Ed Finn: Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of Change Chat. I am your host, Ed Finn, and I am really excited today to be joined by Mitchell Scott. And Mitchell is has been doing the rounds actually talking with Kitbetzmasters and Aaron over at 2530 Media about remanager gonna talk today about remarkable mods and we're gonna talk about supernova plugins and we're gonna kind of look at the two devices and where we think they're going. And just to caveat out front, it's not saying one device is better than the other. I think both of these devices are excellent. I've never actually other than when I was first exploring any tried a remarkable so my knowledge base is pretty limited there and and Mitchell I don't know that you've ever tried a supernode.
Mitchell: I haven't, nope.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so I think that's gonna be a fun conversation because we both know our devices really well. And I think that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you. but what I'd like to do, if you can take just a minute, tell everybody who you are again, but also open with a question that I've had that's been on my mind for a while, which was what got you interested in e-ink to begin with? What was the thing that made you think this is a space I want to be in and something that I want to tinker around with?
Mitchell: Sure. so I'm Mitchell Scott. By day I'm a DevOps manager. and kind of in my spare time, I hack around on lately remarkable devices. I'm kind of a tinkerer. I'm not a developer by trade. I I do kind of the infrastructure and operation side. so I know all about servers and hosting and how the internet works and stuff like that. but I'm more new to the software development aspect of things. so Yeah, e Ink. my first e ink device, I think, was a a Kindle Touch in probably 2011 or 2012. so like most people, intro to e Ink was a Kindle device. I also had just gotten the first gen iPad. I think that was in 2010, maybe. I can't remember exactly. So I wanted I thought the idea of e Ink was really cool. Got the Kindle Touch. I think that device had like 160 PPI or something. It's pretty low res screen. pretty underpowered device, limited to Kindle stuff. So cool, but when I was comparing it to the iPad I had at the time, super limited. I was also wrapping up my time in college, so I didn't use the Kindle all that much for I didn't have a lot of time for reading. It wasn't just textbooks. so I didn't get a whole lot of use out of that and kind of set that aside and didn't come back to eating for a while. my first foray into Like of the E note taker type stuff was in 2022. so I had my first kid in 2016. And at that point, so kind of post having my first child, I realized that my brain wasn't working as well as it used to as far as remembering all the tasks I needed to do for a day or week at work. So before before that, I didn't even use paper notebooks very extensively. I just kind of remembered everything in my head, and then with kind of the post Parental sleep deprivation and stuff. I lost the ability to hold all that stuff in my head and I never really got it back. so that's when I got my first like disc bound notebook and started keeping track of my to-do list and meeting notes and stuff in there. So I was using paper pretty heavily from 2016 to 2021, 2022. and a coworker said, Hey, have you I got this remarkable tablet. You wanna mess with it? And I played with it a little bit and I thought, this is cool. It's
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: It's e-ink again, it's something I think I would use. I was kind of interested in going back to e-ink for reading. and I know the remarkable isn't super well regarded as an e-reader, but I have DRM free copies of all my books, so that wasn't a problem. That's my preferred way to read anyway. Remarkable was kind of it's somebody had one and I held it and played with it, and I thought this is pretty cool. I looked around at the time. And I don't even remember what all was out there in 2022. I know stuff's come a long way since then. There's a lot of options now. one thing about Remarkable is I kind of I was curious. This is before Amazon entered the segment, right? Of eNote takers. I was kind of thinking Amazon's gonna enter this market and just kill the competition. So when I was looking for devices to buy into, a core requirement was I need to be able to run this how I want to if the company disappears tomorrow. Because I kind of thought all of them and Remarkable, like there was pretty good community for Remarkable at the time. there was RM Fake Cloud for self-hosting the cloud. So I thought, okay, I can do this, I can self host my own cloud, I can have this device, never connected to a remarkable server. And if the company goes under tomorrow, I'm gonna be just keep rolling, it'll be fine. So that's why I went with Remarkable at the time. and I've kind of kind of stayed with Remarkable. I so I I bought in with the Remarkable two, and I had that until I still actually have that device. and then last summer I bought a used Remarkable Paper Pro because I thought the color was interesting and I wanted to see what the gallery three stuff was about. Love that device. It's a really early panel, so it's yellow. It may fail at some point. the early gallery panels were a struggle. I think they've improved a lot because I've got a paper pro move as well, and its panels a lot wider. it's a really nice panel. and then I recently got the I got the Paper Pure on launch day. I since then I also picked up Remarkable One. So I've I've got the full family of remarkable devices, which is helpful in developing stuff for all of them. I can test across the whole entire family.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's awesome. You kinda hit on, why remarkable and how you chose it. So I think that's really interesting for everybody to know. I'm kind of curious, is it still and you even mentioned your use case, is it still primarily you use it as a note taker and kind of a a place to collect your thoughts or have you expanded that at all or
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. So the Paper Pro stays b it's basically chained to my desk at all times. It's my primary to-do list tracker, meeting notes, kind of productivity type stuff. And and so now my three daily driver devices are the paper pro, the paper pro move, and now the paper pure, which kind of surprises me a little bit. But we can get into that too. So paper pro, it's so big that it just kind of stays on my desk because I have the other devices, I don't want to carry it around. I could, it's not crazy huge or heavy, but it's a big device. I color code my to-dos based on like I'm Cub Scout master, I'll color code stuff related to that that I need to keep track of. Obviously like work stuff gets a couple different colors based on different things. Personal type stuff, you know, just different things. I color code my notes with dots and highlighting. So having the color display has been really nice for that. I don't I wouldn't want to go back to black and white for that use case. 'Cause I tried to with the pure just to see how it went and I really missed the color for that. so that guy stays on my desk. The Paper Pro Move is actually my primary e-reader. I I use it for other stuff too, but it's I've read I think 8,000 pages on the move. So I know people say you can't read on a remarkable dice. You definitely can. I mean, there's better e-readers, but if it's what you've got, you could certainly make it work. And I I use it for that. it's also nice to have quick access to my to do lists and stuff so that I'm, you know, upstairs reading in bed. I can jot down a quick to do for the morning if I like think of something while I'm reading or just laying in bed at night. like, I need to remember to do whatever. So I'll just put that in the same notebook at all cloud syncs. So when I get to my desk in the morning, it's sitting there on the paper pro as well. another use case for the move, which is interesting, is I take it with me almost everywhere because it's pretty small. so I'll I'll just have it in my pocket of my jeans or a a jacket pocket if it's cold. so I since I always have it with me, I found that it's been nice at restaurants when my kids so I've got small kids from I've got a 10 year old, an eight year old, and a six year old. the younger ones get kind of restless at restaurants sometimes. And I feel not so bad about handing them the the remarkable tablet to color on as opposed to like an iPad or a cell phone to play games on. so that's been a nice use case for it too. And since it's color, the kids like to color on it with different colors.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really good to hear. And I think it's it's important because use case, as as you know from you and I talking, is so important for what you need it to be able to do. It's one reason I don't have a front light, because when I use these devices, I don't need it. I'm always in a well lit condition. Yeah.
Mitchell: Yeah, and I I really like the front light for for the reading side of things. I don't use it much for even the paper pro. I the gallery is bright enough. I don't use the front light on the paper pro unless I'm reading a newspaper and it's really early in the morning, not in the middle of summer. I so ha I do like ha I love having the backlight on the move because it's kind of it's small enough, it's what I take to read in bed. So having a backlight or a front light there is really nice. so I don't have to do like supplemental lighting or anything. but I I can definitely see why people would want to not have a front light. I kind of missed the front light on the on the paper pure.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I think you raise a great point. I think partially my reason is I use Supernote devices primarily for creative and work related tasks, solely. And then I'm actually Loving the books go six for my reader, which has a front light, because a lot of the times as a reader I need that. And I can read from all the different platforms. I don't have to worry about because I don't have all of my books DRM free. And I don't use Calibre and some of the other things that you would use to be able to do some of that. But I think you're right. I think if you know that you're gonna need to be able to see in conditions that aren't ideal for lighting.
Mitchell: nice. Yep. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ed Finn: You really can't go with a non front lid device if that's gonna be part of your
Mitchell: No, it's a it's kind of painful. I think if if you know you're just going to use it in an office setting or a home office setting where you control the lighting in that room and you don't have to worry about, you know, blasting light at a a sleeping partner or something, then you then yeah, you don't need a front light. I also haven't found I've written a little bit on the on the pure and I've I've written on the Remarkable too. I don't find I may not be that sensitive to the pen to ink distance. I know some people really are and really don't want a front light layer there. I don't find that I'm super sensitive to that, I don't think. But again, that may just be different folks are sensitive to different things.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I think it may vary by device. I know that when I got the Note Air 5 C it was very I mean, you could definitely see it when you had the front light on, because of course it has to have the front light because of the collido layer. And so when I naturally write and I'm looking at kind of this angle that you're naturally writing on, you could really see the difference. But when any of the other devices that didn't have one, I couldn't see it.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You could see it. Yeah.
Ed Finn: And I don't know if that was the combination of the collido panel and the light, but you're right, on certain things I can't tell that there's a huge difference. Like if you use the the Go 10.3 Gen 2, the Lumi, I can tell that there's a screen shadow around the edge, but as far as writing on it versus the other one, I can't tell a huge difference as far as that tactile feel, especially if the front light's off.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: So I think you're right. I think a lot of that may be perception or even how close you are, what angle you're at, and how that works. I do want to talk before we jump in, and we are going to jump in and show, some of the remarkable mods, but also some of the supernova plugins. But I want to talk a little bit about remanager, because you kind of changed the game, and and I don't think that's overstating it by
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ed Finn: creating remanager versus having all of these mods out there that are available on GitHub. They're, not super hard to install as long as they're just ones you download and and install. But it's a little different on Remarkable, or at least it seems to be, than the way that some of the SuperNote plugins are. So I'm curious for you, when did you think, you know what, there's gotta be an easier way to do this. And then kind of what's that journey been and what was it like before Re Manager existed?
Mitchell: Yeah, so back kind of when I first got involved with Remarkable in twenty twenty two ish, right before three point I can't remember what version. It was in the three point the early three point or three point three days. apps could have direct access to the frame buffer, which is a technical way to say like apps could just draw to the display on the Remarkable One and Remarkable Two. and that's always been the case for the Remarkable One. They Remarkable made some optimizations. for the Remarkable Two that they continued on through the newer devices. And so applications don't have direct access anymore. They have there's some display complexities. so there was a package manager before called Toltec that was very popular and there were a bunch of applications and mods in it. mostly applications, so less modifying the Remarkable UI and more giving you the ability to run other stuff on the device like games or than you know like chess, not like Doom. There is a Doom port. It does run.
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: Ish. so so that stuff existed before. And then with that big frame buffer update, all the graphical stuff kind of paused. there was like RM hacks that worked on, I think 3.11, some of the slightly newer versions. and then a couple of years ago or a little more than a year ago, a developer figured out a way to more efficiently inject code into remarkable's running application, and they built a whole framework to do that. so that's what the latest generation of mods and packages on Remarkable use. so it's a system that lets you do a bunch of different things, including modify the QT application and its resources and like during runtime. So that's kind of when I got involved. So I'll go back a little bit. back in 22, obviously I set up RM Fate Cloud and I used that the entire time. So I've used it for four years now. that's the only mod I ran on my and I don't even know that I consider that a mod. You don't have to do you just change a couple things on the tablet. You you change some DNS settings and install a certificate and you can you can do that. So I've done that the whole time. and up until probably when I got the paper pro move or so. Around that time is when I started looking at other mods. So I ran my tablets basically stock for for four years. so I wanted to see what was Like what what kind of mods are there? What kind of things were possible? And so I got involved. There's a community discord server for for folks who kind of mod and tinker with the remarkable tablets. it was all very manual. So, like you said, we we were downloading releases from GitHub, copying them to the device via the terminal, installing them on the device via the terminal. It's all very terminal oriented, which with my background is no problem. I've run Linux for twenty years, so it wasn't a big barrier to entry. And I was kind of blind blinded to how hard just that was to lay people or non-technical folks, or even folks who know how to work on computers but don't live in the terminal environment. so I thought, this isn't that hard. Anybody can do this. And then somebody and then I saw I made a couple mods, including my table of contents mod, and somebody really wanted that. And they were non-technical. So I said, Okay, let's hop on a screen share, I'll I'll walk you through this. No problem. It's like six commands. It took an hour and a half. Right. And This person is perfectly competent in all aspects of life. They're just not a technical computer, like super nerd computer user. so at that point is when I thought, this needs to be like a desktop app. This needs to be either a website or a desktop app that can install this stuff. This is too hard for normal people. so I started building the desktop app first, remanager, I actually think I started with. With co-reader, not even my TOC mod. I was trying to get a a more streamlined co-reader installer. and maybe like the RMHAX installer. And I realized as I was doing that, that different variables start coming up, right? Like the mods have different versions for different versions of the software for the remarkable OS. so I thought, okay, I need to track all that. And before too long, I thought I really am inventing or developing a package manager. So I paused development on remanager and I went and built a package manager called Vellum. so it handles and it's a command line application. Remanager talks to it remotely. So remanager, It's basically a remote front end that runs on your computer that talks to a package manager on the tablet. and it's a little more complicated, but that's kind of the high level is it talks to it installs and then talks to the package manager running on the device. so I built the package manager inspired by some of the work that happened on Toltec. So, like I'm definitely not the only person involved here. I didn't build any of the low level injection stuff that happens to get all the like the mod framework, as I call them. That stuff I did not build. I've contributed a little bit now, but most of that work is as other individuals. I I'm not the builder of all of the mods. I've built like thirty five or so, but there's a bunch that I haven't built that other people have built that remanager lets you install. Floating toolbar is a really popular one. I have nothing to do with that project. That's somebody else's. like the the co-reader port, that's another developer entirely. app load is by the same guy that did the mod framework. So my big contribution to this area was just making the existing stuff available to more normal people. so if that's that's kind of what I've done is make a desktop application that's easy to use for for new folks that can manage the installation of stuff on the tablet because before it was you're getting in a terminal, you're running commands that you find on GitHub to install stuff. which I thought GitHub was easy to use because I've used it for years, right? and I realized that some people just seeing a GitHub page, even if it has a really well done README, and like we're developers, so n a lot of the times documentation's the last thing or maybe it never happens. So that even that's not a given. But even if a GitHub page has a really good README, Just seeing a GitHub page, people like normal people don't know how to navigate that. So I built a like a marketing type site for remanager, remanager.io, that's just a very simple click this to download for your platform, and it auto-detects your computer based on like user agent and stuff in the browser. so it was really eye-opening to see because I'm a technical computer person, right? I've done that's my my day job. It's what I've done for for 20 years. so just
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: being kind of brought back into seeing things through the eyes of someone who's just like a normal, you know, normal person. was like, GitHub is like a hurdle for them. Wow. Okay. How can we how can we make this as easy as possible? And I think it's getting there. I think I think we're getting there.
Ed Finn: I think you bring up a good point. no matter what field we're in or whatever we do, sometimes we forget those process steps. It's like, well, yeah, this is so easy to do. But is it? You know, and then having to go back and re-engineer it because I've gotten more familiar with GitHub because I am not highly technical. I mean, I may look more organized than I am sometimes, but the truth is that
Mitchell: Right. Yeah.
Ed Finn: GitHub sometimes can intimidate me because it's just the amount of options that you have. and that's one thing I like about the plugin installer that they're currently using with SuperNode, is all you have to do manually at this point is download the version. So you'll download that to your computer, pull it into your MyStyle folder, and then pick it. And it installs. So there's no terminal. If there was a terminal, I'd be lost. I very rarely except for when they did the side loading initially, was I in the terminal. And that process was very complicated to begin with if you're not used to working in that environment. so I a hundred percent get your point. And I think what this does is it opens it up to more people and it makes it easier for them to be able to engage with it and to test these tools. even when we start talking about some of the plugins today. There's one I won't be able to show because I couldn't get it configured. I couldn't figure it out, even though 90% of that work's already done. And it took me a while to get one or two of the other ones done. Most of them are pretty easy to do. But it does take that expertise. So I think that you doing this and making it so it's understandable and easier for people to engage is a really big step forward. from what you've seen of the SuperNote plugins, and I know you don't have one, so this is all going to be kind of armchair quarterbacking a little bit, but you've seen a lot about them, you've heard a lot about them, we've talked about them in Discord, you and I have had conversations about them. what do you think the best version of their un user interface should be kind of moving forward because again, they're more integrated, it sounds like, than mods are because it's actually being shepherded by the company a little bit. So they're working with these developers. Do you think that should be through InCub? Do you think it should be through kind of more of an app store type experience?
Mitchell: Sure, yeah.
Ed Finn: that's created on their device versus, you know, like Google has Google Play and all of that. What do you if you were going to give them advice, what would it be?
Mitchell: Right. does Yeah, I'm not super familiar with Ink Hub. Does that run that runs on device, right? Yeah. and that's where you can do the like community templates and everything too, right? To me it makes sense to keep everything there. you know, if there's just another tab in Ink Hub that's plugins. I'm not sure like how they curate those today, like or templates, how rich the experience is, if you can sort by popularity or whatever. so
Ed Finn: It does. Yeah, you can pull in a community template.
Mitchell: If if that kind of infrastructure is there, I would think probably building a separate app store would be more confusing. And then you you don't have two places to go instead of a one stop shop for where do I go get more stuff for my device?
Ed Finn: Yeah, that was my thought, but I wanted to get your opinion on it because Ink hub is really interesting and it has a lot of different things, including stickers, which are already a plug in. But right now a and I want to remind everybody, anything plug in related with Supernote is a beta. And actually it's an alpha. I would call it probably an alpha because there's so much tinkering happening. It's not even in an official beta release. It's actually a separate release pipeline. So The stuff I'm gonna show you is stuff that I'm comfortable playing around with, but not everybody I think is gonna be in that space. Ink hub is actually on device already. in the staple release. So I think that in thinking through that and getting people to really understand your comfort level is really important. And I think even for mods, it's probably the same thing. If you're not comfortable with developer mode or going in there and you're afraid you're gonna break something, I wouldn't recommend anybody do it. Just because
Mitchell: Right. And developer mode's easy to get into. a paper pro, paper pro move, or paper pure. I haven't figured out a way to break one yet. Remarkable two is easier to break. there's not a there's not a software recovery process that a normal person can do on those. For the other for the newer devices there is, you plug it in via USB, you run a tool, remarkable gives you it reflashes the OS and and you're you have like a factory fresh device. So On those three devices, or the remarkable one, it's pretty easy to recover too. it's it's pretty low risk. I would say, as always, like I don't know that I'd recommend someone to purchase a device if it's a if you consider the device a big investment. I don't know that I'd recommend purchasing one because there's mods that solve a critical problem for you. These are still fundamentally things that are created by the community, and I'd probably say the same for SuperNote. If you are gonna rely on a Supernote plugin and that's the reason you're gonna buy the device,
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: I don't know, because that's a community developed thing that you're relying on someone who's not getting compensated for their time to build and maintain for you. I would, you know, keep that in mind as you're if you're gonna if you're making a purchase decision. similar to you don't don't necessarily buy a device for what you you think it'll do or the companies promise you it'll do down the road, buy it for what it is today. unless you really want to tinker, in which case go for it. But
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: You know, as a normal user, if you think I absolutely need a table of contents, I can give you one on the remarkable, but remarkable isn't giving you one right now.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I think you raise a good point because, you know, and we'll get to this later after we do some show and tell, because, you know, I bought the supernote for what it was. And I've grown with the device over the years. And I think most people that's where they should fall. Buy it for what it does for you when you are making the point of purchase. And if you know you need certain things, tailor your purchase based on those things. And then if it grows and now you have things later that come online and come on board and they make your work easier, great. But you always know that you can go back and still use the things the device has. And I think that's a really good point that a lot of times gets lost, especially for those of us who are tinkering in the e ink space, especially.
Mitchell: Yeah, and we're excited about the stuff we can make the devices do, right? Like yeah, whether or not the company supports it or or delivers that feature, we're just excited to have more, you know, be able to do more stuff on the devices.
Ed Finn: well what I'd like to do is if you want to share your camera or I don't know if you're gonna share your screen, your camera, where you're wanting to start, but if you wanna do that, we can jump in, we can take a look at some mods and talk about kind of what that looks like on the remarkable.
Mitchell: Sure. so I've got the paper pure here. I've got the remarkable two here. This is running a beta. This is running the 3.28 beta. So I think there may be a couple things we compare this when we get to do your mods. so this device is not modified. I mean, I've got a sleep screen on here. You don't have to install mods for that. That's editing a config file. so on the newer devices, you would have to be in developer mode for that. On the remarkable two, you just SSH another device. So we'll be looking mostly at the paper pure device. for mods. So I'll start with the my table of contents mod. so I've got a document here I wrote and I think it's probably synced over. So I've got my table of contents. So this is completely third party. this is a mod I developed so I can go to different sections of the Of the document. you can oops, I didn't grab all of it. You can make a table of contents entry from a selection. So that'll run through remarkables text conversion. And so I'll probably have, yep, there we go. so I've got that here. looks like I have a broken external link because I haven't used this doc in a while. the other thing better TOC can do, it can auto-number your entries between a few different formats for outline purpose outline purposes. so that's that. It's it's using a bit of so Remarkable has this concept of a table of contents, but it's for EPUBs and PDFs. So I'm reusing their interface.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: So I know the Supernote plugin that you'll show in a second, it it builds like text in the notebook. This is a separate user interface section. So this is not inside the notebook per se. If you export a notebook, this will not be there.
Ed Finn: Okay. Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask whether it travelled off device.
Mitchell: the data for it cloud syncs. So it does travel between devices. So if if this was on my cloud account, I can edit this and when the when the document syncs, that'll come across. But exporting to PDF, it doesn't handle that today. I could probably make it do that. It's just quite a bit of work. so I haven't yet. the other thing is you can link to external documents from here. So like I can link to a newspaper. And so that's here. I can I can change indentation, stuff like that. So it's it's pretty flexible as just a kind of a a table of contents with some external linking functionality to add to notebooks. And and it works with with EPUBs and PDFs as well. So if you have a book and you want to use it for bookmarks, you can kind of use it like that too.
Ed Finn: So I'll show my TOC or the the Supernova plugin TOC and then we'll kinda jump back and forth here a little bit. So let me
Mitchell: Sounds good.
Ed Finn: So here I've got all mine laid out. So Supernode has the native headings. And that allows this table of contents to actually work. So what you do, and you'll notice here, let me go back for a minute. I've got different shading here. So there's kind of a main header, which is that all black, and then it's a little bit grayer, and then I've got one here that's a little bit less gray. So if I go here and we'll go ahead and we'll go into plugins and we'll go to TOC. And when I do that, I'm going to say generate and what it's going to go through is go through the entire document. And of course I just use this for a real short example. But it's going to go through, it's going to identify all of those headings and then it's going to populate which you can barely see happening here. And it's going to convert the text. Now the text conversion, I didn't write I wrote this in a hurry, so it's not great. I tested it earlier. But if I pull that up, you'll be able to see now that those are and it's the SuperNode plugins, it really lost it on that one. But it even recognized when there was an indents. So when you change those header types, it realized that okay, this is a subheader. So that's something Supernode doesn't have natively.
Mitchell: Nice, yeah, the heading levels, yeah.
Ed Finn: you could mark it a different color, but in your main table of contents or your headings, it's all gonna be straight in line like this. So what this does is take that same concept, condense it, turn it all into hyperlinks, so now I can go if I press it, I'm pressing in an angle. If I go here, of course these are all on the same page, but then it even gives you that backwards functionality like you would have in any other hyperlink with SuperNote. So it
Mitchell: okay.
Ed Finn: kind of latches itself onto that same concept, but then enhances it, if that makes any sense.
Mitchell: Yeah, so Remarkable doesn't have that concept of like linked text in a notebook. So you can't do that type of thing on Remarkable, yeah.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and the and the beauty of this, and I I've really found there's another similar plugin called Links, I think it is. I don't have that one installed right now because I've been kind of cycling through them. but it basically crawls through and looks for any link, internal, external, all of that and creates like a master index. And all of those things travel off device, which is why I think they're kind of unique, very similar to what Books does with their outline. But this, when I export it, now all of these links work. And they work in the partner apps all the way across. So it's pretty cool. so it's different. You can't edit it. I can't change the indent. I can't move it around after the fact. You can regenerate it. So if I keep working on this notebook for a long time, things move, I just delete this table of contents, regenerate it, and I get all the updated information.
Mitchell: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna ask about like when if you move a page or create a new page in the middle, does it recalculate that or do you have to go regenerate it manually every time?
Ed Finn: But it's not quite as yeah. As far as I know, you have to regenerate it. But again, these are very early. I don't know if they'll build something in. And I haven't tried it on a large scale yet because a lot of these are very new. it may I know that when we get to the keyword or pu plug-in here in a little bit, I made a video about it, thought it was awesome, said you can only do four, which is a limitation I don't need. The developer had it updated that same day and removed that cap because Supernote doesn't have
Mitchell: Okay. Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: a native limit on how many keywords you can attach. So I mean it's moving that quick. I mean you guys do amazing things when, you start developing these tools. And I just mentioned how great it was and that maybe at some point it would have no cap and got a message within like thirty minutes, hey, I went in I fixed this thing. So it's pretty cool. Doesn't
Mitchell: so the next one
Ed Finn: matter to me.
Mitchell: I'm just gonna go into my list, which is more or less alphabetical. So Paper Pro, Paper Pro Move, and Paper Pure have Bluetooth radios in them. Remarkable doesn't expose this, but I built a modification and some of the folks in the community figured out the commands and stuff that need to run to enable all the all the Bluetooth hardware. So I don't know that I have a device paired to this. I think I do. Let me see. Takes a little while to start 'cause I'm initializing all the radios and stuff, but or it'll fail. There go. so you can see I picked up my keyboard that's connected, it grabs the battery. and then if I go back to a notebook, I can you know, I can type. So that's just exposing basic Bluetooth functionality on the Remarkable, which Remarkable hasn't given us yet. this it could be coming, cause the devices have the hardware. I don't think it's been a focus. Remarkable sells a keyboard folio for the paper pro. not sure if this will ever be native or not, but but it works it works okay. there's bugs for sure, because it's some of the Bluetooth driver stuff is a little rough. I've had an issue when I come out of Hibernate every now and again with the radio on, it'll it'll freeze the device and then just have to reboot it.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and and that's one of those things, you know, w you and I went through and kind of looked at all of this and said, where are functionalities that already exist on these devices? And this is one that Supernote has had as long as I've owned it. Now I don't know about the Gen 1, like the very first SuperNotes that were Linux based, whether or not they had that. but all of the ones since the A5X. and A6X have had Bluetooth and it's just integrated into the drop down menu. So and it works really well and they even have a a weird thing that I it's not weird. I've just never really used it like I thought I would originally. But if you have the partner app open on your desktop and you have it linked to your device, you can actually just start typing with your keyboard from your computer on your device.
Mitchell: interesting. That's cool.
Ed Finn: Which so it's just a pass through for your keyboard that you have connected to your PC and that doesn't even require a Bluetooth connection. It's just straight through the desktop app. I thought I would use that more than I do. But I I don't tend to. So
Mitchell: Yeah, and that's kind of the thing, is I don't I don't type on these devices really. So I I built I built the Bluetooth settings mod that exposes it via the remarkable settings. I don't use the Bluetooth all that much aside from testing it. it's nice to have a keyboard but as far as just using these as like a typewriter, I don't personally use them that way. I know there's a lot of people that do like to use a e paper device as a typewriter with a keyboard. And and it's cool that those people can do that, but I That's just not really a use case that I have.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I do, but in a different way. So I have one of those quirky writers. I don't know if you've seen those. it looks like an old school typewriter. It's got the mechanical keyboard. And I just put my super note in there as a screen and pair it via Bluetooth and then just start typing. And for me, since that's a Word document, you can put text in notes, but I tend to use it as a Word document. I type all that in, then I bring it over to my PC and pretty it up.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah.
Ed Finn: because it's already in word format. But I don't do it like what I was just saying. I don't just type on it unless I'm sitting down and that's what I'm gonna be doing.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there's a community app that's a markdown editor. And and I've used it a little bit for fun and I'd probably find I I if I were gonna be typing on this, I would do that over typing in a remarkable note. 'cause then it's just a text file I can pull off and do whatever I want with.
Ed Finn: Well let's go ahead, we'll look at one that's real quick on my side that is actually a date timestamp. And I don't know if this is something remarkable has but it's really easy to use. And you'll see here we're back to my same document, but if I go to my plugins and then I go to date time. And it's going to give me these options. So I can go ahead and I s can select date, time, date and time. I can include or not include the day name, a bunch of different options here. I tend to want it be want it to be aligned left. I want it to be bold. And then this is something again when I started talking about these, it would only stamp once. It would allow you to add a keyword, but that keyword was basically only good once per day. So if you added it multiple times, it wouldn't work. And here the developer said in their index date for search and changed it up a little bit, took out the hashes and made it just a string of numbers. And I haven't had time to test whether that would then make it searchable globally across all my notes. But that's all you do is you select what you want, you hit insert, and then Go ahead and get rid of my bottom toolbar there. There it is. It's out of the way. It's out of mind. It might keep me from having to always Yeah, you can select it. Well, actually I just deleted it. So we'll go back out here.
Mitchell: And it's just like notebook text? Okay. Yeah.
Ed Finn: So I can go here and I can do whatever I want with that. And it does that with keyworder too, which I end up deleting those, but it leaves the keywords, which is really kind of a cool function. You can leave them on there if you want them or you can get rid of them.
Mitchell: Yeah, so you get like a hidden date stamp then. That's cool.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so you can if I wanted to, I could just hide that. My old habit because I'm old school, normally I would have Supernode plugins and then I would have parenthesis and the date as a double check on me because SuperNode only tags by date created for the calendar, which is one of the things I use a ton. And so for this, I keep thinking, will I replace it and just use the timestamp? Probably not because I'm probably in that habit and I want that redundancy there. But it's a nice to have so that if I go to my keywords
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: There's that date stamp right there. And again, it's just a string of numbers. So I'm not sure how it's gonna play out before it actually looked like you see down here in the bottom right. I don't know what it'll look like as it moves forward, but a really cool, just nice quality of life thing if you're taking a bunch of meetings or notes and you could theoretically turn that into a heading, I would think, and be able to have multiple layers within the note. and then just be able to go back and do that. So kinda cool. I like it a lot. But I don't know, does Remarkable have anything like that on device?
Mitchell: No. Nope. There's nothing that injects a date. I haven't seen a mod to do that. Someone probably could build one. but but no, today I haven't seen anything. Certainly nothing native.
Ed Finn: So i will I use it, how will I use it? I don't know yet. Most of these, to be honest with you, are things I'm just testing. I don't think any of these have been a need for me, but they're they're worth looking at and trying to figure out, hey, wait a minute. It's like the new digest. The original version of the digest I never used. When they revamped it and redid it, it became something I used a lot. And I never knew I needed it.
Mitchell: Yeah, sure.
Ed Finn: until it was there. similar arc.
Mitchell: you bring up a good a good concern with these community tools, either plugins or mods. I think it's probably the same boat. Like how how much do you dive in and make it a core part of your workflow? And I think different people have different answers to that. But yeah, I think it's a it's a good question of do I replace something I've done for years for this feature that I just got? Is it especially if it's a community feature? There's always the risk of it going away.
Ed Finn: Yeah, for sure. And and that that's why I'm wondering, since they're incorporating it in some way, whether that'll help with stability. And you and I have talked before and we talked on Kit's live stream about how you would compensate developers and I don't know w how far down the line is SuperNote and thinking about that. But I saw Kit's discussion with Terminal and how they have that creator fund. So
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah, terminal is a great ecosystem for developers.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so I'm wondering what this looks like a year from now and whether SuperNode will find out a way to if you're gonna be officially certified as a plug-in versus just a community developed plug-in. But then I look at things like Obsidian. So I don't know because Obsidian is highly invested in community plugins, very much in the same way. So it it it's gonna be interesting and I I want people to get compensated for their work, but I also don't want to stunt creativity for people who just want to go out and do stuff and really enjoy it. So you raise a whole bunch of questions we won't be able to solve, but so so what's next on your list?
Mitchell: All right, on my list I've got duplicate annotated pages. I have a couple and I can I can show let me see. I'll just do the newspaper here. so I'm just gonna scribble on some pages here. So a couple features, I'll group them into kind of one because they're related. But if you go to the page we'll review, this is a mod here that adds this annotated filter. So this filters by annotated pages. So this is helpful. Remarkable doesn't have a great way to track like your highlights, for example. I know a lot of people have wanted highlight export and stuff like that. So highlights are functionally annotation. So if you had a book with highlights in it, you could filter by annotated and you'd see all your highlighted pages. so that's nice. I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna exit this doc. But the the one I'm talking about now is duplicate annotated pages, there we go, annotated only for my duplication. So if this works, we should end up with a PDF with three pages that are just my annotated pages. so if you have a document you've marked up and you only want to send pages that you've marked up to somebody, you could export a PDF like that.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and what's interesting about that is I didn't mark this as something that SuperNode already has, but as you showed it, they already have it in their reader application. So you can when you go to export, it's actually right in there and you say export annotated pages only and then it does that just natively. I don't use that a lot, I don't find, but I can see where it could be really useful depending on what workflow you're using it in.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah, I could definitely see where that's one that either you don't need at all or it's critical. Like if if you're if your whole thing is like, you know, you receive a manuscript from an author or whatever and you mark it up and then you need to send that on to somebody else and you just want to send the changes. I could see where that'd be really important. I don't personally use that one a lot. I do use the filter annotated pages sometimes. like w in a book, if I, you know, have highlighted something, I'll go back quickly go back to it to it. but yeah, just little
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: I think those two, those are so easy to add to the interface that I think that could be, you know, obviously something like the table of contents, I can see where that's hard to add to the interface because you need to add a way for users to add and manage, add links. It's kind of complicated. But stuff like this is so simple. You just, you know, add a button to a menu that already has similar items. I think some of this stuff the remarkable could add pretty easily if they wanted to.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that's true with the plugins as well, because what I haven't shown as much yet, which we'll get to in some of these other ones, is that a lot of it flows through to the the toolbar selection menu. So that when you're using it, it's gonna natively just show up. Now the more you install, the longer that menu gets, which can be cumbersome in and of itself. But again, that's trying to figure out what tools do you actually need and want versus what like me I'm playing with and I have the full ten that you can have to test them out. But let me show real quick one of the ones I find most interesting. And that's going to be the collapse expand. I don't know where I would use it yet. I just think it's really cool that somebody did it. So for here you'll see this is my collapse expand test. So if I lasso this, I'm going to try and do it at an angle and not mess this up. And I select all of that and I drop here to my drop down. And again you'll see all the different, I've got a big scroll wheel here, but if I hit collapse expand, what it's gonna do is it's gonna collapse all of that into a little marker. And there it went. So it goes away and then if I want to expand that, I just press. And it takes it a minute. And I think, you know, again, these are all brand new things, but there it is, now it's back. And so I and I can edit it just like I normally would. So if I wanted to add more, I would add it and would keep it bounded in that box. it won't expand that box. I can't figure out a way to make it like a bigger selection or anything other than that. But whatever you select, you can then collapse and hide. So I'm not sure what the use case for that is, and maybe Mitchell, you can give me an idea.
Mitchell: Yeah, I was just thinking. That's a really cool feature. I don't know what I'd do with it though. I'm sure somebody I'm sure somebody can do something with it, but yeah, I don't know what I'd use it for. It is it is a little slow. I wonder what it's doing on the back end.
Ed Finn: I it just came out. Well, and and that's the thing, I wonder what it's doing as well. I don't know what all of the processing pieces are behind there. You'll also notice it took away my heading. So again, I don't know what processing's happening there. but it's it's just really cool to see that it's available. And I can I can see where maybe somebody may be sharing their screen and they don't want to
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. interesting. Yeah, it's not
Ed Finn: show something right away, they wanna reveal it. And if they do that, then maybe that would I I don't know. That's all conjecture. So I maybe I'll reach out to the developer and go, what's the
Mitchell: Yeah. Now you gotta add the old school PowerPoint transitions so you can animate stuff in.
Ed Finn: You never know. So what's next on your list?
Mitchell: so I know this is a feature that other platforms have is kind of a forced manual refresh. So on the remarkable, this is actually built in, but it's turned off. It's in an experimental configuration. what's crazy is we've gotten to the point with remanager and the package manager that it's easy for easier for a user to install a package than to edit a text file. So it's a five finger manual clear. so it's called Ghostbuster. so you can you can run this without mods. If you put the tablet in developer mode, you can go change a a false to a true and a config file in the file system and get this. but it's also a modification. And that that works on all the devices on the gallery three down to the markable one.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. And like you said, on the supernode it's just that sidebar. And you just swipe up on the sidebar and and make that happen. thing
Mitchell: I wish they would just expose it as a setting because they've already it's built into the OS. Like I made this mod, all I did was do the same thing that the operating system is doing. So like it's built into the operating system, it's just turned off. And I wish they'd turn it on because a lot of people have asked for it.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I'm curious because I and this is something I just don't know. But if if you move text around, so if you lasso something on Remarkable and you move it, does it trigger an auto refresh? Okay.
Mitchell: It does, yeah, I can show that too. So so I've got some text here. I'm gonna circle that. It's gonna go into a really fast but really high ghosting mode to do this. And then if you let go, I'm gonna deselect it, and then if you wait a couple seconds, it'll do a full clear that way too.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I asked that because the the full refresh is something that SuperNode already has, but if you look at the what I just asked you about, so if I put we'll just put test and if I lasso that it does the same thing. It goes into kind of a really fast mode, but it's immediate. I don't know if you saw that flash, so whenever I move it. it looks and it kinda localizes that refresh to just wherever that text was and then it clears out that screen, which is one of my frustrations on some of the other devices with their ghosting is you have to constantly refresh the screen. It seems like both Remarkable and Supernota figured out how to localize that in a way that isn't as disruptive.
Mitchell: Yeah, remark generally Remarkables D ghosting is pretty good. but I especially with that five finger gesture, like there there's times that I'm like, well if I could have a f clean a fresh screen, I'm just gonna press it. I don't I don't use it super often. but occasionally. but yeah, it's it'd be really easy for to turn on. Or just put in a put in the setting somewhere.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and so next for me, and let me show this real quick, is the image inserter. And you'll notice I did kind of a not a slide of hand, but there were there were multiple versions of how to insert images and I was trying a new one that I could not get to work the same way that this is the one I've used before, which is image inserter. So what it allows you to do is it almost keeps the picture away from the layer. So it becomes you can select it multiple times and move it around after the fact. And it's it's pretty cool. It seems to work really well. I can't get the crop to work right. So again, it's all new. But if I go to my plugins again and I go to insert image, I'll go to my style, photos, family. When that pops up I just hit insert original and there's the actual picture. And then I can pull that down. You'll see it did that reflash again. Pull it over and there you go. Now what's cool about it is once I take the selection off. There it is. Once I take the selection off, I can actually write right over that and still select it and move it. And it does slow down some of these plugins do slow the UI down a little bit. But now you'll see it removes it from that stroke. Which is very interesting. So I drew that stroke over it, but when I did the selection, as long as I didn't include the stroke, it didn't move it. So it's just an interesting way to be able to use this. And then from here you can cut, copy. it says you can collapse and expand this one. So that would be interesting. I'm not going to do it, but it says you can. But just kind of a neat feature. A lot of people have been very you can always bring an image into SuperNote as a template, but you can't really do anything with it other than that, except in Atelier where you can kind of use it as a background image and you can change the opacity. In a regular note, this is brand new. This is something that you couldn't do without a plug in.
Mitchell: Interesting. So on Remarkable, I can show images are pretty new on Remarkable. The latest stable release 3.27 got this sort of image support. And then it's getting better in 3.28. So I will show current stable 3.27 first. So I've got the Remarkable Partner app on my phone. I've got an image in my iOS clipboard. So I'm just gonna press and say paste and allow. And I've got a pretty well designed logo there so so when that sinks which should happen pretty quickly it'll refresh on the tablet so we've got the image on inside a notebook and i can also see we can we can draw we can draw over this kind of like you were saying i could select the stroke i can select the image independently of the stroke or i think i can do both
Ed Finn: Yeah. Well thank you for that.
Mitchell: the same time. I think that should be both once it clears. Let's see. Have to deselect it. there's my yeah. Stroke kind of order is a little interesting. but yeah, I can rotate, resize, all that sort of stuff. on, let's see, I need a different pen. so on the remarkable two, this is on 3.28. So this is the beta. And on here, this adds the feature, and this is actually pretty slow on the remarkable two. this adds a new capture feature, which is driven by the selection tool. So I could select. Like these cars from a PDF go into a notebook and paste. So that's pretty cool. that actually wasn't super slow that time. it's quite a bit faster on the newer devices, though. The Remarkable 2 is getting a little long in the tooth for for intensive operations. It's a six-year-old device that they no longer sell. so that's kind of the native image handling on Remarkable. And again, this is pretty recent. So they are making some good progress here. So this was the peers on current stable, this is on a beta.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mitchell: So it seems kind of similar to what you've got on the super note now.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, I think so. I don't know that they have any like what you just showed there being able to capture I I think they do, but I don't know which tool it is. And, you know, you and I went spent some time going through and trying to figure out, you know, what things might be like, what they might not be. And there's so many and I'm limited on the Supernode side to only having ten on device at a time. So there's only so much I can test. I'm not sure if they have a capture tool like that. I know they now have a it's not through the plugins, but they now have a web tool that allows you to send articles directly to Supernote that's available on Chrome and Firefox and I think Edge, I'm not sure. But you've had that on Remarkable for a long time, if I remember right.
Mitchell: Yes, Remarkables had something like that for a while. they just added recently, so with 3.27 and the image adding, they added the ability to send a so before it was you could send a web page as a PDF or an EPUB. And they I think they used like Mozilla's readability plugin to strip you know to make it like more readable on a device. now since they have image support, if you're a connect subscriber, they optionally let you save a web page as a notebook. So it will convert everything to remarkables text format and embed the images in this notebook format. So you could send a web page with images in it and then go in and you know copy those images and move them to other notebooks or PDFs or whatever. Yeah. And I think that is also I know it's on Chrome it may be on Firefox. I know it's not on Safari because people are asking for it.
Ed Finn: wow. Well, that's really cool. Yeah. Yeah, that that's really cool. I mean with with Supernotes you get some versatility. So you can do EPUB, you can do PDF, and you can do either reader or page mode. So you can send it as a full page. The issue is you won't be able to select or manipulate. You'll be able to write on it, but it you can't select those images and that kind of thing. but it's a brand new and and I know we're talking about these types of plugins, but that was one that came out
Mitchell: okay.
Ed Finn: probably about two or three weeks ago and I was just super impressed because it's great for read later and you don't have to pay for read wise and that kind of stuff. so I I like it a lot. So the next one I want to show is another one of those that it's really cool. And I think that maybe at some point I'll have the right use case for it. And I think now it's getting closer. But I also like the functionality as it exists. So it's gonna be
Mitchell: Okay, nice. Yeah.
Ed Finn: interesting. So let me pop in here and we're gonna talk about keyworder. So let's just do a new one here. So we'll call this keyword. It is not going to recognize that. My writing is atrocious. So if I go here. And I go to keyworder. What's gonna pop up is a totally different interface. Well, it actually got it. So it got keyword out of that mess that I scribbled. And I can say add. But what's cool is then it pops up to this. And you can actually just go to keyworder standalone without circling anything and pop up to this menu. And here's where you can manage all of your different keywords. So you can have all the keywords here. You can import. you can. upload a file and you can import all of your keywords to have them ready. It automatically sorts them then by alphabet, which is really cool. And then if I want to say I want to add, let's just add these four, which they expanded, you can actually do five now. So we'll say we'll do five. And then if you hit insert, what's going to happen is you'll see them populate here on the bottom here in just a second. And I think I've got it running so many different plugins right now that it's slowing it down. But you'll see there they all come and they come in. And there's my fifth one. Come on. There it is. So then I just get out of that. Those are all there. If I come over here to my keyword, now they're all right there. Just like they would be. And if I go in and delete the actual text. Yeah, it is bogging it down when I've got all of these things happening at once. Usually it's much faster on keyworder, and that's what I would do. I wouldn't have all the images and everything else. But now you'll see the keywords are still there even though the text is gone. So
Mitchell: Interesting. Yeah. Is this I don't know if you're familiar with tags on remarkable. I don't really use tags. does Supernode have a c is it mostly keywords or is there a concept of tagging as well?
Ed Finn: Keywords and tags are the same thing. I think between the two. I think the thing that keyworder brings in is that ability to select multiples, do them all at once, rather than have it be yeah, it's very much it's manual or you circle and it recognizes and it only shows your recents. So like for me, I could sit here and I if they ever do a favorites thing, which would be really cool, there's
Mitchell: Okay. Okay. Like manually typing each one.
Ed Finn: There are certain meetings I have that are standard and they might need six tags because it's three departments here, it's individuals that are always in the same meeting, and I could go and I could hit that and hit insert and it's done. Right now, the way I have to do that is I have to, if they're in my recents, just press them and they automatically add, or I have to re-enter that information again. So it could be a really big quality of life thing for some folks, but I don't know what the final result's gonna be. I see the potential and I think it's really cool, but I don't know if the utility is gonna be there for me long term. Like you said, do I need to do that or slow myself down to do that? But if I uploaded all my keywords and they were already sorted and I just had to go by first letter and select the people I needed, that could make it fast enough for me to to jet and do something like that.
Mitchell: Yeah. Well yeah, 'cause the last thing you want to do walking into a meeting is have to, you know, type out or scroll through and find the six attendees to tag, right?
Ed Finn: Yeah, well I always I usually do that before the day starts when I open that note. Or I do it after the fact and I just look at my calendar and add people. Yeah. But you're right. If you could do it really fast, then that could make it a a really cool thing.
Mitchell: Hm, okay. Yeah, I don't think so Remarkable's tags are pretty simple. I think even on the stock OS you can't like circle and do handwriting conversion to to make a tag. There is a mod for that. I don't use it because I don't use tags, but it's a pretty popular one. So you when you in the like selection context menu, there's one that'll let you create a tag from it. kind of like how I I did the selection for a table of contents entry, it's the same thing of like creating a tag. Kind of like creating a keyword, yeah.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I use the keywords mostly for if I want to search fast, because David it used to be much faster, the handwriting search. I don't know it's because I have so many notes, but it's slower than it used to be. It used to be the minute you closed a note, that was recognized if you have handwriting recognition on almost immediately. But I watched his test and then I went back and I tested mine too, and I was like, This is slower. It's taking longer to index. And again, I don't know if it's because of
Mitchell: Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: how many notes I have on device, but it was much slower than I thought it would be. So keywords, if I remember, are a much faster way to be able to search globally and get it faster to come back. So I think that I try to use them, knowing that the handwriting recognition there is as a fallback that I can go back and look later if I didn't catch it. but yeah, so I I use them pretty extensively, much more than I used to. Because I want to know how many times have I met with this person. And all their notes pop up and then I can go in and look at that. I've got two more to show. One that is kind of clunky, but I want to say cool. I would never use it, but I want to show
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: other folks kind of how to use it I've heard it asked for, let's put it that way. And that's because of books having the scribble erase. So now if you do a plug-in on SuperNotes, you can scribble to erase, but you'll see why I say and what it'll look like in the end, I don't know. But here's my scribble is the name of the tool. And if I scribble there
Mitchell: yeah.
Ed Finn: Sometimes up there it is. Scribbles working. What it's gonna do is basically activate the lasso tool and delete the text. It usually works faster than this. Again, that a lot of this has to do with all of these running at once. But there it went. It got rid of it. To me, this is much faster. And it works even faster when you don't have a bunch of other things going on. But you'll even notice there that it worked faster than The other one did. So would I use that? Probably not. But I can see that someone might want to use that so that they don't have to put their fingers on the screen, so that they don't have to go to the toolbar menu. They can just scribble through it and it'll erase it. that that's just one I thought was kind of neat to to show off for a minute. Do you have another one you want to show real quick and then I'll show
Mitchell: Sure, yeah. I've got one of the popular ones is floating toolbar. So I've got, let's see. I grabbed the paper pro for this because the colors are a little nicer. So the normal remarkable toolbar is this, right? floating toolbar is cool. so I'll do the high contrast one first. So it lets you have a floating toolbar. You can kind of park it anywhere. You can add tools from it, or add tools to it. So if I wanted to add blue ballpoint pin I would just hold this and it'll get added to the toolbar. I usually keep mine docked on the side. So like on the paper pro it's nice because you can you have access to a bunch of colors. It can save colors and thicknesses. You can save like the select tool so I can you know delete whatever. So that's nice to have. I pair that with a plugin I wrote called pin layer memory which will remember the layer you choose for a pin.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: So I use this in my to-do list. So you know, let's see. Get groceries. I have a so I'll select a highlighter. And in the past, I have I've had the highlighter be on its own layer. this is a new document, so it's not. Let me undo that. Move this out. So I have the pin on layer one. I'm gonna say highlighter on layer two. So now when I highlight, and it also follows the pin. So I'm gonna just choose the ballpoints should be on layer one. And then if I choose highlighter, that's on layer two. So when I'm making a to-do list. I'll highlight if it's something that needs to be done quickly. I don't know, this glare may be really bad. So the eraser also follows the layer. So if I want to erase a highlight, I choose the highlighter and then I erase it. So I can and it only erase that layer. So conversely, if I highlight and then choose the pin and then erase that, it only erases the pin. so I use that so that I can quickly add or remove highlights if I need to reprioritize stuff on my to-do list. remarkable also.
Ed Finn: Hmm.
Mitchell: Every time you turn a page, you it kind of resets the layers. So like I was marking up a doing some editing and feedback for a book my brother was writing, and I had a couple of different pen colors I wanted to use for different things. And it across page turns, it wouldn't remember. So this tool also auto-creates the layers for each pen as you make new pages. so the floating toolbar is cool though. I use that a lot. So I'll put my my standard pins I use. So I have like a ballpoint pen and then these are the ones I use for like color classifying my tasks and then a highlighter and then a select tool. so a lot of people like that one.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. I like it a lot. I I think that SuperNote doesn't have that. It has something a little similar. It does have a floating toolbar, but it's not customizable. And I think that's where you see a big difference. And that layer thing is phenomenal. That's really cool to be able to have maybe a standard thing that you always have and then you can mark it up and keep that the way it is. For Supernote on the let me go ahead.
Mitchell: And a lot of people are have asked for like more pin tools in the toolbar. And the floating floating toolbar is the way to get that kind of
Ed Finn: For that So there's the floating toolbar and what that looks like. And then of course you can rotate it and then you get all the rest of the things if you want them just by pressing that little ellipse. And then you can pull that to the bottom and lock it back in, the floating toolbar is native. the floating toolbar actually works in the calendar app too, which is kind of cool. it doesn't have near as many options. But you can drag it anywhere on the screen you want to get it out of your way and then do what you need to do. So it's it's a pretty cool feature. the last thing that I'm gonna show, So what you'll see here is to doist, and this is called super task. And with super task, you'll see already I have test one, I have test task one here, and I have test task two that I haven't entered yet. So if I circle this, and then I go to Find it here, add task. It's gonna recognize it. I'm gonna set it. I can set the priority if I want to, but I can say add to to doist, and then it's gonna say it's done, and I can say view tasks. And now it shows me not only here, but if you look here on the screen, you're gonna be able to see both of those. So it went that quickly. It takes a little bit of setup, you have to do an API key, but it immediately Sinks from here to the to do a stap. And then I haven't tried to tick them off yet. So let's see if Save. And we'll see if it comes through. I might have to refresh on this side. Yeah, for some reason this is something I'm just testing. So it's not showing yet. I don't know how fast the the refresh is back from Todoist on this. I know to it, you know, you saw how fast it went to there, but I don't know how fast it is coming back. And it's still showing on this side. So that may be something I'll have to look into. But if you use Todoist.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: And I mean SuperNode has their own built-in application for tasks and to-dos, which I find useful for in the moment tasks, but I would love to see an integration with Google Tasks, with Microsoft to-dos, that kind of thing, because I think that would be extremely useful for that unified task management platform.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: right now this is the closest thing that the plug-in community has come up with and I don't know what the future of that is. It would be really cool if they could do that though, I would think.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. So Remarkable doesn't have anything like that natively. they don't integrate with any sort of task tracking. There's a a recent calendar integration. and it lets you create meeting notes, which is cool. it's not a full calendar, but you can tap. I'm not gonna do it because I haven't cleaned this up, so I don't wanna leak stuff, but you can tap a an icon and it'll pull a list of like the next I think it's ten hours or ten meetings, whichever's lower. or up to ten rather. And it'll automatically create a meeting note for you if you click on it. It'll fill out the attendees and stuff. So that's kind of nice, but it's pretty basic. I like it, but people want more than that, I think.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I saw that and it it looked really cool. I just to your point, I kind of like one of the reasons that I picked Supernote was the calendar integration. Even though it's not the best out there, I actually think We Woods does the best calendar integration. But if you have one calendar, the Supernote integration is great. If you have multiples, that's when it starts to fall apart a little bit. And even books, it brings everything or you don't even turn it on. The supernotes kind of that middle ground of if you have one calendar, it's gonna sync, it's gonna sync really well, it's both ways, it works really nicely. I like to be able to have that and not have to worry about pulling my laptop or my phone out and I can quickly look and see what I've got going on that day.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: And then my notes are right there.
Mitchell: Yeah. So I actually built this is just a PDF, but this is the first kind of remarkable based project I started working on was it's called Ephemeris. It's a PDF generator. So it can take any number of ICAL or ICS feeds and it generates a PDF. and it's hyperlinked. This one's just a single page, so it won't, but the mini calendars are hyperlinked. So if you if this was longer, you could click a day and it would go to it. and the way it's and the way it syncs preserves annotation. So I could write something on here and then it would
Ed Finn: that's cool.
Mitchell: It replaces the PDF underneath the annotation layer.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool.
Mitchell: So I use that, which is it's perfect for me because I I run a server. So me having a job that runs every five minutes to regenerate a PDF is no big deal. I get for a lot of people that's not the case, right? That's a high barrier to entry. and unfortunately, the state of Remarkable's or lack of public API for their cloud service means I can't host a I I don't feel comfortable hosting a version of this for people to use. because Remarkable right now, if you if you connect
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: A third party service to your Remarkable account with a pairing code or a device token, that is full cloud access. And I'm not willing to host a service that does that. I'm hoping that at some point Remarkable will give us a a properly scoped cloud API so that people can run services like that securely. Cause it'd be it'd really open up kind of the integration world a little more to their cloud platform.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I think that's I think that's really cool. I mean, you know, that's one of the things I struggle with because JB Glossinger's Get It Done Planner. I've downloaded that. I've used it or tried to use it. I've downloaded MDO. They're all great planners and they all do wonderful things, but they're at the end of the day, they're one PDF. And for me, the way I work is kind of disjointed and distributed to where my notes are per meeting in most cases. And it makes it really hard for me to keep everything in one file. Plus the the cynic in me is always worried about redundancy and if that one file gets corrupted, have I lost everything? And so that's that's kind of the the the part I struggle with. But but that's a really cool concept and and it does, you know, kind of beg the question in a way why do you think that Remarkable is holding back giving any API access? I'm just curious.
Mitchell: my guess would be a mixture of probably some tech debt on their cloud side. before before they kind of went into a hiring freeze, I had seen a couple of positions posted for like Go developers. So it's a programming language that Google uses or that Google made, but a lot of people use now, Go. So my guess is their their cloud is carrying some tech debt from the early days that they need or feel like they should. clean up before they start building what need to be publicly stable APIs. So right now, Remarkable's kind of free to change their cloud however they want because they're the only people that use it. As soon as they document and publish like here's how you talk to our cloud, they are then kind of committed to maintaining that for a while. So they mentioned in the AMA on Reddit that it was something they were looking at was providing a public cloud API. So hopefully it's still on the roadmap. That was only a couple months ago so surely so timeline wise, hard to know especially post layoffs their development you know speed maybe a little lower. But they've given us some good stuff on the device updates. So it it's hard to know. I I think it's probably something they're looking at because it why wouldn't they, right? You're giving other people the ability to make your connect subscription more valuable. Seems like a pretty, pretty easy call. so my guess is there's just engineering effort behind the scenes that they need to knock out before they're able to commit to something like that.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. yeah. And I I think that's where, you know, we've talked before the difference in approach and how SuperNote's doing it, but you're right, that comes with risks. It comes with, you know, you once you bring developers directly in, then it's it feels to me at least, and I'm not a developer, as we've said, but it feels almost like a symbiotic relationship that each side has to respect the other and kind of not do something that's gonna break. What the other side's trying to do.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah, and like in in kind of the open source world, there's this concept, like if someone in the community adds a feature to your project, like it it seems like that's a great thing, right? But there's this concept of a yes is forever. So like if you as a project maintainer bring in that feature, the person who built that feature may never come back to your project, but now you're on the hook to keep that up, right? I heard some of the the developers for SQLite, which is a popular open source database, So in free software there's this concept of free as in speech, free as in beer. Like it is it free, you know, free as in dollars or free as in kind of the concept. And then the SQLite developers said it there's also free as in puppies. Like someone gives you a puppy, is that free actually? Definitely not, right? Like then you're responsible for that. So I think I think that's part of it too, is I'm and and I don't know for sure, but my guess would be before they expose something like that, they want to make sure that they're able to maintain it.
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: And and hopefully Supernotes kinda gone through the same thing with their plugin architecture so that that remains stable for the community to build on going forward.
Ed Finn: Yeah. Well I have one more question and then we'll let you go because we've been on here for a while. But I I just and you and I kinda talked about this early on, but if you had to just get rid of all your mods tomorrow, would Remarkable still be the platform and would you be able to do all of the things you currently do or at least the majority of the things you do without those mods?
Mitchell: Yeah. so mods, yes. Because I ran without mods until eight months ago. So for four years I used the Remarkable stuff without any mods. The caveat being I do want to still use RM Fate Cloud, but that doesn't require a mod. That's like networking level changes on the tablet. So Remarkable would have a harder time breaking that than than some of the other things. and I guess I could use their cloud subscription. I'd just rather not. but I think so. I think the mods I've installed are nice to have. They're quality of life improvements, but I was getting along just fine without them before.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I'll answer that for Supernote. tomorrow if I didn't have any of the things that didn't come natively on the tablet, because they do keep expanding those, I would have no issues in all these things I've shown you are nice to have. I know one thing that I didn't show that I've shown in the past is the dictionary and a lot of folks, especially on the reader side, but even in notes it works. So people could be taking a note, get a a word they don't know, just write it down from what they see on the slide and then go back later and look it up. that's a very nice quality of life thing. But then I thought about it, how many times in my Kindle or my Kobo or in my books device do I use the dictionary? Not a lot. So is it something for me that's necessary? For somebody else it may be essential. So I think it's nice to have those, but that goes back to the earlier thing you said about don't pick it for something that may or may not be there. And and that's
Mitchell: Yeah, 'cause these are expensive devices. I mean, the the cost to get into a mark a remarkable is anywhere from four hundred to thousand dollars. supernotes aren't on the low end either, right? They're these are very quite expensive, quite niche devices. So I think, yeah, definitely make sure it'll do what you want before you dive in.
Ed Finn: Well Mitchell, thank you. This has been tremendous. It's been a lot of fun talking to you about this because I think it's really good to hear different perspectives and people who use different devices for their everyday thing. I mean, there's a reason I've been using Superno for five years. You've been using Remarkable for five almost six years, I guess, or somewhere somewhere around that five year mark? Four, okay. So
Mitchell: Yeah. four ish, I think. Yeah. Four or five years, yeah.
Ed Finn: There's a reason we stick with those devices. We may look at other ones. We may, you know, I've got all kinds of them now because they asked me to take a look at them, but I keep coming back to the device that I know is going to do everything I need it to do. And I think that gives a really good perspective. So before we sign off, tell people where to find you, where you're at, drop the website again. I'll put it all down in the description, but I want to make sure that everybody knows where to find what you're doing.
Mitchell: Yeah, so my my biggest project is remanager, and that's an open source free project. that is remanager.io where you can find the website to download that. There's a user guide up there too. so if you want to take a look, I've got a 20 minute YouTube video linked on that site that walks through all of Remanager. my YouTube channel also has a walkthrough of better TOC, which is the table of contents mod that I showed earlier, in more depth, if that's something that you are interested in having on a remarkable. and I think you're you'll put a link to the package index. So if folks are curious what all is out there that's easy to install and remarkable, that's that'll be your go to resource. It's vellum dot delivery. you can browse all the packages the communities put together and and those are all very easy to install. Most of them are one click installs from remanager.
Ed Finn: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Mitchell. This has been great. Hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again soon at some point. If not, we'll talk in Discord for sure. Have a good one, everybody. Thank you all.
Mitchell: Yeah, thanks, Ed. This is awesome. Sounds good. Thanks.
Mitchell: I haven't, nope.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so I think that's gonna be a fun conversation because we both know our devices really well. And I think that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you. but what I'd like to do, if you can take just a minute, tell everybody who you are again, but also open with a question that I've had that's been on my mind for a while, which was what got you interested in e-ink to begin with? What was the thing that made you think this is a space I want to be in and something that I want to tinker around with?
Mitchell: Sure. so I'm Mitchell Scott. By day I'm a DevOps manager. and kind of in my spare time, I hack around on lately remarkable devices. I'm kind of a tinkerer. I'm not a developer by trade. I I do kind of the infrastructure and operation side. so I know all about servers and hosting and how the internet works and stuff like that. but I'm more new to the software development aspect of things. so Yeah, e Ink. my first e ink device, I think, was a a Kindle Touch in probably 2011 or 2012. so like most people, intro to e Ink was a Kindle device. I also had just gotten the first gen iPad. I think that was in 2010, maybe. I can't remember exactly. So I wanted I thought the idea of e Ink was really cool. Got the Kindle Touch. I think that device had like 160 PPI or something. It's pretty low res screen. pretty underpowered device, limited to Kindle stuff. So cool, but when I was comparing it to the iPad I had at the time, super limited. I was also wrapping up my time in college, so I didn't use the Kindle all that much for I didn't have a lot of time for reading. It wasn't just textbooks. so I didn't get a whole lot of use out of that and kind of set that aside and didn't come back to eating for a while. my first foray into Like of the E note taker type stuff was in 2022. so I had my first kid in 2016. And at that point, so kind of post having my first child, I realized that my brain wasn't working as well as it used to as far as remembering all the tasks I needed to do for a day or week at work. So before before that, I didn't even use paper notebooks very extensively. I just kind of remembered everything in my head, and then with kind of the post Parental sleep deprivation and stuff. I lost the ability to hold all that stuff in my head and I never really got it back. so that's when I got my first like disc bound notebook and started keeping track of my to-do list and meeting notes and stuff in there. So I was using paper pretty heavily from 2016 to 2021, 2022. and a coworker said, Hey, have you I got this remarkable tablet. You wanna mess with it? And I played with it a little bit and I thought, this is cool. It's
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: It's e-ink again, it's something I think I would use. I was kind of interested in going back to e-ink for reading. and I know the remarkable isn't super well regarded as an e-reader, but I have DRM free copies of all my books, so that wasn't a problem. That's my preferred way to read anyway. Remarkable was kind of it's somebody had one and I held it and played with it, and I thought this is pretty cool. I looked around at the time. And I don't even remember what all was out there in 2022. I know stuff's come a long way since then. There's a lot of options now. one thing about Remarkable is I kind of I was curious. This is before Amazon entered the segment, right? Of eNote takers. I was kind of thinking Amazon's gonna enter this market and just kill the competition. So when I was looking for devices to buy into, a core requirement was I need to be able to run this how I want to if the company disappears tomorrow. Because I kind of thought all of them and Remarkable, like there was pretty good community for Remarkable at the time. there was RM Fake Cloud for self-hosting the cloud. So I thought, okay, I can do this, I can self host my own cloud, I can have this device, never connected to a remarkable server. And if the company goes under tomorrow, I'm gonna be just keep rolling, it'll be fine. So that's why I went with Remarkable at the time. and I've kind of kind of stayed with Remarkable. I so I I bought in with the Remarkable two, and I had that until I still actually have that device. and then last summer I bought a used Remarkable Paper Pro because I thought the color was interesting and I wanted to see what the gallery three stuff was about. Love that device. It's a really early panel, so it's yellow. It may fail at some point. the early gallery panels were a struggle. I think they've improved a lot because I've got a paper pro move as well, and its panels a lot wider. it's a really nice panel. and then I recently got the I got the Paper Pure on launch day. I since then I also picked up Remarkable One. So I've I've got the full family of remarkable devices, which is helpful in developing stuff for all of them. I can test across the whole entire family.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's awesome. You kinda hit on, why remarkable and how you chose it. So I think that's really interesting for everybody to know. I'm kind of curious, is it still and you even mentioned your use case, is it still primarily you use it as a note taker and kind of a a place to collect your thoughts or have you expanded that at all or
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. So the Paper Pro stays b it's basically chained to my desk at all times. It's my primary to-do list tracker, meeting notes, kind of productivity type stuff. And and so now my three daily driver devices are the paper pro, the paper pro move, and now the paper pure, which kind of surprises me a little bit. But we can get into that too. So paper pro, it's so big that it just kind of stays on my desk because I have the other devices, I don't want to carry it around. I could, it's not crazy huge or heavy, but it's a big device. I color code my to-dos based on like I'm Cub Scout master, I'll color code stuff related to that that I need to keep track of. Obviously like work stuff gets a couple different colors based on different things. Personal type stuff, you know, just different things. I color code my notes with dots and highlighting. So having the color display has been really nice for that. I don't I wouldn't want to go back to black and white for that use case. 'Cause I tried to with the pure just to see how it went and I really missed the color for that. so that guy stays on my desk. The Paper Pro Move is actually my primary e-reader. I I use it for other stuff too, but it's I've read I think 8,000 pages on the move. So I know people say you can't read on a remarkable dice. You definitely can. I mean, there's better e-readers, but if it's what you've got, you could certainly make it work. And I I use it for that. it's also nice to have quick access to my to do lists and stuff so that I'm, you know, upstairs reading in bed. I can jot down a quick to do for the morning if I like think of something while I'm reading or just laying in bed at night. like, I need to remember to do whatever. So I'll just put that in the same notebook at all cloud syncs. So when I get to my desk in the morning, it's sitting there on the paper pro as well. another use case for the move, which is interesting, is I take it with me almost everywhere because it's pretty small. so I'll I'll just have it in my pocket of my jeans or a a jacket pocket if it's cold. so I since I always have it with me, I found that it's been nice at restaurants when my kids so I've got small kids from I've got a 10 year old, an eight year old, and a six year old. the younger ones get kind of restless at restaurants sometimes. And I feel not so bad about handing them the the remarkable tablet to color on as opposed to like an iPad or a cell phone to play games on. so that's been a nice use case for it too. And since it's color, the kids like to color on it with different colors.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really good to hear. And I think it's it's important because use case, as as you know from you and I talking, is so important for what you need it to be able to do. It's one reason I don't have a front light, because when I use these devices, I don't need it. I'm always in a well lit condition. Yeah.
Mitchell: Yeah, and I I really like the front light for for the reading side of things. I don't use it much for even the paper pro. I the gallery is bright enough. I don't use the front light on the paper pro unless I'm reading a newspaper and it's really early in the morning, not in the middle of summer. I so ha I do like ha I love having the backlight on the move because it's kind of it's small enough, it's what I take to read in bed. So having a backlight or a front light there is really nice. so I don't have to do like supplemental lighting or anything. but I I can definitely see why people would want to not have a front light. I kind of missed the front light on the on the paper pure.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I think you raise a great point. I think partially my reason is I use Supernote devices primarily for creative and work related tasks, solely. And then I'm actually Loving the books go six for my reader, which has a front light, because a lot of the times as a reader I need that. And I can read from all the different platforms. I don't have to worry about because I don't have all of my books DRM free. And I don't use Calibre and some of the other things that you would use to be able to do some of that. But I think you're right. I think if you know that you're gonna need to be able to see in conditions that aren't ideal for lighting.
Mitchell: nice. Yep. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ed Finn: You really can't go with a non front lid device if that's gonna be part of your
Mitchell: No, it's a it's kind of painful. I think if if you know you're just going to use it in an office setting or a home office setting where you control the lighting in that room and you don't have to worry about, you know, blasting light at a a sleeping partner or something, then you then yeah, you don't need a front light. I also haven't found I've written a little bit on the on the pure and I've I've written on the Remarkable too. I don't find I may not be that sensitive to the pen to ink distance. I know some people really are and really don't want a front light layer there. I don't find that I'm super sensitive to that, I don't think. But again, that may just be different folks are sensitive to different things.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I think it may vary by device. I know that when I got the Note Air 5 C it was very I mean, you could definitely see it when you had the front light on, because of course it has to have the front light because of the collido layer. And so when I naturally write and I'm looking at kind of this angle that you're naturally writing on, you could really see the difference. But when any of the other devices that didn't have one, I couldn't see it.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You could see it. Yeah.
Ed Finn: And I don't know if that was the combination of the collido panel and the light, but you're right, on certain things I can't tell that there's a huge difference. Like if you use the the Go 10.3 Gen 2, the Lumi, I can tell that there's a screen shadow around the edge, but as far as writing on it versus the other one, I can't tell a huge difference as far as that tactile feel, especially if the front light's off.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: So I think you're right. I think a lot of that may be perception or even how close you are, what angle you're at, and how that works. I do want to talk before we jump in, and we are going to jump in and show, some of the remarkable mods, but also some of the supernova plugins. But I want to talk a little bit about remanager, because you kind of changed the game, and and I don't think that's overstating it by
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ed Finn: creating remanager versus having all of these mods out there that are available on GitHub. They're, not super hard to install as long as they're just ones you download and and install. But it's a little different on Remarkable, or at least it seems to be, than the way that some of the SuperNote plugins are. So I'm curious for you, when did you think, you know what, there's gotta be an easier way to do this. And then kind of what's that journey been and what was it like before Re Manager existed?
Mitchell: Yeah, so back kind of when I first got involved with Remarkable in twenty twenty two ish, right before three point I can't remember what version. It was in the three point the early three point or three point three days. apps could have direct access to the frame buffer, which is a technical way to say like apps could just draw to the display on the Remarkable One and Remarkable Two. and that's always been the case for the Remarkable One. They Remarkable made some optimizations. for the Remarkable Two that they continued on through the newer devices. And so applications don't have direct access anymore. They have there's some display complexities. so there was a package manager before called Toltec that was very popular and there were a bunch of applications and mods in it. mostly applications, so less modifying the Remarkable UI and more giving you the ability to run other stuff on the device like games or than you know like chess, not like Doom. There is a Doom port. It does run.
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: Ish. so so that stuff existed before. And then with that big frame buffer update, all the graphical stuff kind of paused. there was like RM hacks that worked on, I think 3.11, some of the slightly newer versions. and then a couple of years ago or a little more than a year ago, a developer figured out a way to more efficiently inject code into remarkable's running application, and they built a whole framework to do that. so that's what the latest generation of mods and packages on Remarkable use. so it's a system that lets you do a bunch of different things, including modify the QT application and its resources and like during runtime. So that's kind of when I got involved. So I'll go back a little bit. back in 22, obviously I set up RM Fate Cloud and I used that the entire time. So I've used it for four years now. that's the only mod I ran on my and I don't even know that I consider that a mod. You don't have to do you just change a couple things on the tablet. You you change some DNS settings and install a certificate and you can you can do that. So I've done that the whole time. and up until probably when I got the paper pro move or so. Around that time is when I started looking at other mods. So I ran my tablets basically stock for for four years. so I wanted to see what was Like what what kind of mods are there? What kind of things were possible? And so I got involved. There's a community discord server for for folks who kind of mod and tinker with the remarkable tablets. it was all very manual. So, like you said, we we were downloading releases from GitHub, copying them to the device via the terminal, installing them on the device via the terminal. It's all very terminal oriented, which with my background is no problem. I've run Linux for twenty years, so it wasn't a big barrier to entry. And I was kind of blind blinded to how hard just that was to lay people or non-technical folks, or even folks who know how to work on computers but don't live in the terminal environment. so I thought, this isn't that hard. Anybody can do this. And then somebody and then I saw I made a couple mods, including my table of contents mod, and somebody really wanted that. And they were non-technical. So I said, Okay, let's hop on a screen share, I'll I'll walk you through this. No problem. It's like six commands. It took an hour and a half. Right. And This person is perfectly competent in all aspects of life. They're just not a technical computer, like super nerd computer user. so at that point is when I thought, this needs to be like a desktop app. This needs to be either a website or a desktop app that can install this stuff. This is too hard for normal people. so I started building the desktop app first, remanager, I actually think I started with. With co-reader, not even my TOC mod. I was trying to get a a more streamlined co-reader installer. and maybe like the RMHAX installer. And I realized as I was doing that, that different variables start coming up, right? Like the mods have different versions for different versions of the software for the remarkable OS. so I thought, okay, I need to track all that. And before too long, I thought I really am inventing or developing a package manager. So I paused development on remanager and I went and built a package manager called Vellum. so it handles and it's a command line application. Remanager talks to it remotely. So remanager, It's basically a remote front end that runs on your computer that talks to a package manager on the tablet. and it's a little more complicated, but that's kind of the high level is it talks to it installs and then talks to the package manager running on the device. so I built the package manager inspired by some of the work that happened on Toltec. So, like I'm definitely not the only person involved here. I didn't build any of the low level injection stuff that happens to get all the like the mod framework, as I call them. That stuff I did not build. I've contributed a little bit now, but most of that work is as other individuals. I I'm not the builder of all of the mods. I've built like thirty five or so, but there's a bunch that I haven't built that other people have built that remanager lets you install. Floating toolbar is a really popular one. I have nothing to do with that project. That's somebody else's. like the the co-reader port, that's another developer entirely. app load is by the same guy that did the mod framework. So my big contribution to this area was just making the existing stuff available to more normal people. so if that's that's kind of what I've done is make a desktop application that's easy to use for for new folks that can manage the installation of stuff on the tablet because before it was you're getting in a terminal, you're running commands that you find on GitHub to install stuff. which I thought GitHub was easy to use because I've used it for years, right? and I realized that some people just seeing a GitHub page, even if it has a really well done README, and like we're developers, so n a lot of the times documentation's the last thing or maybe it never happens. So that even that's not a given. But even if a GitHub page has a really good README, Just seeing a GitHub page, people like normal people don't know how to navigate that. So I built a like a marketing type site for remanager, remanager.io, that's just a very simple click this to download for your platform, and it auto-detects your computer based on like user agent and stuff in the browser. so it was really eye-opening to see because I'm a technical computer person, right? I've done that's my my day job. It's what I've done for for 20 years. so just
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: being kind of brought back into seeing things through the eyes of someone who's just like a normal, you know, normal person. was like, GitHub is like a hurdle for them. Wow. Okay. How can we how can we make this as easy as possible? And I think it's getting there. I think I think we're getting there.
Ed Finn: I think you bring up a good point. no matter what field we're in or whatever we do, sometimes we forget those process steps. It's like, well, yeah, this is so easy to do. But is it? You know, and then having to go back and re-engineer it because I've gotten more familiar with GitHub because I am not highly technical. I mean, I may look more organized than I am sometimes, but the truth is that
Mitchell: Right. Yeah.
Ed Finn: GitHub sometimes can intimidate me because it's just the amount of options that you have. and that's one thing I like about the plugin installer that they're currently using with SuperNode, is all you have to do manually at this point is download the version. So you'll download that to your computer, pull it into your MyStyle folder, and then pick it. And it installs. So there's no terminal. If there was a terminal, I'd be lost. I very rarely except for when they did the side loading initially, was I in the terminal. And that process was very complicated to begin with if you're not used to working in that environment. so I a hundred percent get your point. And I think what this does is it opens it up to more people and it makes it easier for them to be able to engage with it and to test these tools. even when we start talking about some of the plugins today. There's one I won't be able to show because I couldn't get it configured. I couldn't figure it out, even though 90% of that work's already done. And it took me a while to get one or two of the other ones done. Most of them are pretty easy to do. But it does take that expertise. So I think that you doing this and making it so it's understandable and easier for people to engage is a really big step forward. from what you've seen of the SuperNote plugins, and I know you don't have one, so this is all going to be kind of armchair quarterbacking a little bit, but you've seen a lot about them, you've heard a lot about them, we've talked about them in Discord, you and I have had conversations about them. what do you think the best version of their un user interface should be kind of moving forward because again, they're more integrated, it sounds like, than mods are because it's actually being shepherded by the company a little bit. So they're working with these developers. Do you think that should be through InCub? Do you think it should be through kind of more of an app store type experience?
Mitchell: Sure, yeah.
Ed Finn: that's created on their device versus, you know, like Google has Google Play and all of that. What do you if you were going to give them advice, what would it be?
Mitchell: Right. does Yeah, I'm not super familiar with Ink Hub. Does that run that runs on device, right? Yeah. and that's where you can do the like community templates and everything too, right? To me it makes sense to keep everything there. you know, if there's just another tab in Ink Hub that's plugins. I'm not sure like how they curate those today, like or templates, how rich the experience is, if you can sort by popularity or whatever. so
Ed Finn: It does. Yeah, you can pull in a community template.
Mitchell: If if that kind of infrastructure is there, I would think probably building a separate app store would be more confusing. And then you you don't have two places to go instead of a one stop shop for where do I go get more stuff for my device?
Ed Finn: Yeah, that was my thought, but I wanted to get your opinion on it because Ink hub is really interesting and it has a lot of different things, including stickers, which are already a plug in. But right now a and I want to remind everybody, anything plug in related with Supernote is a beta. And actually it's an alpha. I would call it probably an alpha because there's so much tinkering happening. It's not even in an official beta release. It's actually a separate release pipeline. So The stuff I'm gonna show you is stuff that I'm comfortable playing around with, but not everybody I think is gonna be in that space. Ink hub is actually on device already. in the staple release. So I think that in thinking through that and getting people to really understand your comfort level is really important. And I think even for mods, it's probably the same thing. If you're not comfortable with developer mode or going in there and you're afraid you're gonna break something, I wouldn't recommend anybody do it. Just because
Mitchell: Right. And developer mode's easy to get into. a paper pro, paper pro move, or paper pure. I haven't figured out a way to break one yet. Remarkable two is easier to break. there's not a there's not a software recovery process that a normal person can do on those. For the other for the newer devices there is, you plug it in via USB, you run a tool, remarkable gives you it reflashes the OS and and you're you have like a factory fresh device. So On those three devices, or the remarkable one, it's pretty easy to recover too. it's it's pretty low risk. I would say, as always, like I don't know that I'd recommend someone to purchase a device if it's a if you consider the device a big investment. I don't know that I'd recommend purchasing one because there's mods that solve a critical problem for you. These are still fundamentally things that are created by the community, and I'd probably say the same for SuperNote. If you are gonna rely on a Supernote plugin and that's the reason you're gonna buy the device,
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: I don't know, because that's a community developed thing that you're relying on someone who's not getting compensated for their time to build and maintain for you. I would, you know, keep that in mind as you're if you're gonna if you're making a purchase decision. similar to you don't don't necessarily buy a device for what you you think it'll do or the companies promise you it'll do down the road, buy it for what it is today. unless you really want to tinker, in which case go for it. But
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: You know, as a normal user, if you think I absolutely need a table of contents, I can give you one on the remarkable, but remarkable isn't giving you one right now.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I think you raise a good point because, you know, and we'll get to this later after we do some show and tell, because, you know, I bought the supernote for what it was. And I've grown with the device over the years. And I think most people that's where they should fall. Buy it for what it does for you when you are making the point of purchase. And if you know you need certain things, tailor your purchase based on those things. And then if it grows and now you have things later that come online and come on board and they make your work easier, great. But you always know that you can go back and still use the things the device has. And I think that's a really good point that a lot of times gets lost, especially for those of us who are tinkering in the e ink space, especially.
Mitchell: Yeah, and we're excited about the stuff we can make the devices do, right? Like yeah, whether or not the company supports it or or delivers that feature, we're just excited to have more, you know, be able to do more stuff on the devices.
Ed Finn: well what I'd like to do is if you want to share your camera or I don't know if you're gonna share your screen, your camera, where you're wanting to start, but if you wanna do that, we can jump in, we can take a look at some mods and talk about kind of what that looks like on the remarkable.
Mitchell: Sure. so I've got the paper pure here. I've got the remarkable two here. This is running a beta. This is running the 3.28 beta. So I think there may be a couple things we compare this when we get to do your mods. so this device is not modified. I mean, I've got a sleep screen on here. You don't have to install mods for that. That's editing a config file. so on the newer devices, you would have to be in developer mode for that. On the remarkable two, you just SSH another device. So we'll be looking mostly at the paper pure device. for mods. So I'll start with the my table of contents mod. so I've got a document here I wrote and I think it's probably synced over. So I've got my table of contents. So this is completely third party. this is a mod I developed so I can go to different sections of the Of the document. you can oops, I didn't grab all of it. You can make a table of contents entry from a selection. So that'll run through remarkables text conversion. And so I'll probably have, yep, there we go. so I've got that here. looks like I have a broken external link because I haven't used this doc in a while. the other thing better TOC can do, it can auto-number your entries between a few different formats for outline purpose outline purposes. so that's that. It's it's using a bit of so Remarkable has this concept of a table of contents, but it's for EPUBs and PDFs. So I'm reusing their interface.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: So I know the Supernote plugin that you'll show in a second, it it builds like text in the notebook. This is a separate user interface section. So this is not inside the notebook per se. If you export a notebook, this will not be there.
Ed Finn: Okay. Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask whether it travelled off device.
Mitchell: the data for it cloud syncs. So it does travel between devices. So if if this was on my cloud account, I can edit this and when the when the document syncs, that'll come across. But exporting to PDF, it doesn't handle that today. I could probably make it do that. It's just quite a bit of work. so I haven't yet. the other thing is you can link to external documents from here. So like I can link to a newspaper. And so that's here. I can I can change indentation, stuff like that. So it's it's pretty flexible as just a kind of a a table of contents with some external linking functionality to add to notebooks. And and it works with with EPUBs and PDFs as well. So if you have a book and you want to use it for bookmarks, you can kind of use it like that too.
Ed Finn: So I'll show my TOC or the the Supernova plugin TOC and then we'll kinda jump back and forth here a little bit. So let me
Mitchell: Sounds good.
Ed Finn: So here I've got all mine laid out. So Supernode has the native headings. And that allows this table of contents to actually work. So what you do, and you'll notice here, let me go back for a minute. I've got different shading here. So there's kind of a main header, which is that all black, and then it's a little bit grayer, and then I've got one here that's a little bit less gray. So if I go here and we'll go ahead and we'll go into plugins and we'll go to TOC. And when I do that, I'm going to say generate and what it's going to go through is go through the entire document. And of course I just use this for a real short example. But it's going to go through, it's going to identify all of those headings and then it's going to populate which you can barely see happening here. And it's going to convert the text. Now the text conversion, I didn't write I wrote this in a hurry, so it's not great. I tested it earlier. But if I pull that up, you'll be able to see now that those are and it's the SuperNode plugins, it really lost it on that one. But it even recognized when there was an indents. So when you change those header types, it realized that okay, this is a subheader. So that's something Supernode doesn't have natively.
Mitchell: Nice, yeah, the heading levels, yeah.
Ed Finn: you could mark it a different color, but in your main table of contents or your headings, it's all gonna be straight in line like this. So what this does is take that same concept, condense it, turn it all into hyperlinks, so now I can go if I press it, I'm pressing in an angle. If I go here, of course these are all on the same page, but then it even gives you that backwards functionality like you would have in any other hyperlink with SuperNote. So it
Mitchell: okay.
Ed Finn: kind of latches itself onto that same concept, but then enhances it, if that makes any sense.
Mitchell: Yeah, so Remarkable doesn't have that concept of like linked text in a notebook. So you can't do that type of thing on Remarkable, yeah.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and the and the beauty of this, and I I've really found there's another similar plugin called Links, I think it is. I don't have that one installed right now because I've been kind of cycling through them. but it basically crawls through and looks for any link, internal, external, all of that and creates like a master index. And all of those things travel off device, which is why I think they're kind of unique, very similar to what Books does with their outline. But this, when I export it, now all of these links work. And they work in the partner apps all the way across. So it's pretty cool. so it's different. You can't edit it. I can't change the indent. I can't move it around after the fact. You can regenerate it. So if I keep working on this notebook for a long time, things move, I just delete this table of contents, regenerate it, and I get all the updated information.
Mitchell: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna ask about like when if you move a page or create a new page in the middle, does it recalculate that or do you have to go regenerate it manually every time?
Ed Finn: But it's not quite as yeah. As far as I know, you have to regenerate it. But again, these are very early. I don't know if they'll build something in. And I haven't tried it on a large scale yet because a lot of these are very new. it may I know that when we get to the keyword or pu plug-in here in a little bit, I made a video about it, thought it was awesome, said you can only do four, which is a limitation I don't need. The developer had it updated that same day and removed that cap because Supernote doesn't have
Mitchell: Okay. Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: a native limit on how many keywords you can attach. So I mean it's moving that quick. I mean you guys do amazing things when, you start developing these tools. And I just mentioned how great it was and that maybe at some point it would have no cap and got a message within like thirty minutes, hey, I went in I fixed this thing. So it's pretty cool. Doesn't
Mitchell: so the next one
Ed Finn: matter to me.
Mitchell: I'm just gonna go into my list, which is more or less alphabetical. So Paper Pro, Paper Pro Move, and Paper Pure have Bluetooth radios in them. Remarkable doesn't expose this, but I built a modification and some of the folks in the community figured out the commands and stuff that need to run to enable all the all the Bluetooth hardware. So I don't know that I have a device paired to this. I think I do. Let me see. Takes a little while to start 'cause I'm initializing all the radios and stuff, but or it'll fail. There go. so you can see I picked up my keyboard that's connected, it grabs the battery. and then if I go back to a notebook, I can you know, I can type. So that's just exposing basic Bluetooth functionality on the Remarkable, which Remarkable hasn't given us yet. this it could be coming, cause the devices have the hardware. I don't think it's been a focus. Remarkable sells a keyboard folio for the paper pro. not sure if this will ever be native or not, but but it works it works okay. there's bugs for sure, because it's some of the Bluetooth driver stuff is a little rough. I've had an issue when I come out of Hibernate every now and again with the radio on, it'll it'll freeze the device and then just have to reboot it.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and and that's one of those things, you know, w you and I went through and kind of looked at all of this and said, where are functionalities that already exist on these devices? And this is one that Supernote has had as long as I've owned it. Now I don't know about the Gen 1, like the very first SuperNotes that were Linux based, whether or not they had that. but all of the ones since the A5X. and A6X have had Bluetooth and it's just integrated into the drop down menu. So and it works really well and they even have a a weird thing that I it's not weird. I've just never really used it like I thought I would originally. But if you have the partner app open on your desktop and you have it linked to your device, you can actually just start typing with your keyboard from your computer on your device.
Mitchell: interesting. That's cool.
Ed Finn: Which so it's just a pass through for your keyboard that you have connected to your PC and that doesn't even require a Bluetooth connection. It's just straight through the desktop app. I thought I would use that more than I do. But I I don't tend to. So
Mitchell: Yeah, and that's kind of the thing, is I don't I don't type on these devices really. So I I built I built the Bluetooth settings mod that exposes it via the remarkable settings. I don't use the Bluetooth all that much aside from testing it. it's nice to have a keyboard but as far as just using these as like a typewriter, I don't personally use them that way. I know there's a lot of people that do like to use a e paper device as a typewriter with a keyboard. And and it's cool that those people can do that, but I That's just not really a use case that I have.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I do, but in a different way. So I have one of those quirky writers. I don't know if you've seen those. it looks like an old school typewriter. It's got the mechanical keyboard. And I just put my super note in there as a screen and pair it via Bluetooth and then just start typing. And for me, since that's a Word document, you can put text in notes, but I tend to use it as a Word document. I type all that in, then I bring it over to my PC and pretty it up.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah.
Ed Finn: because it's already in word format. But I don't do it like what I was just saying. I don't just type on it unless I'm sitting down and that's what I'm gonna be doing.
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there's a community app that's a markdown editor. And and I've used it a little bit for fun and I'd probably find I I if I were gonna be typing on this, I would do that over typing in a remarkable note. 'cause then it's just a text file I can pull off and do whatever I want with.
Ed Finn: Well let's go ahead, we'll look at one that's real quick on my side that is actually a date timestamp. And I don't know if this is something remarkable has but it's really easy to use. And you'll see here we're back to my same document, but if I go to my plugins and then I go to date time. And it's going to give me these options. So I can go ahead and I s can select date, time, date and time. I can include or not include the day name, a bunch of different options here. I tend to want it be want it to be aligned left. I want it to be bold. And then this is something again when I started talking about these, it would only stamp once. It would allow you to add a keyword, but that keyword was basically only good once per day. So if you added it multiple times, it wouldn't work. And here the developer said in their index date for search and changed it up a little bit, took out the hashes and made it just a string of numbers. And I haven't had time to test whether that would then make it searchable globally across all my notes. But that's all you do is you select what you want, you hit insert, and then Go ahead and get rid of my bottom toolbar there. There it is. It's out of the way. It's out of mind. It might keep me from having to always Yeah, you can select it. Well, actually I just deleted it. So we'll go back out here.
Mitchell: And it's just like notebook text? Okay. Yeah.
Ed Finn: So I can go here and I can do whatever I want with that. And it does that with keyworder too, which I end up deleting those, but it leaves the keywords, which is really kind of a cool function. You can leave them on there if you want them or you can get rid of them.
Mitchell: Yeah, so you get like a hidden date stamp then. That's cool.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so you can if I wanted to, I could just hide that. My old habit because I'm old school, normally I would have Supernode plugins and then I would have parenthesis and the date as a double check on me because SuperNode only tags by date created for the calendar, which is one of the things I use a ton. And so for this, I keep thinking, will I replace it and just use the timestamp? Probably not because I'm probably in that habit and I want that redundancy there. But it's a nice to have so that if I go to my keywords
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: There's that date stamp right there. And again, it's just a string of numbers. So I'm not sure how it's gonna play out before it actually looked like you see down here in the bottom right. I don't know what it'll look like as it moves forward, but a really cool, just nice quality of life thing if you're taking a bunch of meetings or notes and you could theoretically turn that into a heading, I would think, and be able to have multiple layers within the note. and then just be able to go back and do that. So kinda cool. I like it a lot. But I don't know, does Remarkable have anything like that on device?
Mitchell: No. Nope. There's nothing that injects a date. I haven't seen a mod to do that. Someone probably could build one. but but no, today I haven't seen anything. Certainly nothing native.
Ed Finn: So i will I use it, how will I use it? I don't know yet. Most of these, to be honest with you, are things I'm just testing. I don't think any of these have been a need for me, but they're they're worth looking at and trying to figure out, hey, wait a minute. It's like the new digest. The original version of the digest I never used. When they revamped it and redid it, it became something I used a lot. And I never knew I needed it.
Mitchell: Yeah, sure.
Ed Finn: until it was there. similar arc.
Mitchell: you bring up a good a good concern with these community tools, either plugins or mods. I think it's probably the same boat. Like how how much do you dive in and make it a core part of your workflow? And I think different people have different answers to that. But yeah, I think it's a it's a good question of do I replace something I've done for years for this feature that I just got? Is it especially if it's a community feature? There's always the risk of it going away.
Ed Finn: Yeah, for sure. And and that that's why I'm wondering, since they're incorporating it in some way, whether that'll help with stability. And you and I have talked before and we talked on Kit's live stream about how you would compensate developers and I don't know w how far down the line is SuperNote and thinking about that. But I saw Kit's discussion with Terminal and how they have that creator fund. So
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. Yeah, terminal is a great ecosystem for developers.
Ed Finn: Yeah, so I'm wondering what this looks like a year from now and whether SuperNode will find out a way to if you're gonna be officially certified as a plug-in versus just a community developed plug-in. But then I look at things like Obsidian. So I don't know because Obsidian is highly invested in community plugins, very much in the same way. So it it it's gonna be interesting and I I want people to get compensated for their work, but I also don't want to stunt creativity for people who just want to go out and do stuff and really enjoy it. So you raise a whole bunch of questions we won't be able to solve, but so so what's next on your list?
Mitchell: All right, on my list I've got duplicate annotated pages. I have a couple and I can I can show let me see. I'll just do the newspaper here. so I'm just gonna scribble on some pages here. So a couple features, I'll group them into kind of one because they're related. But if you go to the page we'll review, this is a mod here that adds this annotated filter. So this filters by annotated pages. So this is helpful. Remarkable doesn't have a great way to track like your highlights, for example. I know a lot of people have wanted highlight export and stuff like that. So highlights are functionally annotation. So if you had a book with highlights in it, you could filter by annotated and you'd see all your highlighted pages. so that's nice. I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna exit this doc. But the the one I'm talking about now is duplicate annotated pages, there we go, annotated only for my duplication. So if this works, we should end up with a PDF with three pages that are just my annotated pages. so if you have a document you've marked up and you only want to send pages that you've marked up to somebody, you could export a PDF like that.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and what's interesting about that is I didn't mark this as something that SuperNode already has, but as you showed it, they already have it in their reader application. So you can when you go to export, it's actually right in there and you say export annotated pages only and then it does that just natively. I don't use that a lot, I don't find, but I can see where it could be really useful depending on what workflow you're using it in.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah, I could definitely see where that's one that either you don't need at all or it's critical. Like if if you're if your whole thing is like, you know, you receive a manuscript from an author or whatever and you mark it up and then you need to send that on to somebody else and you just want to send the changes. I could see where that'd be really important. I don't personally use that one a lot. I do use the filter annotated pages sometimes. like w in a book, if I, you know, have highlighted something, I'll go back quickly go back to it to it. but yeah, just little
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: I think those two, those are so easy to add to the interface that I think that could be, you know, obviously something like the table of contents, I can see where that's hard to add to the interface because you need to add a way for users to add and manage, add links. It's kind of complicated. But stuff like this is so simple. You just, you know, add a button to a menu that already has similar items. I think some of this stuff the remarkable could add pretty easily if they wanted to.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that's true with the plugins as well, because what I haven't shown as much yet, which we'll get to in some of these other ones, is that a lot of it flows through to the the toolbar selection menu. So that when you're using it, it's gonna natively just show up. Now the more you install, the longer that menu gets, which can be cumbersome in and of itself. But again, that's trying to figure out what tools do you actually need and want versus what like me I'm playing with and I have the full ten that you can have to test them out. But let me show real quick one of the ones I find most interesting. And that's going to be the collapse expand. I don't know where I would use it yet. I just think it's really cool that somebody did it. So for here you'll see this is my collapse expand test. So if I lasso this, I'm going to try and do it at an angle and not mess this up. And I select all of that and I drop here to my drop down. And again you'll see all the different, I've got a big scroll wheel here, but if I hit collapse expand, what it's gonna do is it's gonna collapse all of that into a little marker. And there it went. So it goes away and then if I want to expand that, I just press. And it takes it a minute. And I think, you know, again, these are all brand new things, but there it is, now it's back. And so I and I can edit it just like I normally would. So if I wanted to add more, I would add it and would keep it bounded in that box. it won't expand that box. I can't figure out a way to make it like a bigger selection or anything other than that. But whatever you select, you can then collapse and hide. So I'm not sure what the use case for that is, and maybe Mitchell, you can give me an idea.
Mitchell: Yeah, I was just thinking. That's a really cool feature. I don't know what I'd do with it though. I'm sure somebody I'm sure somebody can do something with it, but yeah, I don't know what I'd use it for. It is it is a little slow. I wonder what it's doing on the back end.
Ed Finn: I it just came out. Well, and and that's the thing, I wonder what it's doing as well. I don't know what all of the processing pieces are behind there. You'll also notice it took away my heading. So again, I don't know what processing's happening there. but it's it's just really cool to see that it's available. And I can I can see where maybe somebody may be sharing their screen and they don't want to
Mitchell: Mm-hmm. interesting. Yeah, it's not
Ed Finn: show something right away, they wanna reveal it. And if they do that, then maybe that would I I don't know. That's all conjecture. So I maybe I'll reach out to the developer and go, what's the
Mitchell: Yeah. Now you gotta add the old school PowerPoint transitions so you can animate stuff in.
Ed Finn: You never know. So what's next on your list?
Mitchell: so I know this is a feature that other platforms have is kind of a forced manual refresh. So on the remarkable, this is actually built in, but it's turned off. It's in an experimental configuration. what's crazy is we've gotten to the point with remanager and the package manager that it's easy for easier for a user to install a package than to edit a text file. So it's a five finger manual clear. so it's called Ghostbuster. so you can you can run this without mods. If you put the tablet in developer mode, you can go change a a false to a true and a config file in the file system and get this. but it's also a modification. And that that works on all the devices on the gallery three down to the markable one.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. And like you said, on the supernode it's just that sidebar. And you just swipe up on the sidebar and and make that happen. thing
Mitchell: I wish they would just expose it as a setting because they've already it's built into the OS. Like I made this mod, all I did was do the same thing that the operating system is doing. So like it's built into the operating system, it's just turned off. And I wish they'd turn it on because a lot of people have asked for it.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I'm curious because I and this is something I just don't know. But if if you move text around, so if you lasso something on Remarkable and you move it, does it trigger an auto refresh? Okay.
Mitchell: It does, yeah, I can show that too. So so I've got some text here. I'm gonna circle that. It's gonna go into a really fast but really high ghosting mode to do this. And then if you let go, I'm gonna deselect it, and then if you wait a couple seconds, it'll do a full clear that way too.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I asked that because the the full refresh is something that SuperNode already has, but if you look at the what I just asked you about, so if I put we'll just put test and if I lasso that it does the same thing. It goes into kind of a really fast mode, but it's immediate. I don't know if you saw that flash, so whenever I move it. it looks and it kinda localizes that refresh to just wherever that text was and then it clears out that screen, which is one of my frustrations on some of the other devices with their ghosting is you have to constantly refresh the screen. It seems like both Remarkable and Supernota figured out how to localize that in a way that isn't as disruptive.
Mitchell: Yeah, remark generally Remarkables D ghosting is pretty good. but I especially with that five finger gesture, like there there's times that I'm like, well if I could have a f clean a fresh screen, I'm just gonna press it. I don't I don't use it super often. but occasionally. but yeah, it's it'd be really easy for to turn on. Or just put in a put in the setting somewhere.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and so next for me, and let me show this real quick, is the image inserter. And you'll notice I did kind of a not a slide of hand, but there were there were multiple versions of how to insert images and I was trying a new one that I could not get to work the same way that this is the one I've used before, which is image inserter. So what it allows you to do is it almost keeps the picture away from the layer. So it becomes you can select it multiple times and move it around after the fact. And it's it's pretty cool. It seems to work really well. I can't get the crop to work right. So again, it's all new. But if I go to my plugins again and I go to insert image, I'll go to my style, photos, family. When that pops up I just hit insert original and there's the actual picture. And then I can pull that down. You'll see it did that reflash again. Pull it over and there you go. Now what's cool about it is once I take the selection off. There it is. Once I take the selection off, I can actually write right over that and still select it and move it. And it does slow down some of these plugins do slow the UI down a little bit. But now you'll see it removes it from that stroke. Which is very interesting. So I drew that stroke over it, but when I did the selection, as long as I didn't include the stroke, it didn't move it. So it's just an interesting way to be able to use this. And then from here you can cut, copy. it says you can collapse and expand this one. So that would be interesting. I'm not going to do it, but it says you can. But just kind of a neat feature. A lot of people have been very you can always bring an image into SuperNote as a template, but you can't really do anything with it other than that, except in Atelier where you can kind of use it as a background image and you can change the opacity. In a regular note, this is brand new. This is something that you couldn't do without a plug in.
Mitchell: Interesting. So on Remarkable, I can show images are pretty new on Remarkable. The latest stable release 3.27 got this sort of image support. And then it's getting better in 3.28. So I will show current stable 3.27 first. So I've got the Remarkable Partner app on my phone. I've got an image in my iOS clipboard. So I'm just gonna press and say paste and allow. And I've got a pretty well designed logo there so so when that sinks which should happen pretty quickly it'll refresh on the tablet so we've got the image on inside a notebook and i can also see we can we can draw we can draw over this kind of like you were saying i could select the stroke i can select the image independently of the stroke or i think i can do both
Ed Finn: Yeah. Well thank you for that.
Mitchell: the same time. I think that should be both once it clears. Let's see. Have to deselect it. there's my yeah. Stroke kind of order is a little interesting. but yeah, I can rotate, resize, all that sort of stuff. on, let's see, I need a different pen. so on the remarkable two, this is on 3.28. So this is the beta. And on here, this adds the feature, and this is actually pretty slow on the remarkable two. this adds a new capture feature, which is driven by the selection tool. So I could select. Like these cars from a PDF go into a notebook and paste. So that's pretty cool. that actually wasn't super slow that time. it's quite a bit faster on the newer devices, though. The Remarkable 2 is getting a little long in the tooth for for intensive operations. It's a six-year-old device that they no longer sell. so that's kind of the native image handling on Remarkable. And again, this is pretty recent. So they are making some good progress here. So this was the peers on current stable, this is on a beta.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mitchell: So it seems kind of similar to what you've got on the super note now.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, I think so. I don't know that they have any like what you just showed there being able to capture I I think they do, but I don't know which tool it is. And, you know, you and I went spent some time going through and trying to figure out, you know, what things might be like, what they might not be. And there's so many and I'm limited on the Supernode side to only having ten on device at a time. So there's only so much I can test. I'm not sure if they have a capture tool like that. I know they now have a it's not through the plugins, but they now have a web tool that allows you to send articles directly to Supernote that's available on Chrome and Firefox and I think Edge, I'm not sure. But you've had that on Remarkable for a long time, if I remember right.
Mitchell: Yes, Remarkables had something like that for a while. they just added recently, so with 3.27 and the image adding, they added the ability to send a so before it was you could send a web page as a PDF or an EPUB. And they I think they used like Mozilla's readability plugin to strip you know to make it like more readable on a device. now since they have image support, if you're a connect subscriber, they optionally let you save a web page as a notebook. So it will convert everything to remarkables text format and embed the images in this notebook format. So you could send a web page with images in it and then go in and you know copy those images and move them to other notebooks or PDFs or whatever. Yeah. And I think that is also I know it's on Chrome it may be on Firefox. I know it's not on Safari because people are asking for it.
Ed Finn: wow. Well, that's really cool. Yeah. Yeah, that that's really cool. I mean with with Supernotes you get some versatility. So you can do EPUB, you can do PDF, and you can do either reader or page mode. So you can send it as a full page. The issue is you won't be able to select or manipulate. You'll be able to write on it, but it you can't select those images and that kind of thing. but it's a brand new and and I know we're talking about these types of plugins, but that was one that came out
Mitchell: okay.
Ed Finn: probably about two or three weeks ago and I was just super impressed because it's great for read later and you don't have to pay for read wise and that kind of stuff. so I I like it a lot. So the next one I want to show is another one of those that it's really cool. And I think that maybe at some point I'll have the right use case for it. And I think now it's getting closer. But I also like the functionality as it exists. So it's gonna be
Mitchell: Okay, nice. Yeah.
Ed Finn: interesting. So let me pop in here and we're gonna talk about keyworder. So let's just do a new one here. So we'll call this keyword. It is not going to recognize that. My writing is atrocious. So if I go here. And I go to keyworder. What's gonna pop up is a totally different interface. Well, it actually got it. So it got keyword out of that mess that I scribbled. And I can say add. But what's cool is then it pops up to this. And you can actually just go to keyworder standalone without circling anything and pop up to this menu. And here's where you can manage all of your different keywords. So you can have all the keywords here. You can import. you can. upload a file and you can import all of your keywords to have them ready. It automatically sorts them then by alphabet, which is really cool. And then if I want to say I want to add, let's just add these four, which they expanded, you can actually do five now. So we'll say we'll do five. And then if you hit insert, what's going to happen is you'll see them populate here on the bottom here in just a second. And I think I've got it running so many different plugins right now that it's slowing it down. But you'll see there they all come and they come in. And there's my fifth one. Come on. There it is. So then I just get out of that. Those are all there. If I come over here to my keyword, now they're all right there. Just like they would be. And if I go in and delete the actual text. Yeah, it is bogging it down when I've got all of these things happening at once. Usually it's much faster on keyworder, and that's what I would do. I wouldn't have all the images and everything else. But now you'll see the keywords are still there even though the text is gone. So
Mitchell: Interesting. Yeah. Is this I don't know if you're familiar with tags on remarkable. I don't really use tags. does Supernode have a c is it mostly keywords or is there a concept of tagging as well?
Ed Finn: Keywords and tags are the same thing. I think between the two. I think the thing that keyworder brings in is that ability to select multiples, do them all at once, rather than have it be yeah, it's very much it's manual or you circle and it recognizes and it only shows your recents. So like for me, I could sit here and I if they ever do a favorites thing, which would be really cool, there's
Mitchell: Okay. Okay. Like manually typing each one.
Ed Finn: There are certain meetings I have that are standard and they might need six tags because it's three departments here, it's individuals that are always in the same meeting, and I could go and I could hit that and hit insert and it's done. Right now, the way I have to do that is I have to, if they're in my recents, just press them and they automatically add, or I have to re-enter that information again. So it could be a really big quality of life thing for some folks, but I don't know what the final result's gonna be. I see the potential and I think it's really cool, but I don't know if the utility is gonna be there for me long term. Like you said, do I need to do that or slow myself down to do that? But if I uploaded all my keywords and they were already sorted and I just had to go by first letter and select the people I needed, that could make it fast enough for me to to jet and do something like that.
Mitchell: Yeah. Well yeah, 'cause the last thing you want to do walking into a meeting is have to, you know, type out or scroll through and find the six attendees to tag, right?
Ed Finn: Yeah, well I always I usually do that before the day starts when I open that note. Or I do it after the fact and I just look at my calendar and add people. Yeah. But you're right. If you could do it really fast, then that could make it a a really cool thing.
Mitchell: Hm, okay. Yeah, I don't think so Remarkable's tags are pretty simple. I think even on the stock OS you can't like circle and do handwriting conversion to to make a tag. There is a mod for that. I don't use it because I don't use tags, but it's a pretty popular one. So you when you in the like selection context menu, there's one that'll let you create a tag from it. kind of like how I I did the selection for a table of contents entry, it's the same thing of like creating a tag. Kind of like creating a keyword, yeah.
Ed Finn: Yeah, and I use the keywords mostly for if I want to search fast, because David it used to be much faster, the handwriting search. I don't know it's because I have so many notes, but it's slower than it used to be. It used to be the minute you closed a note, that was recognized if you have handwriting recognition on almost immediately. But I watched his test and then I went back and I tested mine too, and I was like, This is slower. It's taking longer to index. And again, I don't know if it's because of
Mitchell: Mm-hmm.
Ed Finn: how many notes I have on device, but it was much slower than I thought it would be. So keywords, if I remember, are a much faster way to be able to search globally and get it faster to come back. So I think that I try to use them, knowing that the handwriting recognition there is as a fallback that I can go back and look later if I didn't catch it. but yeah, so I I use them pretty extensively, much more than I used to. Because I want to know how many times have I met with this person. And all their notes pop up and then I can go in and look at that. I've got two more to show. One that is kind of clunky, but I want to say cool. I would never use it, but I want to show
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: other folks kind of how to use it I've heard it asked for, let's put it that way. And that's because of books having the scribble erase. So now if you do a plug-in on SuperNotes, you can scribble to erase, but you'll see why I say and what it'll look like in the end, I don't know. But here's my scribble is the name of the tool. And if I scribble there
Mitchell: yeah.
Ed Finn: Sometimes up there it is. Scribbles working. What it's gonna do is basically activate the lasso tool and delete the text. It usually works faster than this. Again, that a lot of this has to do with all of these running at once. But there it went. It got rid of it. To me, this is much faster. And it works even faster when you don't have a bunch of other things going on. But you'll even notice there that it worked faster than The other one did. So would I use that? Probably not. But I can see that someone might want to use that so that they don't have to put their fingers on the screen, so that they don't have to go to the toolbar menu. They can just scribble through it and it'll erase it. that that's just one I thought was kind of neat to to show off for a minute. Do you have another one you want to show real quick and then I'll show
Mitchell: Sure, yeah. I've got one of the popular ones is floating toolbar. So I've got, let's see. I grabbed the paper pro for this because the colors are a little nicer. So the normal remarkable toolbar is this, right? floating toolbar is cool. so I'll do the high contrast one first. So it lets you have a floating toolbar. You can kind of park it anywhere. You can add tools from it, or add tools to it. So if I wanted to add blue ballpoint pin I would just hold this and it'll get added to the toolbar. I usually keep mine docked on the side. So like on the paper pro it's nice because you can you have access to a bunch of colors. It can save colors and thicknesses. You can save like the select tool so I can you know delete whatever. So that's nice to have. I pair that with a plugin I wrote called pin layer memory which will remember the layer you choose for a pin.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm.
Mitchell: So I use this in my to-do list. So you know, let's see. Get groceries. I have a so I'll select a highlighter. And in the past, I have I've had the highlighter be on its own layer. this is a new document, so it's not. Let me undo that. Move this out. So I have the pin on layer one. I'm gonna say highlighter on layer two. So now when I highlight, and it also follows the pin. So I'm gonna just choose the ballpoints should be on layer one. And then if I choose highlighter, that's on layer two. So when I'm making a to-do list. I'll highlight if it's something that needs to be done quickly. I don't know, this glare may be really bad. So the eraser also follows the layer. So if I want to erase a highlight, I choose the highlighter and then I erase it. So I can and it only erase that layer. So conversely, if I highlight and then choose the pin and then erase that, it only erases the pin. so I use that so that I can quickly add or remove highlights if I need to reprioritize stuff on my to-do list. remarkable also.
Ed Finn: Hmm.
Mitchell: Every time you turn a page, you it kind of resets the layers. So like I was marking up a doing some editing and feedback for a book my brother was writing, and I had a couple of different pen colors I wanted to use for different things. And it across page turns, it wouldn't remember. So this tool also auto-creates the layers for each pen as you make new pages. so the floating toolbar is cool though. I use that a lot. So I'll put my my standard pins I use. So I have like a ballpoint pen and then these are the ones I use for like color classifying my tasks and then a highlighter and then a select tool. so a lot of people like that one.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool. I like it a lot. I I think that SuperNote doesn't have that. It has something a little similar. It does have a floating toolbar, but it's not customizable. And I think that's where you see a big difference. And that layer thing is phenomenal. That's really cool to be able to have maybe a standard thing that you always have and then you can mark it up and keep that the way it is. For Supernote on the let me go ahead.
Mitchell: And a lot of people are have asked for like more pin tools in the toolbar. And the floating floating toolbar is the way to get that kind of
Ed Finn: For that So there's the floating toolbar and what that looks like. And then of course you can rotate it and then you get all the rest of the things if you want them just by pressing that little ellipse. And then you can pull that to the bottom and lock it back in, the floating toolbar is native. the floating toolbar actually works in the calendar app too, which is kind of cool. it doesn't have near as many options. But you can drag it anywhere on the screen you want to get it out of your way and then do what you need to do. So it's it's a pretty cool feature. the last thing that I'm gonna show, So what you'll see here is to doist, and this is called super task. And with super task, you'll see already I have test one, I have test task one here, and I have test task two that I haven't entered yet. So if I circle this, and then I go to Find it here, add task. It's gonna recognize it. I'm gonna set it. I can set the priority if I want to, but I can say add to to doist, and then it's gonna say it's done, and I can say view tasks. And now it shows me not only here, but if you look here on the screen, you're gonna be able to see both of those. So it went that quickly. It takes a little bit of setup, you have to do an API key, but it immediately Sinks from here to the to do a stap. And then I haven't tried to tick them off yet. So let's see if Save. And we'll see if it comes through. I might have to refresh on this side. Yeah, for some reason this is something I'm just testing. So it's not showing yet. I don't know how fast the the refresh is back from Todoist on this. I know to it, you know, you saw how fast it went to there, but I don't know how fast it is coming back. And it's still showing on this side. So that may be something I'll have to look into. But if you use Todoist.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: And I mean SuperNode has their own built-in application for tasks and to-dos, which I find useful for in the moment tasks, but I would love to see an integration with Google Tasks, with Microsoft to-dos, that kind of thing, because I think that would be extremely useful for that unified task management platform.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: right now this is the closest thing that the plug-in community has come up with and I don't know what the future of that is. It would be really cool if they could do that though, I would think.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. So Remarkable doesn't have anything like that natively. they don't integrate with any sort of task tracking. There's a a recent calendar integration. and it lets you create meeting notes, which is cool. it's not a full calendar, but you can tap. I'm not gonna do it because I haven't cleaned this up, so I don't wanna leak stuff, but you can tap a an icon and it'll pull a list of like the next I think it's ten hours or ten meetings, whichever's lower. or up to ten rather. And it'll automatically create a meeting note for you if you click on it. It'll fill out the attendees and stuff. So that's kind of nice, but it's pretty basic. I like it, but people want more than that, I think.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I saw that and it it looked really cool. I just to your point, I kind of like one of the reasons that I picked Supernote was the calendar integration. Even though it's not the best out there, I actually think We Woods does the best calendar integration. But if you have one calendar, the Supernote integration is great. If you have multiples, that's when it starts to fall apart a little bit. And even books, it brings everything or you don't even turn it on. The supernotes kind of that middle ground of if you have one calendar, it's gonna sync, it's gonna sync really well, it's both ways, it works really nicely. I like to be able to have that and not have to worry about pulling my laptop or my phone out and I can quickly look and see what I've got going on that day.
Mitchell: Yeah.
Ed Finn: And then my notes are right there.
Mitchell: Yeah. So I actually built this is just a PDF, but this is the first kind of remarkable based project I started working on was it's called Ephemeris. It's a PDF generator. So it can take any number of ICAL or ICS feeds and it generates a PDF. and it's hyperlinked. This one's just a single page, so it won't, but the mini calendars are hyperlinked. So if you if this was longer, you could click a day and it would go to it. and the way it's and the way it syncs preserves annotation. So I could write something on here and then it would
Ed Finn: that's cool.
Mitchell: It replaces the PDF underneath the annotation layer.
Ed Finn: Yeah, that's really cool.
Mitchell: So I use that, which is it's perfect for me because I I run a server. So me having a job that runs every five minutes to regenerate a PDF is no big deal. I get for a lot of people that's not the case, right? That's a high barrier to entry. and unfortunately, the state of Remarkable's or lack of public API for their cloud service means I can't host a I I don't feel comfortable hosting a version of this for people to use. because Remarkable right now, if you if you connect
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: A third party service to your Remarkable account with a pairing code or a device token, that is full cloud access. And I'm not willing to host a service that does that. I'm hoping that at some point Remarkable will give us a a properly scoped cloud API so that people can run services like that securely. Cause it'd be it'd really open up kind of the integration world a little more to their cloud platform.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I think that's I think that's really cool. I mean, you know, that's one of the things I struggle with because JB Glossinger's Get It Done Planner. I've downloaded that. I've used it or tried to use it. I've downloaded MDO. They're all great planners and they all do wonderful things, but they're at the end of the day, they're one PDF. And for me, the way I work is kind of disjointed and distributed to where my notes are per meeting in most cases. And it makes it really hard for me to keep everything in one file. Plus the the cynic in me is always worried about redundancy and if that one file gets corrupted, have I lost everything? And so that's that's kind of the the the part I struggle with. But but that's a really cool concept and and it does, you know, kind of beg the question in a way why do you think that Remarkable is holding back giving any API access? I'm just curious.
Mitchell: my guess would be a mixture of probably some tech debt on their cloud side. before before they kind of went into a hiring freeze, I had seen a couple of positions posted for like Go developers. So it's a programming language that Google uses or that Google made, but a lot of people use now, Go. So my guess is their their cloud is carrying some tech debt from the early days that they need or feel like they should. clean up before they start building what need to be publicly stable APIs. So right now, Remarkable's kind of free to change their cloud however they want because they're the only people that use it. As soon as they document and publish like here's how you talk to our cloud, they are then kind of committed to maintaining that for a while. So they mentioned in the AMA on Reddit that it was something they were looking at was providing a public cloud API. So hopefully it's still on the roadmap. That was only a couple months ago so surely so timeline wise, hard to know especially post layoffs their development you know speed maybe a little lower. But they've given us some good stuff on the device updates. So it it's hard to know. I I think it's probably something they're looking at because it why wouldn't they, right? You're giving other people the ability to make your connect subscription more valuable. Seems like a pretty, pretty easy call. so my guess is there's just engineering effort behind the scenes that they need to knock out before they're able to commit to something like that.
Ed Finn: Mm-hmm. yeah. And I I think that's where, you know, we've talked before the difference in approach and how SuperNote's doing it, but you're right, that comes with risks. It comes with, you know, you once you bring developers directly in, then it's it feels to me at least, and I'm not a developer, as we've said, but it feels almost like a symbiotic relationship that each side has to respect the other and kind of not do something that's gonna break. What the other side's trying to do.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah, and like in in kind of the open source world, there's this concept, like if someone in the community adds a feature to your project, like it it seems like that's a great thing, right? But there's this concept of a yes is forever. So like if you as a project maintainer bring in that feature, the person who built that feature may never come back to your project, but now you're on the hook to keep that up, right? I heard some of the the developers for SQLite, which is a popular open source database, So in free software there's this concept of free as in speech, free as in beer. Like it is it free, you know, free as in dollars or free as in kind of the concept. And then the SQLite developers said it there's also free as in puppies. Like someone gives you a puppy, is that free actually? Definitely not, right? Like then you're responsible for that. So I think I think that's part of it too, is I'm and and I don't know for sure, but my guess would be before they expose something like that, they want to make sure that they're able to maintain it.
Ed Finn: Yeah.
Mitchell: And and hopefully Supernotes kinda gone through the same thing with their plugin architecture so that that remains stable for the community to build on going forward.
Ed Finn: Yeah. Well I have one more question and then we'll let you go because we've been on here for a while. But I I just and you and I kinda talked about this early on, but if you had to just get rid of all your mods tomorrow, would Remarkable still be the platform and would you be able to do all of the things you currently do or at least the majority of the things you do without those mods?
Mitchell: Yeah. so mods, yes. Because I ran without mods until eight months ago. So for four years I used the Remarkable stuff without any mods. The caveat being I do want to still use RM Fate Cloud, but that doesn't require a mod. That's like networking level changes on the tablet. So Remarkable would have a harder time breaking that than than some of the other things. and I guess I could use their cloud subscription. I'd just rather not. but I think so. I think the mods I've installed are nice to have. They're quality of life improvements, but I was getting along just fine without them before.
Ed Finn: Yeah, I'll answer that for Supernote. tomorrow if I didn't have any of the things that didn't come natively on the tablet, because they do keep expanding those, I would have no issues in all these things I've shown you are nice to have. I know one thing that I didn't show that I've shown in the past is the dictionary and a lot of folks, especially on the reader side, but even in notes it works. So people could be taking a note, get a a word they don't know, just write it down from what they see on the slide and then go back later and look it up. that's a very nice quality of life thing. But then I thought about it, how many times in my Kindle or my Kobo or in my books device do I use the dictionary? Not a lot. So is it something for me that's necessary? For somebody else it may be essential. So I think it's nice to have those, but that goes back to the earlier thing you said about don't pick it for something that may or may not be there. And and that's
Mitchell: Yeah, 'cause these are expensive devices. I mean, the the cost to get into a mark a remarkable is anywhere from four hundred to thousand dollars. supernotes aren't on the low end either, right? They're these are very quite expensive, quite niche devices. So I think, yeah, definitely make sure it'll do what you want before you dive in.
Ed Finn: Well Mitchell, thank you. This has been tremendous. It's been a lot of fun talking to you about this because I think it's really good to hear different perspectives and people who use different devices for their everyday thing. I mean, there's a reason I've been using Superno for five years. You've been using Remarkable for five almost six years, I guess, or somewhere somewhere around that five year mark? Four, okay. So
Mitchell: Yeah. four ish, I think. Yeah. Four or five years, yeah.
Ed Finn: There's a reason we stick with those devices. We may look at other ones. We may, you know, I've got all kinds of them now because they asked me to take a look at them, but I keep coming back to the device that I know is going to do everything I need it to do. And I think that gives a really good perspective. So before we sign off, tell people where to find you, where you're at, drop the website again. I'll put it all down in the description, but I want to make sure that everybody knows where to find what you're doing.
Mitchell: Yeah, so my my biggest project is remanager, and that's an open source free project. that is remanager.io where you can find the website to download that. There's a user guide up there too. so if you want to take a look, I've got a 20 minute YouTube video linked on that site that walks through all of Remanager. my YouTube channel also has a walkthrough of better TOC, which is the table of contents mod that I showed earlier, in more depth, if that's something that you are interested in having on a remarkable. and I think you're you'll put a link to the package index. So if folks are curious what all is out there that's easy to install and remarkable, that's that'll be your go to resource. It's vellum dot delivery. you can browse all the packages the communities put together and and those are all very easy to install. Most of them are one click installs from remanager.
Ed Finn: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Mitchell. This has been great. Hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again soon at some point. If not, we'll talk in Discord for sure. Have a good one, everybody. Thank you all.
Mitchell: Yeah, thanks, Ed. This is awesome. Sounds good. Thanks.
