Remarkable

thoughts on moving, habits, reading as a replacement activity, and the remarkable 2. 2025-02-27

I moved recently! As part of that move, hidden among all the boxes, was a room that I would use as an office. Previously, my apartment was of the studio kind: kitchen, bathroom and, The Room. The Room was both living room, office, and bedroom. I made it work relatively well for all of those considering I’ve been working remotely since 2019, but there was some tension and flaws with it.

See, I think you build up a lot of habits spatially—with where you occupy space when you do something. I used to use my kitchen as an office until my used 2012 macbook air was no longer suitable as work laptop (butchered by apple’s lack of OS support for old hardware) but was exiled from there when switching to a chunkier thinkpad which caused wrist pains in the same wooden-stool no-armrests setup. So I started working more from The Room. This mostly works, but it is so very easy to get sucked into The Computer. One of the things I really wanted to do more, as a replacement activity for semi-unconsciously jumping between sources of novelty (youtube / social media / email), was read. But, having The Computer in The Room made it less easy to switch activities without sometimes accidentally losing half an hour or more.

Enter: new apartment. Over here, I confine The Computer into its own room and when I’m there I do computer. But when I’m not there, I am freed? There are no prior ingrained habits in the currently sparsely decorated living room (unless you count boxes, in which case it’s already entered its baroque period). One of the things I wanted to do, then, was use it to read! Unfortunately, my ereader’s screen had an accident when traveling last summer and I have yet to pillage my other ereader (defunct for less easily discernible reasons than smashed-screen) for parts. So I ended up buying a used remarkable 2, something I’ve had on my radar, complete with active keyworded subscriptions for the local ebay equivalent, for around two years.

Some early thoughts:

• I can finally read pdfs!
• The marker (plus) works just like a pen, and my handwriting is the same! It’s the same.. Anyway, it works well for writing by hand, and the latency is especially low when zoomed in.
• Internet Archive pdfs are slow as hell to start reading (because they are likely pure bitmaps and not only a text layer?), but if you open the grid view to let it generate thumbnails for a while then even those PDFs become acceptable in terms of rendering speed.
• I’m not going to use remarkable-the-company’s services, but if you connect the cable to your computer you can visit this hardcoded address http://10.11.99.1/ to import / export PDFs in a web interface. Sometimes janky, but mostly just worked for me.
• There is a lively scene of hacks for the rm2 (search: rm-hacks) but the latest remarkable 2 OS version isn’t yet supported.

As an aside, I love buying technology a few years after launch—5 years, in terms of this device—and doing so second-hand. It’s cheaper. You get to potentially partake in the ecosystem that has built-up. All the flaws of the technology are more or less well-known, and in some cases the manufacturer has managed to release quite a few updates in the interim. And importantly, you’re not contributing to excess production, but instead taking part in a momentary person-to-person human exchange that is potentially saving an artefact from being tossed away and maybe burned to release some of the precious metals it contains.

It should be known that some vendors, like MNT Reform, are worth supporting directly. But I’ve never really been in that bracket of consumption power that I can do so lightly. It also turns out that while I am an early adopter of some things, with hardware I am more like a 2nd or 3rd gen adopter. I like the wrinkles having been mostly ironed out, and swooping in before the hardware starts to get superfluous features and thinned out worth-wise.

Well, then, that’s the post!