Show HN: A daily digest for reMarkable
46 comments
·January 12, 2025coronapl
0xferruccio
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
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
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
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
kevinsundar
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
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
ge96
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
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
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
Both had the ability to cast with the remarkable app.
nerdw
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
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
I also have a supernote and yeah I think that could work. You can add email accounts to a supernote and read PDFs
cvburgess
I was planning on building this but never got around to it. After getting this set up its perfectly fine for my needs. Is there a way we can pay for it or at least tip you? I know the servers aren't crazy expensive but I'd love to support the work and hope it sticks around a while!
groos
The bottom image on the page got me believing there was something wrong with me :-)
mlamina
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
Love to hear that :)
BeetleB
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
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:
Caleb_Smith
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
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
cvburgess
For those of us with a black and white remarkable like RM2 could you add a setting to set all text to black including links? The blue washes out to gray.
Also setting the journal prompts to black would be wonderful - they are hard to see unlike the articles.
archydeb
Lovely landing page, appreciate the care over the icons!
citizenpaul
How does this make money? I'm just curious? Data aggregate sales?
0xferruccio
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
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
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
yasserf
This looks incredible, thank you for creating it! I have been looking for something exactly like this for a while now
0xferruccio
That's amazing to hear super happy it resonates :)
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.