I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this.
I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink
The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long.
Suggestions are welcome
My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]
You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/
That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.
Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?
Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200
I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.
My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.
I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.
> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.
This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.
It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.
I ought to do a write up, but If you open it up the UART pads are available to get a U-Boot console. U-boot is in HAB mode, with a custom signed debian buster kernel. This was my first time dealing wit u-boot, but it was otherwise pretty open and was able to write to ENV and FS from the u-boot console, which let me stop the Freewrite app from starting, boot into root shell, turn on SSH, etc. So you can get into userspace and replace the UI and whole app. When I dropped this project I had it booting shell onto the e-ink, with a command to drop back into the Freewrite app if I wanted.
Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.
Looks great but the price is pretty insane, and really the eink should be a lot bigger. So much wasted space on the bezels.
For some reason writerdecks almost all insist on having tiny little screens.
I think it's more a supply chain issue. There aren't any very stretched rectangular eInk panels from what I've been seeing. I've seen some for price tags but I mean nothing like 8-10 inches or so.
And they're such a niche phenomenon that they have to do with the scraps left by other industries like ereaders.
That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!
I use the Onyx Boox Palma for a portable eink drafting setup. It's worked pretty well. I wrote about it here: https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/
That's very similar to the setup I'm working on, including the stand. Thanks for sharing!
One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?
For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.
> The keyboad
Perhaps you should have chosen a better one?!
I chose the keyboard I wanted :)
It was a joke on the typo.
Hahaha I missed that completely, sorry.
...Now I kind of don't want to fix it :D
make the "r" a link to this discussion thread. btw you made the typo twice :-)
Great idea, done.
I fixed the second one normally because that's just embarrassing. I guess at least we know it was really written by a human? ;)
My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.
Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.
If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.
I use a pine note + a bluetooth keyboard + SSH / VPN to make that work for me. It's acceptable. I would like "a laptop", but it's fine.
I use a Bigme Hibreak Pro eink phone, nix-on-droid/ssh to home server over tailscale, and a foldable keyboard, to have my coding setup with me and not be tied to where I can carry a laptop.
For foldable keyboards, if they are flimsy or stable matters.
The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.
The US version (the DM250US) is now $549, alas. I was looking at these briefly, but can’t justify the expense — might as well get a MacBook Neo if I were in the market.
Yeah I think that's substantially more than I paid for my JP market version.
I will say it is a really nice device, probably the all-around best of the dedicated writing devices I've owned and/or researched over the years. But on a typical value scale, it's not worth that.
Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.
I do see the Note Max as presently available, FWIW: <https://shop.boox.com/products/notemax>
I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.
I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.
If you want something you can use today with a Kindle or other e-reader I made an app for this https://solarwriter.msol.io
If your up for waiting and the usual crowd funding risks there's https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zerowriter/zerowriter-f...
I backed it myself.
Ideally, somebody like Modos would create a replacement e-ink display for the Framework.
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