[COFF] Re: Reader, paper, tablet, phone (was: Re: Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.))

[Tomasz Rola <rtomek@ceti.pl>]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 10:45:43AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jun 2023, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 11:02:33AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
[...]
> > a. have sd card slot in a reader (I mean hardware with e-ink, not some
> > app on a phone). This means a card can be slipped into the box without
> > opening it. This means the box is not water-proof. However, I had a
> > look inside and I suspect it can still be water-prooved with duct
> > tape, if someone wants it so much.
> 

Hello again and sorry for the late answer. Busy, hardware glitches,
tired, etc.

> (For the record, the "device" I'm discussing is my Boox Nova Air 7.8" E Ink
> tablet, Amazon product B09FQ14Z6N.)
> 
> What are you wanting/needing an SD card for?  Extra storage?
> File-transfer?  For what I use this device for, the built-in storage
> (32GB) has been more than enough to hold the books & notes I need it to.

There is no use pattern as such. It was just very convenient to have
one. When I bought my first reader, PocketBook 622 (or something like
it, a good decade ago), it only had 2GB of flash. Of this, about half
was already prefilled with free ebooks, free photos to see in some
app. I decided to keep all this, which left me with .LT. 1GB for my
use. If I wanted just epubs, this was more than enough to have few
thousands files. But, an atlas of human anatomy from Internet Archive
was ca. 8MB, Lisp 1.5 manual from bitsavers was another 9MB and if I
wanted some more, space would quickly ran out. An 8GB card solved the
problem.

Later on, a member of family fell in love with e-reader, too. But, in
her hands they died rather quickly. So we struck a deal - she will buy
me a new one and get mine, which after a year of use was still mostly
like new. I just replugged SD card and it was it. Now I have two
broken Pocketbooks 622 in a drawer, waiting for their chance - just
replace their displays.

Later on, I bought me an Inkpad (again from Pocketbook, probably I am
a fanboy). This one had about 7.8'' display, many more inky pixels and
not too big cpu, so was a bit sluggish. But I liked it. Alas, it
entered nirvana as a result of botched upgrade. If I am to believe
internet, it can be pulled back into this world with the help of
specially crafted serial cable and kermit.

So, later on I bought me a Pocketbook 633 (definitely a fanboy!). This
one can display 256 colors on outer LCD display and 16 levels of grey
on inner e-ink display, which combines into 4096 colors. I wanted to
give it a try, but if this specimmen dies, I will go back to normal
e-ink b/w. The colors are there, but nothing outstanding. Ok for office
kind of documents - pie charts, graphs etc. Space photographs,
ukiyo-e, n nono no. Besides, if I use color, it powers on the LCD
layer and consumes significantly more power than when it goes with
e-ink only. For some documents, color can be turned off, for icons on
main page, they show in color.

Each time I just replug the card. So next time, I guess I will be
looking for another reader with a slot.

As of what you write about using cable and or BT for file transfer, it
is all true but if reader does not work anymore, it might be hard to
get files back. Or impossible. I have a smartphone, just to make a
photo sometimes, nothing more, and I store it all on sdcard,
again. This one phone does not want to emulate pendrive when I plug it
into my Linux box, I had to install ftp server on it (phone). If it
dies, I will unplug the card. Easy as a pie. No need to spend days
looking for some bloody program which maybe is Windows-XP-only or
maybe just been dropped from manufacturer support website. So I guess
my next phone should better have a socket for sdcard, too.

This is the future - if I have a need to support, I need to support it
by me. Investing money in something that may turn into a brick and get
my stuff with it - I do not think so. Too bad if some manufacturer
does not want to play along, but they come by a dozen so maybe I can
find what I want :-)...

[...]
> This device does not advertise any water-proofing at all.

Well, somehow all readers without sdcard tout about them being
waterproof. Like I wanted to read in water.

[...]
> The exception to this is my watch.  I have a Fossil Hybrid smart-watch.
> It's an analog watch with an e-ink background that can show me
> alerts/info from my phone.  It only needs to be charged about once every
> 10 days or so. I don't want a watch that I'd have to recharge daily.

I bought me a cheap mechanical clock from China (say, 17 bucks). It only
needs a "mechanical recharge" once a day and I have to turn it back 5
minutes once a week to keep it somewhat accurate. Good enough for me.

[...]
> The other thing I use this device for is for hand-written notes and
> sketches.  Writing on the screen with the stylus feels a lot like
> writing with a pencil on paper.  I'm not an artist by any stretch, but
> sometimes writing things out and using boxes, circles, helps sort things
> out in my head, or sometimes I'll sketch things out while working on a
> design I eventually want to 3d print. All stuff I'd historically done in
> a paper notebook, but now I have similarly-sized electronic notepad
> where I can erase mistakes, have layers to my drawings (like
> photoshop/gimp/etc), zoom in/out, etc.

Well I went the other way - bought some pencils to see how it goes
with paper notes. Color crayons, some other thingies for making
circles and lines (compass, ruler). Now, seems I will have to make
some kind of notebook (in a future, not now) because what I see in my
shops somehow does not convince me to buy (yeah I know about
moleskines and leichturms, but this is not what I want, not sure what
I want). Right now, it is just a normal crappy school notebook but
with nice cover :-) .

> The notepad app is also linked to my DropBox account, so when I'm done
> with whatever doodles/notes/sketches, I can then load them up on one
> of my other systems as PDFs.  I've even toyed with the idea of writing

"Dropbox baaad, shoe box good" :-)

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **