jmtd → Jonathan Dowland's Weblog

During my PhD, on a sunny summer’s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was that due to the bright sunlight, I couldn’t see a damn thing.

In 2021 I decided to take the plunge and buy the Remarkable 2 that has been heavily advertised at the time. Over the next four or so years, I made good use of it to read papers; read drafts of my own papers and chapters; read a small number of technical books; use as a daily planner; take meeting notes for work, PhD and later, personal matters.

I didn’t buy the remarkable stylus or folio cover instead opting for a (at the time, slightly cheaper) LAMY AL-star EMR. And a fantastic fabric sleeve cover from Emmerson Gray.

I installed a hack which let me use the Lamy’s button to activate an eraser and also added a bunch of other tweaks. I wouldn’t recommend that specific hack anymore as there are safer alternatives (personally untested, but e.g. https://github.com/isaacwisdom/RemarkableLamyEraser)

Pros: the writing experience is unparalleled. Excellent. I enjoy writing with fountain pens on good paper but that experience comes with inky fingers, dried up nibs, and a growing pile of paper notebooks. The remarkable is very nearly as good without those drawbacks.

Cons: lower contrast than black on white paper and no built in illumination. It needs good light to read. Almost the opposite problem to the iPad! I’ve tried a limited number of external clip on lights but nothing is frictionless to use.

The traditional two-column, wide margin formatting for academic papers is a bad fit for the remarkable’s size (just as it is for computer display sizes. Really is it good for anything people use anymore?). You can pinch to zoom which is OK, or pre-process papers (with e.g. Briss) to reframe them to be more suitable but that’s laborious.

The newer model, the Remarkable Paper Pro, might address both those issues: its bigger; has illumination and has also added colour which would be a nice to have. It’s also a lot more expensive.

I had considered selling on the tablet after I finished my PhD. My current plan, inspired to some extent by my former colleague Aleksey Shipilëv, who makes great use of his, is to have a go at using it more often, to see if it continues to provide value for me: more noodling out thoughts for work tasks, more drawings (e.g. plans for 3D models) and more reading of tech books.

Tags: hardware

It's done! It's over! I've graduated, I have the scroll, I'm staring at the eye-watering prices for the official photographer snap, I'm adjusting to post-thesis life.

My PhD thesis revisions have been accepted and my thesis is now available from Newcastle University Library's eThesis repository.

As part of submitting my corrections, I wrote a brief report detailing the changes I made from my thesis at the time of the viva. I also produced a latexdiff marked-up copy of the thesis to visualise the exact changes. In order to shed some light on the post-viva corrections process, at least at my institution, and in the hope that they are some use to someone, I'm sharing those documents:

• jdowland corrections report 2025-11-03.pdf (50 kiB)
• jdowland thesis latexdiff 2025-11-03.pdf (2.6 MiB)

Tags: phd

When I started looking at synths again, I had a feeling I would want to record from them, and ideally not with a computer. To that end, I also bought a second-hand standalone multitrack recorder, the Zoom R8.

It's a little desktop console with two inputs, a built-in mic, and 8 sliders for adjusting the playback of 8 (ostensibly) independent tracks. It has a USB port to interface with a computer, and features some onboard effects (delay, reverb, that kind-of thing).

Look a bit closer, and the USB port is mini-USB, which gives away its age (and I'll never get rid of mini-USB cables, will I?). The two inputs are mono, so to capture stereo output from the minilogue-xd I need to tie up both inputs. Also, the 8 tracks are mono, so it's more like a stereo 4-track.

The effects (what little I've played with them) are really pretty cool; and it's great to apply them to a live signal. We had some fun running them over a bass guitar. However you can only use them for 44.1 kHz sample rate. If you ignore the effects the device supports 48 kHz.

I've ended up using it as my main USB interface on my computer; It's great for that. The internal mic ended up being too weak to use for video calls. As a USB interface, my computer can receive the signal from the synth (and I've wasted more time than I care to admit trying to wrestle with the Linux audio stack to do something with that).

It can also run on batteries, which opens up the possibility of recording piano with my daughter, or field recording or suchlike.

Writing this up serves as a reminder to me of why I bought it, and I now intend to spend a little more time using it that way and stop wasting time fighting ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire/PortAudio/etc.

Tags: music making

It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything unexpected to you¹: it just contains music.

There's so much exploitation of attention, and so much of what we interact with in a computing context (social media) etc has been weaponised against us, that having something some matter-of-fact is a relief. I know that sometimes, I prefer to put a record on than to dial up the very same album from any number of (ostensibly more convenient) digital sources, partly because I don't need to spend any of my attention spoons to do so, I can save them for the task at hand.

The same is perhaps not true for audio CDs. That might depend on your own relationship with them, of course. For me they're inexorably tied up with computing and a certain amount of faff (ripping, encoding, metadata). And long dead it might be (hopefully), but I can still remember Sony's CD rootkit scandal: CDs could be a trojan horse. Beware!

Tags: computing vinyl

Since it's spooky season, let me present to you the FrankenKeyboard!

8bitdo retro keyboard

For some reason I can't fathom, I was persuaded into buying an 8bitdo retro mechanical keyboard. It was very reasonably priced, and has a few nice fun features: built-in bluetooth and 2.4GHz wireless (with the supplied dongle); colour scheme inspired by the Nintendo Famicom; fun to use knobs for volume control; some basic macro support; and funky oversized mashable macro keys (which work really well as "Copy" and "Paste")

The 8bitdo keyboards come with switch-types I had not previously experienced: Kailh Box White v2. I'm used to Cherry MX Reds, but I loved the feel of the Box White v2s. The 8bitdo keyboards all have hot-swappable key switches.

It's relatively compact (comes without a numpad), but still larger than my TEX Shura, which (at home) is my daily driver. I also miss the trackpoint mouse on the Shura. Finally, the 8bitdo model I bought has American ANSI key layout, which I can tolerate but is not as nice as ISO. I later learned that they have a limited range of ISO-layout keyboards too, but not (yet) in the Famicom colour scheme I'd bought.

DIY Shura

My existing Shura's key switches are soldered on and can't be swapped out. But I really preferred the Kailh white switches.

I decided to buy a second Shura, this time as a "DIY kit" which accepts hot-swappable switches. I then moved the Kailh Box White v2 switches over from the 8bitdo keyboard.

keycaps

Part of justifying buying the DIY kit was the possibility that I could sell on my older Shura with the Cherry MX Red switches. My existing Shura's key caps are for the ISO-GB layout and have their legends printed onto them. After three years the legends have faded in a few places.

The DIY kit comes with a set of ABS "double-shot" key caps (where the key legends are plastic rather than printed). They look a lot nicer, but I don't look at my keys. I'm considering applying the new, pristine key caps to the old Shura board, to make it more attractive to buyers. One problem is I'm not sure the new set of caps includes the ISO-UK specific ones. It might be that potential buyers might prefer to have used caps with the correct legends rather than pristine ones which are mislabelled.

franken keyboard

Given I wasn't going to use the new key cap set, I borrowed most of the caps from the 8bitdo keyboard. I had to retain the G, H and B keys from my older Shura as they are specially molded to leave space for the trackpoint, and a couple of the modifier keys which weren't the right size. Hence the odd look! (It needs some tweaking. That left-ALT looks out of place. It may be that the 8bitdo caps are temporary. Left "cmd" is really Fn, and "Caps lock" is really "Super". The right-hand red dot is a second "Super".)

Since taking the photo I've removed the "stabilisers" under the right-shift and backspace keys, in order to squeeze a couple more keys in their place. the new keycap set includes a regular-sized "BS" key, as the JIS keyboard layout has a regular-sized backspace. (Everyone should have a BS key in my opinion.)

I plan to map my new keys to "Copy" and "Paste" actions following the advice in this article.

Tags: hardware