cmr @cmr@mastodon.social

so apparently i was a little too early on the mastodon train last time. i just rechecked the twitter bridge thing and fully 1/9 of my follows are linked. over 100! damn. i’m hype for rustodon, thinking about contributing.

I misread "Magi Doujinshi" as "Maga doujinshi" and almost had a heart attack.

Me: drinking with friends is great!
My liver: sure! But you should slow down or stop
*2 hours pass*
Liver: we need to have a talk

Nothing like that first cigarette after 10 hours of being on planes and in airports

I really prefer Mastodon a lot, but I don't get the same gratification from posting here. Still more people on Twitter atm :(

heyo @im !!

Correction: the ePubs did sync but didn't show up in the UI and now have 2 copies of each book on there. I can't understand what's going on with the sync behavior with the macOS app. I tried deleting the duplicates but it crashed and when I reopened it it downloaded them again. I really need to go to bed, though, so I'll play with it more tomorrow evening.

anyway I have work in 7.5 hours so I should sleep asap

(I only used the "inkiest" pen there. I really like the "marker" setting. The pencil setting is meh)

Here's some bad footage of me scribbling in the notebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugqKjM8-p4

So, first impressions? It's a neat device. They pretty much live up to expectations. If you're a heavy paper-reader-and-annotator like I am, and can't stand glass tablets and bad styluses, and can put up with epaper, then you should really check this thing out. It's probably not great as a "I like reading fiction" device. For that, I heartily recommend any of the Kobo devices, especially Kobo Aura ONE. Also powered by open source. Also has open source firmware available! Plus, good company.

I was unable to successfully import any ePubs with the macOS app. This is an unfortunate bug that I hope they fix soon.

I hope their "webui" for adding books locally via USB is pulled out of beta soon. Roundtripping through the cloud on a rural New Hampshire internet connection is about the most painful thing you can do with an ereader.

I REALLY WISH IT DID DJVU. Like, really badly. So so so badly. Like, the PDF is 6 times larger badly. Ah well.

I'm worried about the cloud service. Where is the money for that coming from? How much storage are they planning for per user? Each device is only 8GB local storage, but if that approaches full that's over 250TB of storage for their claimed 35k devices sold. That's 6.6k/month minimum on GCP.

*backend.

It's super easy to get the notebooks from the device onto my laptop in either pdf or png. OCR might be neat to play with someday, but that's a nightmare.

The iOS app is a gimmick, but can sync files from their whatever to your phone. The macOS app isn't in the App Store. macOS app only connects over HTTPS (good!). Looks like their background is all GCP.

It isn't perfect. No backlight. Not a big deal for the use cases I'm interested in. The surface feels a bit eh on my hand, and I'm worried about scratches on the non-glass surface. I had some issues writing on the top of the notebook when my hadn't was resting on the display (only on the top though). It comes with all the usual caveats about epaper displays, though the pen latency is really impressive. Perceptible, but not in a way that feels uncomfortable.

So my experience with their little notebook app was incredibly positive. This is an awesome device. This is exactly what I had hoped it would be: a tablet I can take notes on in a way I am comfortable with, read + annotate PDFs, and read the occasional ebook.

Holy shit this stylus + screen is nice. The latency really is as low as on the videos. This is great. I could actually take notes on this!