For me it’s more about understanding what’s going on inside the tablet. The only real “change” I’ve made in the software was renaming the “Life/oragnize” template category to “LifeOrg” in order to make room on the screen for a new “Custom” category, which I use for the custom templates I use - and that was done by editing a JSON file, not by monkey-patching the xochitl executable itself (which makes me nervous).

Other than that, everything I’ve done is writing programs to interact with the tablet (backups, list files, delete files which aren’t cleaned up on tablets that don’t connect to a cloud account, etc.), and writing documentation about what I’m learning along the way.

If you’re just looking to make a backup of the entire tablet at once, and you don’t need the backed-up files to be usable for anything on the computer (other than being able to restore them back to the tablet when/if needed) …

• You can use rsync or scp to just plain copy the files from the tablet. My rm2-backup script does this, using rsync, plus it stores the backed-up files in a way that files which didn’t change from the previous backup are not copied again, they are “hard linked” to the same file in the previous backup - so if you’ve only edited one document, it might only download 15-20 files, but the directory it produces will still be a full backup of the entire tablet.

  The Filesystem page on the same site has more information about how the tablet stores documents, and why you can’t “just download them” in a format that the software on your computer can deal with.

• You can use RCU to back up individual documents to .rmn files, which can later be uploaded back to a reMarkable tablet.

  I’ve heard that RCU also has a command line interface to do this without having to use the GUI, but I haven’t used it myself - mostly because it takes forever to start. Just running ./RCU --help takes 16 seconds on an M2 MacBook Air, which IMHO is “not great but not horrible” for a GUI program, but is a deal-killer for command line utilities which might be called from a script. (I understand why it takes so long, and I don’t disagree with doing it that way, it’s just … as a user it’s kind of irritating.)

• I am working on a Perl script which can download the same .rmn files that RCU creates, and which has an option to download all documents at once. It isn’t ready yet, mostly because I haven’t had time to concentrate on it, but I have gotten as far as producing files that RCU is able to upload into a different tablet. (Plus it doesn’t take 15+ seconds just to start up.)

  I want to finish it, then I want to re-write it in Golang so people don’t have to deal with figuring out how to install Perl modules just to use it.

If you need the backed-up files to be usable (i.e. all files converted to PDF, with pen strokes “burned into” the PDFs and therefore not edit-able if the PDF files are uploaded back to a tablet), you can …

• use the built-in web interface to export them as PDF files.

• use the reMarkable apps, if the tablet is connected to a cloud account. (I’m pretty sure they can export documents to PDF, but I’ve never used them so I can’t say for sure from direct experience.)

• use RCU to download them to PDF files.

Every time I’ve upload a document with colour, or used the “highlighter” tool, it shows up as greyscale on the tablet’s display and shows up in colour if I download it to the computer as a PDF. What do you mean by “nor does it support color (grayscale) schemes”?

As for creating custom templates … you can make templates for whatever you like. This page has most of the details, including a few different ways to upload templates into your tablet.

I also just got the update, although not “officially” from reMarkable … somebody out there remembered that I was looking for the update image’s actual filename and sent it to me, so both of my tablets are now running 3.8.2.1965. (Somebody should send the filename to the developer of codexctl as well.)

I had been using 3.8.0.1944 on my “experimenting” tablet for the past few weeks. With RCU d2023.001(j) I clicked the “use it anyway” button (I forget the exact wording) and it seemed to work just fine. Of course now with the updated “compatibility table” I’m not seeing that warning anymore.

Cool, thanks for confirming. Now I know the answer for the next time somebody asks.

Why not just download a PDF of a dictionary and upload it to the tablet?

• Download via USB - yes, using a built-in web interface. You can SSH into it, but the files are not stored in a format that you’ll be able to do much with.

• Handwriting recognition - requires a cloud account and that the tablet be connected to the internet (the handwriting recognition works by sending the pen strokes to reMarkable, who forwards them to a third party) but it doesn’t require a paid subscription.

• You can upload PDF and EPUB documents via USB, using the web interface. Templates … not officially, but directions are out there for how to do it, and there are third party programs which make it simple.

• The tablet syncs with the reMarkable cloud.
• The desktop and mobile apps work by talking to the reMarkable cloud. They do not talk directly with the tablet, even if it’s plugged in via USB cable.
• The third-party file sharing plugins work entirely in the cloud. The tablet never talks directly with dropbox, google, or microsoft.

The only things I’ve seen the tablet talk directly to, other than the reMarkable cloud, are a reMarkable server collecting some kind of analytics files, and NTP servers (to make the tablet’s clock correct).

I don’t use the cloud service so I can’t answer from direct experience, but from what I can tell, it should. The sync client (on the tablet) would think it’s just another newly created document, so it would sync it as a new file (and start the 50-day timer so it can stop sync’ing it if you aren’t paying for a subscription).

Use RCU.

Connect to tablet A. Download the PDF. This should save it as an .rmn file.

Connect to tablet B. Upload the .rmn file.

Neither of my tablets’ serial numbers (or machineid values, or whatever they use to “approve” which tablets can and cannot download it) are able to download this version.

If anybody is able to get it, can you share the full filename of the xxx.signed file? This page explains how I “sniff” the process to get the filenames, at least when my tablets are allowed to get the updates.

If you used something like RCU to upload your custom templates (and I think screens), the first time RCU connects to the tablet after the upgrade it will offer to “re-link” these files automatically. No need to re-upload, or manually edit a JSON file.

As long as a PDF is okay for “sharing afterwards”, yes.

As for “sharing live” … I use goMarkableStream for this. You view the tablet in a browser window, and you share the browser window using whatever video sharing software you’re already using for the meeting. It works by talking directly to the tablet and does not require a reMarkable Connect subscription or an internet connection (i.e. it can work over a USB cable).

Just be sure to install the correct version of goMarkableStream, depending on the firmware version in your tablet. There are now three different ways for software to access the screen’s contents, and each version of goMarkableStream implements only one of them. This is explained on the Github page where you can clone the repo and/or download an executable.

For work, I have a monthly document, previously a notebook with templated pages but now I’m trying a PDF that I made using rm2-cal, that I keep as a long-term record, exported to PDF and backed up to a company-owned file sharing thing.

I also have notebooks for each of the recurring meetings I’m involved in, with the first page being “items for the next meeting”, and then when the meeting starts each week I add a new page immediately after that and move items from one page to another as I cover them. These are also retained as PDFs on the company’s file-sharing thing.

For personal stuff, it depends. There are some things I keep long-term, but a lot of it is more “to-do list” kinda stuff, like “items I want to cover on remarkable.jms1.info”, where once I’ve done or written whatever it is, that item (or page, or notebook) can go.

And in both cases, I have a Linux server at home which, if the tablets aren’t sleeping at the time, automatically “pulls” backups from them every hour. If I ever accidentally delete something (that isn’t “brand new”), I can go to the server and find/restore it to either tablet. (Remember I mentioned a list of things I wanted to write about on the web site? 😁)

I have. And while I don’t think I’ve directly quoted anything from it, I have read through parts of it when trying to figure out something new (particularly the first week or two after my first tablet arrived back in June, so if I haven’t said it before, THANK YOU for the virtual hand-holding when I first started), and I have definitely sent people links to some of the pages where you had documented things that I either didn’t have time to, hadn’t investigated yet, or didn’t see the need to try and cover again because you already had already explained them.

This new “issues” page is mostly intended for reMarkable themselves, and that particular line was about the fact that reMarkable doesn’t provide any documentation about what’s at the other end of an ssh command.

My “dream”, I guess, is that they’ll do like a lot of companies are doing and appoint somebody, maybe one of the devs, or a product manager with a decent amount of technical knowledge, as a “community liaison” kinda thing … and then start some kind of … not sure what to call it, maybe a “developer community”, for people who are interested in doing more with the tablets than just the standard note-taking and sync’ing to reMarkable Connect that they officially support. I figure they could start with some of the “more technical” users (you, me, Davis/RCU, and ddvk come to mind, plus a few others I only know as Reddit usernames).

The best example I’ve seen of such a program is the Puppet’s Community on slack, where you’ll find a mixture of beginner-level questions (but not too many), advanced discussions about internals, and totally off-topic conversations as well. Unfortunately $DAYJOB recently made the decision to switch from Puppet to Ansible (that’s a conversation better held in person, over grown-up beverages) so I don’t get to spend nearly as much time there as I used to.

I know it’s probably never going to happen, but … a guy can dream, right?