eInk _at all_, yet people even right here in HN still believe they are eInk. Qualcomm of all companies (an actual patent troll -- ask Apple -- and most definitely unlikely to be afraid of a minuscule company like eInk) owns a in my opinion _much_ better EPD technology called Mirasol which has zero of the slow refresh problems of eInk, much better color reproduction, much better contrast *, and is barely more expensive!
The plain truth is that majority of customers just don't care enough about these technologies, and therefore they will always be niche. At the end of the day, average customer can't distinguish the latest EPD panel to a reflective LCD from decades ago. Customers will flock towards shiny glossy LCD watch over EPD all the time. That's why Gyricon failed. That's why Mirasol failed. That's why every other electrophoretic startup folds.
* eInk contrast is still a joke and for the last decade actually degrading rather than improving, thanks to touchscreen layers, color filter layers, etc. But you see it being parroted all the time that "eink has infinite contrast". The latest color panels this year are no better than the ones I have on WindowsCE devices from the late 1990s, eInk or not. Colors still look incredibly dull, there is a ridiculously limited palette, and resolution and contrast take a sharp hit (pun not intended).
Mirasol sounds great, how come there are not more devices out there using it? The only one I could find was the "Toq", a 2013 proof of concept smartwatch by Qualcomm?
> a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers
Is there evidence of this? On every HN e-ink thread this is repeated as if it is common knowledge, but I haven't read much to back it up. Have you personally been shut down by lawyers when you try to use an eink display in a hacker kind-of-way?
And yes, there are patents, but so what? How does the company wield them? Are the licensing terms terrible? My Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom CPU. Broadcom is no stranger to patents yet there's plenty of hobbyist and hacker activity around their components.
>Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers
That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. Sure, like any successful tech company, e-ink owns patents and controls a large part of the market more-or-less, but patents aren't the main reasons why the e-paper industry hasn't moved forward.
That's kind of like saying "ASML's and Cymer's patents are the reason the EUV lithography hasn't moved forward and why they have no competition."
No mate, that's not true. Just like EUV lithography, making e-ink tech displays, affordably, and at scale with good yields and healthy margins to keep the industry afloat, is hard, very hard, bordering on magic, which is the main reason they have no competition.
Turns out making minuscule pigment electrostatic particles that can quicky move around inside a fluid suspension and hold their position long enough at various ambient conditions, is a huge challenge, and manufacturing that at scale with very low defects and sustainable margins is even harder.
Nothing in their patents currently is holding back competition, but competition can't reach the scale and yields that would make enough profits to support a viable competitor consider even entering this field, versus OLED displays, as that's where thew real money is in display manufacturing right now and that's where the competition is heating up and where all the R&D money gets poured.
That's why there's been various alternatives to e-ink-like tech popping up from university research labs and being displayed at trade shows, but going from a research lab one-off prototype being shown at trade shows, to mass production at scale with good yields and profit margins, is the real challenge and is where e-ink has their secret sauce that nobody can successfully replicate.
Similarly how China has been showing off working home grown Xnm lithography prototype chips that can compete with TSMC, but reaching the yields and volumes of TSMC is where the impossible to cross cliff lies, and why people get confused and don't understand that the major challenge lies in manufacturing at scale and not just the core tech that makes the widget unique.
I'm not defending e-ink the company and their corporate practices, just wanted to shed some light on the technicalities of the subject and hopefully clear some of the FUD and conspiracies that get wrongfully spread around.
> That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges.
For clarification -- disingenuous is defined as:
> not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does
In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?
Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker. "disingenuous " was the wrong word in that context. I meant to use it as a synonym for "unfair" and made a mistake.
>In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?
No, that's nowhere near close to what I claimed. I think my post was clear on what I meant despite my mistake: that people are too quick to blame e-ink the company for malice without understanding the technical challenges around industrialization of such technology and the economic factors of the e-ink-like products market (profit margins, supply/demand) that drive competition and investments, or lack thereof, in this tech.
it is definitely not a synonym for "unfair"; it is a serious attack on the integrity of the person you were responding to, and you should apologize to them
I do believe the first word in my previous comment was "sorry" for the mistake, and unfortunately I can't edit that comment anymore to correct the mistake.
Also, I have no reason to apologies to the commenter as he did not provide any evidence to support his claims that "e-ink is evil" in order for his integrity to be affected, to warrant an apology for my counter-arguments, nor do I think the original commenter is petty enough to be offended by my honest mistake, which I rectified later.
I'm not the person who apologised or the person who was apologised to, but the following, to me, reads like an appropriate apology in the context:
> Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker. "disingenuous " was the wrong word in that context. I meant to use it as a synonym for "unfair" and made a mistake.
This particular mistake (assuming disingenuous means a little less than it does) is not particularly uncommon among native english speakers (or on HN, at that).
FWIW:
> you called them a liar who was pretending to be stupid
The "pretending to be stupid" is not an essential part of the definition above (merely "typically by").
Finally, Merriam-Webster offers up other definitions:
lacking in candor
giving a false appearance of simple frankness
These don't fit particularly with the strident definition you're using.
English words are complex, with contextual and flexible meanings. You've picked one definition. And then you've attacked someone's integrity on the basis of it, which is exactly what you're arguing has been done to someone else. Don't be this guy.
The "typically" in that definition would suggest that "claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge" is unnecessary to claim disingenuity.
You're on the right track, though; it's worth asking if the people criticizing patents and their stranglehold on innovation are not being candid or sincere in doing so. (The answer IMO is "no, they're being very candid and sincere, in stark contrast to most defenders of contemporary patent law", but it's nonetheless the more relevant question).
Given that the margins are so tight and the expenses so high as you've illustrated, explain to me how it's possible that the extra costs involved with licensing patented hardware is not a significant factor?
It doesn't really make sense to say that on the one hand, it's super tough and hard to make a profit, and on the other hand the costs of accessing patented hardware is an immaterial cost.
Your post just really isn't convincing that a patent here has little effect on the ability for others to compete.
When margins are as tight as you say they are then obviously the costs of licensing are going to make the margins even thinner or next to impossible for another competitor to meet.
Love when people come out here with unironic defense here of monopolies by simply defending them as some meritocratic output of success or something.
In my opinion, saying that without explaining what they misunderstood / what you disagree with them on is both snarky and unsubstantial enough to fall below the line of the HN guidelines. Especially as it's not clear to me that their interpretation isn't what you meant, and it's clear that they are arguing in good faith rather than intentionally misunderstanding. Though their last paragraph was itself snarky enough that I can see why you might have wanted to react in kind (not that that means you should). /my two cents
I didn't detail further why he misunderstood, because in my interpretation of his comment, he had his pitchfork out and falsely accused me of "defending monopolies" just to engage in flame-bait which I didn't want to fuel, and I already went into enough details in my original comment to explain why he misunderstood and why my original explanation is not "defending monopolies" but presenting the facts, he just has to read it again carefully with an open mind and with his pitchfork down.
Fair enough to not want to engage, but in that case you could just not engage rather than adding more snark.
But ideally, even if you think they don't deserve your explanation, considering it's a public forum you could still explain why you think there wrong for the benefit of the rest of us who maybe also don't understand your argument.
>Fair enough to not want to engage, but in that case you could just not engage rather than adding more snark.
That wasn't snark from my end, I was just telling him he was wrong, as plead for him to re-read my comment again with an open mind. That's it. Actual snark would have added more fuel to his flame-bait which I didn't want to do.
> considering it's a public forum you could still explain why you think there wrong for the benefit of the rest of us who maybe also don't understand your argument
Because I don't have more information than that of my original comment, which is based on some years of experience developing products with e-ink displays and getting to know the tech and the company to a degree that allows me to have a relatively informed opinion to a degree on this topic.
And, because you can never please everyone no matter what you do, and some members can be overly contrarian and needlessly pedantic at times when it contradicts their entrenched belief that "evil corp is evil", expecting "sauce or GTFO" for every opinion on the matter (even though they themselves provided no proof for their "evil corp is evil" opinion), but I don't have or can't publicly share any documents to provide proof or more deep insight into the matter, nor the time to perform investigative journalism on the spot based on public OSS data, just to win an argument here.
Like I said, it's just my opinion based on my experience in the field, so take it as is with a pinch of salt, as an opinion of an average joe on the internet, not as a proper journalistic piece.
Commercialization is the fate of punk - always has been. I read the headline more in the sense of aesthetically Punk. I'm not sure if I agree, but E-Ink certainly has a very special appeal that always makes me want to buy more. Not so much the tablets, but the small displays, especially the brightly colored ones. The yellow background makes them look like sticky notes right out of a magic fairy tale wonder world.
Looks like some of the patents have expired, but the e-ink company keeps adding more. At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary :/
> At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary
It's the same trick that pharmaceutical companies use to extend their patents. Find a slightly new use or way that also covers the old use, and bam, exclusivity for another 20 years.
People say this but I’ve never been quite clear. Outside of medicine where you can convince doctors to insist on your new better safer cap or whatever is there anything stopping people from just building a product without the new patents. You still aren’t allowed to patent things with prior art right? So you can’t legally wait till your product is about to loose patent protection and then patent another existing aspect of it
Corporations with large legal teams are able to discourage others from experimenting in areas near expiring patents by coming up with "novel uses" and other such legal loopholes that effectively extend their patent protection despite what seem to be clear limits.
This effect in the case of eInk is clearly described by others in this thread.
Patents are irrelevant - if you think OLEDs don't have any patents then I have a bridge to sell you.
The real problem is that E-Ink is a niche product that lacks economy of scale, because LCDs do everything an EPD can do and more.
I don't know if it's been patented, but E-Ink's recent Gallery 3 screen is pretty amazing, they got multi-dye color screens to refresh fast enough to use in an e-note. That's insane, that's an order of magnitude reduction! It might actually make color e-notes a viable product category.
If only they asked questions like that in philosophy class! I'd say no, punk requires a wall to push against. The question of whether we still have a Man to stick it to - I'd say yes. And by Man, I mean a force that is either irresponsible with their power or got their power illegitimately or simply doing bad things with their power. Plenty of that around, and so much of it just goes ignored or worse, copied for personal gain.
I'm just finishing up Schnier's - A Hacker's Mind - and it's a good example of where "hacking" happens these days. The force the book profiled hackers are working against are just the masses. Us. People. Which has always been around - but it makes me wonder if we as hackers of the 80s and 90s just developed a mental toolkit for corporations to use against us and then left our counterculture post empty.
Hacking, the act of using technology in ways the manufacturer or developer didn't intend, is inherently punk. The "man" is the company that puts blocks in place to keep you from doing what you want with the hardware you bought.
> They are a return to the magical feeling of computers of the 80s and 90s. It’s a world where Microsoft and Apple never existed and we don’t have to suffer with abstractions on top of abstractions. It’s DOS for the 2020s
Does the author know who wrote DOS? Microsoft and Apple were essencial to the magic of that era of computing.
It’s a genuine question, someone born in the 2000s is 23 now and will have only experienced that age indirectly.
I do, but they made it popular. I'd much rather CP/M had won, not some quick and dirty clone, but that's besides the point.
The “DOS for the 2020s” being anti-Microsoft and Apple makes no sense to me. Also, DOS was the mainstream, not some retro-cyberpunk thing. Again, makes no sense at all to me.
Looks like it was, though, unless you mean the "jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM" bit.
Edit: to clarify, when people say "DOS", 99.999% of the time they mean MS-DOS, not the generic "disk operating system", which is a category and wasn't developed by anyone in particular.
Sadly it seems that the current trend is to throw in android and apps and whatnot to make it a terrible tablet replacement, whilst driving the cost up. It baffles me how android is in any way (apart from installing other reader apps) an improvement for e-readers.
Installing other reader apps is exactly the point of having Android, and there isn't really a way to implement "just enough Android" to be able to run other reader apps. You have to have the whole package of an Android OS. I have a Boox device and use other reader apps all the time. There are also browsers optimized for e-ink (EinkBro is the one I'm using now) and it's great for reading books that are only available as webpages.
Also, developing your own OS is not necessarily cheaper than porting Android. Boox has been doing Android-based e-readers for a long time and their devices are usually on the cheaper end for the hardware. I feel it boils down more to UX rather than cost - do you want to let the user install whatever apps they want, or do you want to give them a more curated experience (and probably also limit them to your walled garden).
Also by "reader apps" I mean "reader apps with their walled gardens", like Kindle, as opposed to readers for local files. Boox's builtin reader is OK, but I've used other e-readers whose builtin reader was worse and it'd be useful to have a 3rd party one for your local files. Ironically those e-readers are not Android-based.
I know you can de-DRM Kindle books, but there are other walled gardens that don't allow you to do that easily (for me it's some Chinese e-book apps).
My go-to e-reader for years has been an ad-supported kindle that I immediately jailbreak to install KOReader and remove the ads (as well as any communication with amazon). It's cheap, supports epub, and the hardware is surprisingly good and durable.
As a bonus you can basically install any GTK app you care to on there; I have a term emulator with SSH and a chess game with AI on mine, for example
Lots of apps and websites work great on eink, anything focused around text. Because it's android, I can use any reader software I like, including the Kindle app, but all text format are effectively s7pported. Browsing HN on it is a breeze, and chrome works much better than the Kindle built in browser. I would feel totally comfortable writing on it with a Bluetooth keyboard, or even writing and running code inside of Termux. Sudoku and crosswords are great.
The thing that nobody realizes until they actually spend some real time with eating is how much more comfortable it is to read with then a phone or iPad screen. It works in all lighting conditions, the battery life lasts for weeks. Good luck reading on your phone at the beach on a sunny day.
The things that it's not good at are non-text based games and videos, but that's not what it's for. I have a computer and phone for those things.
Have to disagree on that for non-english books. libgen / z-lib aren't always amazing for those, in my experience. The local library is the other way around, almost no english content, but plenty in my native tongue.
The library also has the current (clickbait-free) print versions of newspapers as e-papers, which the shadow libraries (at least those that I know) have not.
I would like to be able to run software on a tablet-sized device with an e-ink display. I have uses for the no-backlight no-power-when-static display beyond just reading text. Ideally it would be with an open source operating system, but I'll settle for something that lets me sideload apps.
Performance is always in tension with price and weight, but software openness isn't in tension with any of them, really.
Supernote is decent in this regard. It's an android base, but the software has been very intentionally designed so as to avoid many of the pitfalls. It's primarily a notetaking e-ink tablet, it excels at writing notes or marking up pdfs/ebooks. If you really want you are able to install other applications, currently not officially supported though they've said they plan on adding support, but it's completely secondary to the primary mostly seamless design.
Can someone talk me in/out of buying one of these? I've looked at them several times, and I have quite literally no purpose for it (each iPad I buy I end up not using it much, and somehow the next iPad I think will be different. I basically just use it as a painting reference).
But I could imagine sitting this on my desk and using it when designing software to draw out diagrams.
That said, I also use actual paper and pencil and have notebooks full of sketches... so ultimately I don't know if I would want this or not.
Help me decide!
EDIT: I bought it so from here forward only rationalize my decision that it was good!
> I've looked at them several times, and I have quite literally no purpose for it
I have a supernote. I'm glad I have it, it fills a niche for me that has been very beneficial. With that said, I don't think because it works for me that it will be a good tool for everyone. I'll make a bit of a blunt argument, but I hope you take it in good spirit.
If you buy some shiny new toy that you know you don't need then you are a slave to your desires, a slave to marketers. You're taking hard earned money that could be saved, invested, or donated and using it to engage in a useless fantasy of some sort of benefit that you already know to be marginal. Do you want to be the kind of person who does that? Do you want to be someone who mindlessly consumes products just for the sake of consuming products? Tools are a means to an end, don't make them an end in and of themselves.
Also, you already have a workflow. What are the costs of switching from what you know works? Think also of possible unforeseeable downsides. You know the limitations of what you have currently, but you also know /exactly/ what you have. Do you choose the unknown item that will only possibly have marginal benefit or do you stick with what is tried and true, known, and established? Id choose the established option any day of the week.
We have very very different perspectives, it is probably not worth replying.
The very fiber of my being down to my DNA is about creative energy, not consumption. I am inspired by tactile things, and things which spur certain energies. This is why I love programming, painting, etc.
Money is no issue, so there's that.
And lastly, my entire mind is a kaleidoscope of tradeoff decisions every waking second. Things like "investing the money of my tablet" I will just never do. I do not think like that. If I can have a happiness factor of 10, with the ultimate cost of not investing as some variable, and the amount of time learning about investing, and the benefit of the joy of learning things that earn me far more than investing, or starting a new company, I will always simply choose the simple answer "Just earn more." That is ultimately what it always boils down to, with my happiness and satisfaction level of life at the highest, while minimizing costs of heavy minutiae like investing. It's not that I don't like technical things, I am obsessed with them, but I can have hundred percent returns through my own companies rather than < 10% returns through investing. I'm absolutely certain this will seem like the 'wrong' perspective to others, but no one else lives in my head. For me, what is most paramount, is that I'm constantly maximizing benefits while minimizing costs, and projecting this plan forward constantly, and refining my trajectory if I see inefficiencies, or miscalculations.
Also "literally no purpose for it" is hyperbole, I obviously have some purpose for it or I wouldn't buy it. I have 20+ sketchbooks sitting next to me that I fill, and every new project or company I start/take part in which is complex, I sketch it out across multitudes of pages. I was more saying that... I have no "need" for it to replace paper, but I'm always open to trying new things that augment my experience
I've made similar considerations (as a college student) and honestly, just stick to pen(cil) and paper. Analog stuff are so cheap and so good that you won't come close to paying off the price of a e-paper tablet.
The only benefit imo is portability and ease of sharing to computer, but I find my scanner on my printer works perfectly fine and that I have trouble finding things digitally even with effort organizing
My opinion against e-paper tablets would definitely change if their price becomes much lower
Was firmly in this camp, and preferred paper to electronics, until the Remarkable 2.
It managed to get close enough in feel (not perfect to be fair) to paper that I don’t mind using it for notes and studying.
It’s pretty nice being able to markup text books and research papers as a separate layer I can toggle to de-deface the page, add note pages, etc. And having my whole book collection at hand everywhere I go without lugging around a 50lb backpack.
I still prefer paper for desk references. Flipping through a 300pg tome looking for a specific familiar page is still easier with analogue.
I’ve had a remarkable 2, I found I prefer paper for notes. I don’t read my notes very often, so its more the process of writing them that I ’use’. And although very good, its not the same on a rm2. Not sure waht it is exactly. The latency, the tactile aspect, maybe even the physicality of a note book or just the annoyance of using a device again..
I wish I could talk you out of it but I love mine. Now whenever I bust out an old notepad I get frustrated I can't pick up and move around the text to reorganize my notes as I'm writing them...
I love love love eink. I have used eink daily since about 2007 (first gen kindle... who's design I still adore. Talk about punk looking lol).
I then switched to an Entourage eDGe briefly (too big) and then to an Entourage eDGe Pocket in ~2011. I still have it and use it (battery amazingly holds all day charge under use).
Just got a Boox Tab Ultra C and I am in heaven. The CFA layer over the eink goves really nice muted colors that remind me of 1960s news print and it is so easy on the eyes. The screen refresh speeds are amazing (I actually watch videos using PiP floating (smaller windows refresh better) while doing other things. The Android 11 install is heavily optimized and runs beautifully. If I use it for just tectual data in airplane mode I easy get nearly a month per charge.
My dream is a laptop that is 300+ DPI eink @ 13-15" with maybe a clear oled overlay for when you need color. It would be so nice. Or even a laptop with a rotate screen like the old panasonic toughbooks or fujitsu lifebooks that has a 180 hinge.
Oled or IPS hiDPI on one side and highres eink on the other.
Would be phenomenal. As soon as I have the spare cash I am going to get one of the desktop eink monitors! I am so excited they are finally becoming a thing.
I used to run a greyscale NeXT Turbo for years. Was only 68hz but it was a proper monochrome CRT and was easy on my eyes. For whatever reason, color CRTs hurt my eyes unless they are ~85hz or higher.
Anyways, enough ranting. Suffice to say eink is a dream for people like me and I can only hope it contonues getting better <3
There is no jailbreaking. You are given root access out of box[2]. They don't discourage external developers, they even provide a toolchain[1] to build for the device upon request. Hell, their CTO at the time (not sure if they still are) wrote some non-official software that people can install[4], and helped some of the initial members of the community get their stuff working. They just don't provide official support for external software on the device.
As for bricking your device: It will not hard brick, it may only soft-brick[0], as in, the display will not update on the rM2, because the software driving the screen needs to be updated to support the new OS. You can still SSH in and revert the changes and then downgrade. If you were silly enough not to write down your SSH password, or set up an SSH key and can't get into SSH, you can still recover your device[3] on your own.
I didn't know there's different kinds of bricking. It does NOT sound like having root access.
This big warning is on the front page:
> Warning: Toltec does not support OS builds newer than 2.15.1.1189. You will soft-brick your device if you install before support is released. See remarkable2-recovery for information on how to recover your device if you have done this.
> I didn't know there's different kinds of bricking.
There are two types of bricking[0]. A hard brick, where the device no longer functions, and may not be recoverable, and a soft brick, where the device is still working, but fails to boot to a usable state.
> It does NOT sound like having root access.
Could you clarify what you mean by this not sounding like you have root access? You have the ability to sign in to the device as the root user out of the box, which is exactly what root access is.
> This big warning is on the front page:
>
> > Warning: Toltec does not support OS builds newer than 2.15.1.1189. You will soft-brick your device if you install before support is released. See remarkable2-recovery for information on how to recover your device if you have done this.
Yes, I know about the warning, I wrote it. When it was less strongly worded, way too many people were ignoring the warning, trying to install toltec on an OS version that didn't have the offsets required for rm2fb yet, and did not write down their SSH password or set up an SSH key.
> a soft brick, where the device is still working, but fails to boot to a usable state.
Interesting. This means that if I ruin my grub I soft bricked the PC. As long as it's recoverable easily, I wouldn't consider that 'bricking'.
> Could you clarify what you mean by this not sounding like you have root access?
I just meant that if the device is no longer usable, you don't control it (as root). But you clarified that soft-brick is like a boot problem which, if easily fixable, isn't a problem.
That's just 16 years, not much. From the POV of retro, this is new. Especially as we are talking about a still used and evolving technology, not something dead which was rediscovered and revived.
No, for it to be retropunk, it would need to just work. Not necessarily work well, but just work.
QBasic would be fine. GW-BASIC would be fine. P5.js would be great. Hypercard would be adequate. Heck, even raw assembly code would work.
Documentation on jailbreaks, microcontroller versions, ssh, and file systems? Not so much.
The whole point was /simplicity/. Simplicity isn't the same as ease-of-use or speed-of-use, but old-school computers might boot into a BASIC interpreter. That was simple.
I'd love to have a simple eink solution. I don't care if I'm manually flipping pixels or have high-level APIs, and I don't care if I'm using BASIC, Makecode, Python, or C. I do care that it just works, and I know ahead of time it just works.
What I don't want is I buy an old Kobo on eBay, and find out it's not jailbreakable, or requires some library which requires a different version of Ubuntu, or whatnot. I don't need another half-baked project.
The actual ultimate here would be an all-in-one which is micro:bit compatible. All-in-one means it includes a case, a reasonable form factor, and works in standard micro:bit programming environments.
Any of the e-ink pads that run Linux under the hood and expose SSH can get you to a bash prompt. Which is about as simple as one can get.
Why does it have to be /simple/ anyway? With a rich programming environment you can make your own simplicity. The world needs more devices that force you to come to them, not the other way around.
> What I don't want is I buy an old Kobo on eBay, and find out it's not jailbreakable, or requires some library which requires a different version of Ubuntu, or whatnot.
I understand what you're getting at. When I was following some of the article links with respect to the Remarkable 2, I had the exact same concerns when they were discussing how you need to wait for the patches to be updated to new firmware versions since the screen driver was integrated into the software. Needless to say, I have also been bitten by such things with other devices.
That said, you picked a poor example. Kobos aren't locked down in any meaningful way. Anyone with a knowledge of Unix and how the update process works can inject their own software. There are no secrets. There is no encryption. At least when it comes to the operating system. It is the way hardware should be, albeit it is so rare for it to be so that it is easy to jump to conclusions.
Odd, I always considered retropunk as something requiring a specialist skillset. Breaking into systems to bend them to your will etc. Different perspectives I guess.
I was using the definition from the article: "... we don’t have to suffer with abstractions on top of abstractions. It’s DOS for the 2020s. It’s graphing calculators for grown-ups"
Yours is probably a better one, but perhaps less relevant here.
> It’s a world where Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X never existed and we don’t have to suffer with abstractions on top of abstractions. It’s DOS for the 2020s. It’s graphing calculators for grown-ups.
rmkit is a library (and group of devs) for creating apps on the rM (and now Kobo). outside of rmkit, people typically use Qt to write apps, but there's many routes[0], including SAS[1]: a solution that uses unix pipes. the rM2 requires a bit more hacking to get working than the rM1 because their framebuffer driver[2] is embedded in their software for rM2 and requires updating rm2fb every time remarkable releases a new update. there's alternative drivers[3] to drive the display in development.
i will keep updating the article based on feedback, thank you and keep hacking
[0]: https://remarkable.guide/devel/index.html
[1]: https://rmkit.dev/apps/sas
[2]: https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable2-framebuffer/
[3]: https://github.com/matteodelabre/waved