[HN Gopher] Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable
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       Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable
        
       Author : 0xferruccio
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2025-01-12 14:32 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (digest.ferrucc.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (digest.ferrucc.io)
        
       | nerdw wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | I also have a supernote and yeah I think that could work. You
           | can add email accounts to a supernote and read PDFs
        
       | yasserf wrote:
       | This looks incredible, thank you for creating it! I have been
       | looking for something exactly like this for a while now
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | That's amazing to hear super happy it resonates :)
        
       | coronapl wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | 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
        
       | Caleb_Smith wrote:
       | What a great idea! When testing this out, the text from the
       | articles is somewhat opaque, which makes it difficult to read.
       | The images and headers seem look fine though.
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | Hey Caleb thanks for reporting this! I hadn't noticed it in my
         | use, but I do use a dark shade of gray for the pdf
         | 
         | I'll update the colour to be a full black colour for when
         | digests get sent out so this doesn't happen
         | 
         | Edit: I just updated the fonts to just render in black for the
         | article body so the text should be all black in your next
         | digest
        
       | ge96 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | Both had the ability to cast with the remarkable app.
        
       | shekhar101 wrote:
       | I am RM2 user and this is useful for me. I signed up not
       | expecting much but that digest designer is so well done! Kudos.
       | Beautifully executed. Signed up and looking forward to the
       | digests.
        
       | BeetleB wrote:
       | Does Calibre not work with reMarkable? It has a feature that
       | simulates a newspaper. You create a recipe for a website (e.g. NY
       | Times), and have it run once a day. Based on how you created the
       | recipe, it will pick all the articles in the last day and package
       | it into an ePub (with TOC).
       | 
       | I used it a lot over a decade ago. The feature is still there.
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | Haven't tried that! Will try it out and see how it compares as
         | I assume it does most of the things my app does
         | 
         | I guess the nice things I was able to add in this were the
         | journaling prompts and the next thing I wanted to add was a
         | daily puzzle kind of like the ones on:
         | 
         | https://sudokupad.svencodes.com
        
       | citizenpaul wrote:
       | How does this make money? I'm just curious? Data aggregate sales?
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | It doesn't make money, I was already hosting it for myself and
         | decided to share the spare server capacity for good karma on
         | the internet!
         | 
         | If it gets too expensive to run I'll just block new people from
         | signing up and only have existing users
        
           | dingnuts wrote:
           | This is really nice of you but if you want to serve the
           | public it wouldn't hurt to think about how the service can be
           | made self sufficient financially so that when you no longer
           | wish to run it, or want to, it can be handed off to someone
           | wants to do so, and without being a burden or needing more
           | charity
        
             | 0xferruccio wrote:
             | Good point! I'm not against the idea potentially charging
             | for this if people like it
             | 
             | I'll track if some other people besides me will still use
             | this 3-6 months from now and potentially introduce a paid
             | tier to be able to run it forever if there's lots of people
             | relying on it
        
       | artemonster wrote:
       | does this work with boox?
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | Unfortunately it does not! If you/someone has any appetite I
         | can open-source this so people can can contribute more
         | integrations (some friends wanted to get the PDF sent to a
         | kindle email)
        
       | makach wrote:
       | I keep getting unauthorized? Is there an FAQ or dummy guide?
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | Hey there are you getting unauthorised on the website? Maybe
         | you can try and hard reload the webpage and it should work!
         | 
         | Feel free to email me at hi@ferrucc.io and I can help you get
         | unstuck. There are still some rough edges around the app as I
         | made it over a couple of weekends and it was initially only
         | intended to be used by me :)
        
           | makach wrote:
           | I got it to save, after fiddeling a little bit with the
           | template and saving it.
           | 
           | I am curious though, when you get the token - theoretically
           | can you access all my synchronized files and notes? How do
           | you protect the token?
           | 
           | regards
        
             | 0xferruccio wrote:
             | Theoretically yes - the authorization allows read/write
             | access to articles on the device as unfortunately there's
             | no API with write-only permissions for the reMarkable. I
             | store tokens securely on my VPS that hosts the site in a
             | SQLite DB.
             | 
             | I've made it very easy to both disconnect devices and void
             | tokens, as well as delete your account completely. I'm
             | considering adding logic to automatically disconnect
             | devices after 90 days of inactivity to minimize the number
             | of active tokens.
             | 
             | This is a personal project I made for fun, but I still made
             | sure to follow as many best practices as possible to keep
             | the servers safe (like setting up ufw and disabling logins
             | with passwords)
        
               | makach wrote:
               | Thank you for the honest answer. It is a definitive show-
               | stopper for me to continue using your service considering
               | how much access you will accumulate in your database - I
               | am sure your current setup is technically more secure
               | than any enterprise solution - however - considering my
               | notes and remarkable are sensitive information, and
               | contain (c) documents I cannot risk it.
               | 
               | I think remarkable should consider opening/widening their
               | API.
               | 
               | have you investigating using the browser
               | extension/word/ppt "send to remarkable" API?
               | 
               | if you have a patreon or community I'd love to support
               | because the idea is great!
        
       | groos wrote:
       | The bottom image on the page got me believing there was something
       | wrong with me :-)
        
       | dSebastien wrote:
       | I hoped to find something different: a digest of my recent notes.
       | Would be cool as well
        
         | j6m8 wrote:
         | you could try my https://github.com/j6k4m8/goosepaper :)
        
           | 0xferruccio wrote:
           | oh wow this is so cool! would've saved me the time of
           | building this from scratch if I knew about this :)
        
       | kevinsundar wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
       | calvinmorrison wrote:
       | I got a remarkable and i love it. its a linux tablet. i can ssh
       | in. i love it
        
       | mlamina wrote:
       | Man... I'm not kidding. This morning I thought "I should build a
       | news aggregator for my reMarkable". Thanks for saving me the work
        
         | 0xferruccio wrote:
         | Love to hear that :)
        
       | archydeb wrote:
       | Lovely landing page, appreciate the care over the icons!
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-14 23:01 UTC)