Hacker Remix

Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable

76 points by 0xferruccio 6 days ago | 47 comments

coronapl 5 days ago

Really interesting project! A few questions:

1. How do you send the document to the Remarkable? My understanding is that Remarkable does not provide any public APIs. Do you use one of the unofficial open-source APIs? 2. Are you using pstmrk.it for tracking purposes? Maybe you can be more explicit about this in the Privacy Policy.

Additionally, the magic link email is landing in my spam inbox. I assume that this might be because you are using an icloud domain.

0xferruccio 5 days ago

I use rmapi-js (https://github.com/erikbrinkman/rmapi-js) to authenticate, which allows you to get a token you can use to send digests to the device

I use postmark because it's supposed to get emails in your inbox and because I already had an account on it. I'll see what I can do to not make it go in spam :P

Most of the complexity in the product is in:

- Scraping RSS feeds (have to use proxies to extract html and mirror all the images so that I can embed them in the digest)

- Generate PDFs of exactly the right format using Puppeteer (using cloudflare workers for this)

coronapl 5 days ago

Super interesting! I can assume that it is quite complex to scrape all of the RSS feeds and build the PDF. I will make sure to play with it.

eightysixfour 3 days ago

Doesn’t rmapi-is give you read access to the user’s remarkable library as well?

Any chance you’d be willing to release source code for self-hosting?

0xferruccio 3 days ago

Theoretically yes! Unfortunately there's no API with more restrictive permissions :P

Good point around releasing the source code for self-hosting. The only painful parts are that I two commercial services here and there for stealth proxying requests to fetch articles like (https://www.scrapingbee.com/) and Puppeteer on Cloudflare Workers (https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/platform...) to generate PDFs, so it's like $50/month to self-host something that actually works

But maybe if I open source this others can contribute too and find ways to make this cheaper to run

nerdw 6 days ago

This is really great idea, but as a Supernote user instead of ReMarkable, I just wish the output could be something different instead of tight ReMarkable integration.

0xferruccio 5 days ago

Thanks! Yeah I just made this for myself and figured I could allow others to make their digest too.

How would it work to send things to the Supernote? Is it enough to just send an email with the PDF?

clayhacks 5 days ago

I also have a supernote and yeah I think that could work. You can add email accounts to a supernote and read PDFs

ge96 3 days ago

I had an RM2 it was great, love that writing texture feel and how you can program it yourself too that's nice. I never subscribed with mine or even connected it to WiFi. I'm still unsure if I will get one again as I think I would just use something like a Surface Book.

My reasoning is financial mostly in the past when I was better off (like I am now) I bought so much crap like multiple G lenses (thousands $). Now I'm about avoiding being broke so just 1 type of similar device vs. multiple. I also had an iPad Pro which arguably their hardware is the best eg. built in lidar but I don't like the iOS ecosystem in an iPad so I got rid of that too.

Ancapistani 3 days ago

I had the rM2, and recently sold it and bought an rPP.

I hear where you're coming from. I'm in a similar place actually, but I've embedded the reMarkable so deeply into my workflow it would be a very painful device to cut out of my professional life.

Just the ability to cast my "paper notebook" in a Zoom call is incredible.

ge96 3 days ago

that sounds resource intensive to cast, so I guess that's the difference between rPP and rM2? I guess it's just a greyscale image being streamed.

the writing feeling is what I enjoyed the most and long battery life, you just have it sitting on the side for weeks/month(s) no charging concern

eightysixfour 3 days ago

Both had the ability to cast with the remarkable app.

itishappy 3 days ago

The reMarkable 2 streams in color as well.

kevinsundar 3 days ago

This is really cool! I unfortunately don't have a reMarkable but I run a similar "free personalized email digest" service https://www.getchangelog.com mainly for people following changes to tools / services / Github repos & other RSS feeds.

Wonder if you'd be willing to add email support? Anyways, great work, and I love the design. It really matches the design ethos of reMarkable.

0xferruccio 3 days ago

That's super cool! Your product reminds me of https://mailbrew.com/ which I used for a couple of years

> Wonder if you'd be willing to add email support?

I might add support for Kindle/Supernote and send a PDF by email to them, but I wouldn't really want to turn this thing into a business. I already build another SaaS for a living and just don't have enough energy to dedicate to this