site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2674 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Does anyone have strong opinions about e-ink tablets? I'm in the market to upgrade from a Kindle and debating a few options:

  • DayLightCo has amber backlight and can be used outdoors, but isn't true e-ink. I'm not sure how the image "beauty" will decay. It's the only one with full 60hz support, and it doesn't support colors.
  • Remarkable: These look stunning. I love the true e-ink look. But they have a closed system that doesn't support most apps (Obsidian) without tinkering. I've heard they're just a glorified notepad.
  • Boox has the worst name but the most features, and seems to support a lot out of the box. I can't put my finger on why they give me the wrong impression.

Any thoughts appreciated.

I saw a coworker take notes with one and found it super cool and looked into the models a while ago. Ridiculously expensive. These devices basically cost iPad prices. And many seems to not be even that good for their most basic use case of functioning like an e-notebook.

I guess for me part of the value is that e-ink tablets can't do what an iPad can do. I don't want to be distracted by discord and twitter. I don't want movies and webpages. And I think e-ink looks beautiful and it helps me want to read more instead of getting sucked into the scroll.

As someone who has a deposit on one the the daylight computers, what about it isn't true e-ink?

I was about to go check myself by can't seem to access the website at the moment.

I love my kindle keyboard, old though it is, and despise touchscreens on my e-readers. I tried the kobo and hated the software and touchscreens.

e-ink is a specific technology, daylight isn't using it. e-ink is owned by the E Ink Corporation. It's fundamentally different from an LCD, it uses electricity to flip microcapsules onto and off the back of a transparent surface. Some of these microcapsules are black and some are white. This is what gives the image such a crisp paper-feel, it's not emitting light like an LCD, it's actually static material that reflects light. Every image is basically etched into the tablet. It's also why draw times are so slow and there tends to be a "ghosting" problem. Recently developers figured how to get this process to simulate color, which seems like it's reaching almost good-enough.

Daylight isn't using e-ink, they're using what's called "transflective LCD". It's an LCD with an extra reflective layer underneath so that light from the environment reflects onto the image. This article has some more in-depth explanations:

https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/transmissive-vs-reflective-vs-transflective-displays/

Using LCD is how daylight solved the screen refresh rate and ghosting and other latency. It seems like they're basically the first mover to try this approach for paper-like tablets instead of using e-ink. I'm very curious to see how it looks, especially because the amber backlight seems like a huge plus. In the few videos I can find online it looks fine. But e-ink looks incredible to me and I'm not sure I want to give that up.

I also miss the kindle keyboard. I think that was a phenomenal product and a genuine step forward in man's history with technology. It wowed me. Everything looked good, it was a computer made human, it was a better experience than reading a physical book. Buttons were mechanically simple and simpler than turning a page. I could carry 100 books in my pocket. Instant dictionary. It was great. I never got over the switch to touchscreens, which ruined the user interface (I have to put my hand between my eyes and what I'm reading). The kindle keyboard seemed to disappear from Amazon's service page, they've stopped supporting it, I have no idea why, maybe some patent trolling. I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned. We give kids in schools these junky laptops that only distract them when we have all the technology for making incredible learning devices ready-to-hand. I can't overstate my enthusiasm about this. We have all the technology to make ultimate reading-learning devices, we have the technology to make something that is well-tuned to the human experience, more well-tuned than anything we have ever made before. Instead of designing new computers for better features that we passively let alter our day-to-day, we could be making superdevices that progressively advance our future with technology. And we basically stopped that whole technological line so we could stream Netflix on everything, and we put touchscreens where they don't belong, and now the supervisionaries are chasing crazy boondoggles like neuralink. Gahjhhjhhhh

I really want daylight to be good, the amber backlight alone is exciting, but I need to see how it compares to e-ink before I can commit to one.

Yeah, e-ink is a great technology and it looks amazing. I haven't used a laptop in years, so I took the plunge with the daylight on a whim, but my old kindle keyboards have died on me and I'm stuck with newer, but still old, models. I still resent the touch screens. I hold the damn thing with my hands, it can't start flipping pages every time my thumb brushes the screen.

When I get the daylight, I'll have to make a post about how I like it.

I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned

Pebble somehow managed to go bankrupt.

Their products were far and away superior to anything Apple (to say nothing of Google, who gobbled up Fitbit, who owns all the old Pebble IP) offers today in terms of responsiveness, software quality, and battery life; they were even working on a Raspberry-Pi-fication of their watch.

I still believe that an open (as in, "not restricted to what the app store pushes") wearable computer connected to the cell network combined with a watch would have been the next frontier of personal computing had they survived. Sadly, it was not to be.

I have an older Boox e-reader and I love it. It is not particularly good-looking, unlike the Remarkable, but the fact that you can install any Android app is a game changer. Some of them are quite big, which is important if you plan on using it for PDFs.

PDFs is a big use case, since if I wanted to just stick with epubs I could just stick with my kindle. How do you feel about the lag and overall design? I don't mind the slow refresh for e-ink in general, and I know I can configure Boox pretty extensively through the menu, but I think it would annoy me trying to do general OS-like stuff swiping around if the interface was jank.

Also, how long does the battery usually last you?

Then get something as big as your budget can afford. The first time I bought the Nova I found it a bit too small, so I upgraded.

I am not bothered by the refresh rate, but I am mostly using it for reading academic papers or books, so I spend more time on a single page than someone reading comics for example. For the same budget, I’d rather have something big and comfortable than something smaller with higher fresh rate.

The autonomy is huge, I rarely charge it, so I couldn’t tell you.

I'm team reMarkable. I was on the pre-order for the rM2 years back. It is a glorified notebook, which is what they position it as. I'm not on the latest firmware version, as I don't think the features of fw 3.x are worth it. They are reasonable open with ssh and root access and they respect the free software that they use.

If you already have a digital workflow and you need apps, then this is the wrong choice.

For me it's a notebook for handwritten notes and a koreader eink ebook reader using a small hack.

How do you feel about reading on the Remarkable? Everyone has great things to say about sketching and taking notes, which would be a nice feature, but I primarily imagine using it to read books, especially PDFs I can't get to look nice on my kindle.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats