reMarkable review

I've had my reMarkable Paper Pro Move for just over 6 weeks now, so how's it going?

It's had a good tryout: taking notes at a science fiction convention, on a couple of plane trips, and on a train journey.

My first serious use was at the science fiction convention.  The note taking went well, but I was surprised at the short battery life (about half a day of full on writing), given it is advertised to last much longer.  However, the convention rooms are typically dimmed to make it easier to see the speakers, and so I needed to use the backlight to see what I was doing, and this does drain the battery quite quickly.  The plane rides and train journey were much brighter, and I could easily take notes without using the backlight, and the battery seeming lasts forever then.  On those journeys I was mainly using it to take notes on a non-fiction book I was reading, and to sketch some diagrams when thinking about some technical ideas.  It's a bit small for sketching, but okay for simple figures.

At the convention, I was taking notes seated without anything to rest the notebook on.  Its small size was helpful here, as it is easily graspable.  After several hours of holding it, however, it does start to bite into my fingers.  On the planes and train, I could use the "table" provided, and it was fine.  The train was a little shaky at times, and so the erase option was put to good use!

There are several pen tools avaialable: ball-point, fineliner, calligraphy, marker, pencil, brush, highlighter, shader, each in different thicknesses, each with a different behaviour.  There are also several page backgrounds: plain, lined, squared.  I played around a bit, and eventually settled on the medium thickness fineliner on narrow lined paper for ordinary writing.  

The writing feel is good, but, despite the advertising, I would not say that it feels just like writing on paper, unless maybe you are writing on a single sheet of thin paper on a hard surface.  It's certainly not like writing in a notebook.  But it's also certainly far superior to writing with a stylus on a tablet.  

One issue for me is that the marker attaches magnetically to the right side of the notebook.  I'm left-handed.  So if I want to take notes intermittently (which I do particularly when reading), I can either lay the marker down and potentially lose it, or keep reaching across the device to attach and detach it.  However, as a lefty I am totally used to the world not being built for me in so many ways that this is a relatively minor inconvenience.

It's easy to add folders, notes, new pages to notes, and to rename and rearrange things.  Having some structure is better than having a bunch of random notes in a heap.

There's a handwriting to text conversion feature.  This is surprisingly good, given I have notoriously bad handwriting.  (I am expecting/hoping that my handwriting might improve after using this for a while, just so that I can exploit the conversion more easily.)  It doesn't always work, but occasionally it works when even I can't easily read what I have written!  But if you use the conversion and it mis-converts things, it can tricky to recover what the reality was.  To get round this, I use the desktop app on my PC.  The notebook syncs with this very smoothly.  On the PC, I go to the handwritten page, convert to text, ctrl-A ctrl-C ctrl-Z, so I have selected and copied all the text then immediately reverted to the handwriting form.  I paste the text into the relevant Evernote or Obsidan note, then lightly edit where needed, referring back to the handwritten version if required. I keep the handwritten form on the notebook.  (If you don't ctrl-Z to undo the conversion immediately, you can't get it back later.)

This desktop app and accompanying cloud storage requires a subscription.  Buying 2 years at a time works out to £2.99/month.  Whether you want this depends on whether you are happy to risk keeping your notes on the notebook without backup.  I, on the other hand, backup my backups.

There are some online tutorials on the product website, ranging from introductory (how to make folders and notes) to more advanced (how to use it in various scenarios, none of which are relevant to me, however).

So, overall, I am definitely happy with this.  It isn't perfect, but then paper isn't perfect either.  It's very light and portable, easy to use, a good feel to the writing process, and the handwriting recognition means the end of transcribing notes.  I will continue to use my laptop for taking notes in seminars and lectures (I can type faster than I can write legibly), and ordinary paper for sketching larger diagrams at home.  But for notes on the go, this is the device for me.

tubular woes

The second day of Astrofest was as good as the first (better, taking into account I had significantly more sleep last night than the night before!)

Today we heard about: 

• ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter mission and its view of the solar poles
• Searching for micrometeorites in piles of dust
• ESA’s Science programme in general
• An interview with Gary Hunt on his 50 years in space science, including his Voyager experiences
• Interstellar magnetic fields, including a description of how the Pillars of Creation ‘fingers’ are pointing at the star forming area, with shock waves from star production pushing on the material, bending magnetic fields to form the fingers
• J-P Metsavainio’s stunning astrophotography, including a mind-blowingly detailed image of the Milky Way (zooming in to which showed lots more ‘fingers’ pointing at star formation)
• How large telescope mirrors are made
• NASA’s Psyche mission to a metal asteroid

Excellent!

Usually, at the end of the Saturday of Astrofest, we dash off to catch a train home from Kings Cross.  But it's always a rush, and the train is always packed.  This year we decided to do something different: go back to the hotel, have dinner, then proceed more leisurely to Kings Cross for a later, hopefully less full, train.

On buying tickets, we discovered there were no trains home from Kings Cross that night, due to engineering works.  The app suggested a cross country route, but we decided to travel via Liverpool Street instead.  Slower than the Kings Cross train, but not slower than the cross-country route, and on a direct tube line from High St Kensington.

So, we had dinner, collected our luggage, and proceeded to the tube station.  Only to be regaled with announcements that there severe delays on the Circle Line.  There were complicated instructions of what to do, but we instead took the District line to Earl’s Court, then the Piccadilly line to Holborn, then the Central line to Liverpool St.  So, not direct, but we did catch the main line train we had been aiming for, although with slightly less leeway than we had hoped!  We arrived home not too late, well fed, and full of great astronomy.  So we’ll probably try that approach again next year (well, eating first, not the grand tour of the underground, hopefully).

view from a London hotel window

I had a very productive and enjoyable time at the ALICE workshop in Copenhagen, working with a great team, modifying and using a system that modifies its own programming language.  We hope to get a paper out of it.  Watch this space!

Unfortunately, the last day of the Workshop clashed with a prior engagement in London: Astrofest 2026.  So I left Copenhagen on the last flight out on Thursday evening.  I knew this was a risky decision at the best of times, and then it started snowing...

The flight was delayed by two hours.

In the queue to board.  Brrr.

That meant I missed the last train from Stansted to London.  Saved by National Express!  I got a coach to Paddington.  I felt very 21st Century as I sat on the coach and used my Greater Anglia app on my phone to cancel my rail ticket and request a refund, for which I was charged £5.

I got to Paddington after 2am: the tube was shut, and there were no taxis.  I downloaded a taxi app (not Uber), and summoned a black cab.  That took me to my hotel off Kensington High Street (and cost more than my coach fare from Stansted).  

I arrived at 3am (4am Copenhagen time), but I arrived.  Five hours sleep, then breakfast (and a photo out of the window) ready for a day of astronomy talks.  

no snow!

The talks were very good, covering the JUICE mission, the Herschel telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (and its relationship to K-Pop; yes, really!), landscape astrophotography (marvellous photos), the history of Guillaume Le Gentil's tragi-comic failure to witness two transits of Venus, and galaxies in 3D (I thought the Hubble Deep field photos were mind-blowing enough; seeing them in 3D takes that experience to another level).

Well worth the travel hassle.  And more tomorrow!

phone, meet floor

I mostly like my new Pixel 10, but it has one issue.  The camera sticks out a bit at the back, and the back surface is very smooth.  So the phone doesn't lie flat, and if it's right on the edge of a surface, it has a tendency to start sliding, especially if the power cable is plugged in and pulling it slightly.

I was on a train today, with my phone plugged in and resting on the tiny table in front of me.  I didn't notice it start sliding.  It gently slid off the table, bounced against the side of the carriage, then plopped onto the floor.  

No damage, but when I picked it up, I discovered I had in that instant received an email from Vodafone, offering me damage insurance.  Coincidence?

After ALife

My colleague and I travelled back to Tokyo on the bullet train this morning.  I had quite a bit of time before my flight, so he suggested we visit Electric Town.  We took a local train, then searched for some empty luggage lockers so we wouldn't have to wheel suitcases around.  All the coin-operated ones we found were full.  But we did find an alternative.

A very nice gentleman took our bags and gave us a ticket.

Divested of luggage, we walked around, marvelling at the sheer variety of stores selling everything electrical, electronic, technical, cutesy twee, and much that was unidentifiable.

A huuuge multistorey shop sold large expensive items, including mega-sized TVs, bicycles, telescopes, and sharks.

I've been to specialist telescope shops with fewer items on display.

Difficult to get a scale, but this was several feet tall.

At the other extreme, there were alleyways and arcades with tiny shops selling all kinds of electronics, from small boxes full of individual resistors and transistors, to crates full of old laptops.  Everything for the hobbyist.

One shop among hundreds.

It was lightly raining and getting dark: the combination of weather and goods made me feel like I was on the set of Bladerunner.  

After that, we retrieved our luggage, and I caught a train to the airport, to wait for my just after midnight flight home.  

I like the simplicity and clarity of the airport shop names.

The end of my third trip to Japan.

goodbye MARCH

I've been up in York for the last couple of days, visiting colleagues, discussing projects, and, sadly, saying goodbye to MARCH, an EPSRC funded-project involving York and Sheffield, which has been running since February 2021.  It started during lockdown!  The amazing team has done some wonderful work, with some more publications still in the pipeline, and we'll be sad to see it finish.  But there are many follow-on irons in the fire, so it's not really the end.

On my way home this evening, my train passed through March station.  So this felt like an appropriate photo: March in the distance, with a ghostly me in the foreground!

escaping the heat

It was a lovely morning to be sitting on a quiet railway platform, listening to the birds singing, waiting for the train that would take me from the developing heat in the south (forecast mid 30s) to the more civilised levels in Glasgow (forecast, low 20s). 

8:46 am BST; already warm

relaxing train

While waiting for my train from Glasgow Queen Street to Edinburgh, for the first leg of my journey home, I was amused to see the destination on this other train:

view from a conference centre hotel room

We took the bullet train from Seoul to Pohang yesterday.  It felt familiar as I got on.  Ah, it's actually a Eurostar train!  Comfortable, smooth, and on time.

After a short taxi ride from Pohang Station, we arrived at the PIC (PIC = POSCO International Center, POSCO = Pohang Iron and Steel Company).  The Centre includes the conference venue and a hotel.  The view from my room is a combination of AC unit (necessary in the heat!) and lovely greenery.

Today started with a tour of the POSTECH campus (POSTECH = Pohang University of Science and Technology) for those who had arrived early enough.

braving the heat

the local synchrotron, unfortunately not part of the tour!

And then our TEMC workshop as the first event.

home from Hanover

The NNPC conference was a delight: great invited speakers, great contributed talks, great poster discussions (and I'm not just saying that because I was one of the organisers: all the contributors did a fantastic job).  I learned a lot.  I'm looking forward to the next one; hopefully it will be sooner than 5 years next time!

The conference catering was good, too.  A constant flow of tea and coffee, accompanied by fantastic little hazelnut biscuits (each small biscuit had four or five whole hazelnuts!), and rhubarb fruit juice.  Many of us tentatively tried the latter, then agreed we rather liked it: not overly sweetened, but sweet enough to be a refreshing drink.

The lunches and dinners were all vegetarian, as provided by the sponsors.  This was all very flavoursome, but lacked a certain something.  After the conference finished yesterday afternoon, a colleague and I went out for a steak dinner.

This morning I rolled up to the train station to catch the 7am train to the airport.  On the departure board, in the space reserved for the platform number, were three surprisingly short German words.  I typed these in to Google translate.  "Train is cancelled".  Oh dear, but I had allowed enough time to be able to get the next train if necessary.  I went to the information desk.  The woman there tapped at a keyboard, then told me the next train to the airport was in half an hour.  I don't know what made me check further, but I asked if that one was running.  More keyboard tapping.  A lot more keyboard tapping.  Then she said, oh, the next train that is running is the 8am one.  That would have left very little time before boarding, which I wasn't willing to risk.  I asked if there was another way to the airport.  Yes, I could catch a different train, change to a bus, then change to a further train.  I looked at her, she looked at me, and then she said, but a taxi would probably be easier.  I agreed.  Fortunately, I was travelling with another colleague from the conference, so we shared a taxi, and ended up at the airport earlier than we would have got there by the original 7am train.  Time for a leisurely breakfast of coffee and warm cinnamon bun.

The flight was fine.  The train journey from Heathrow to home metamorphosed into a bus journey for part of the way, due to weekend engineering works, which made the trip a little longer than it should have been: about eight and a half hours door-to-door, for an approximately 560 mile journey.  Considerably better progress than the seven hours for what should have been a 180 mile journey last Saturday.

  

travel in the time of Storm Babet

Storm Babet hit the UK and other parts of northern Europe this week.  I was due to travel by train from York to Ely yesterday (Friday), a journey I've done many times, scheduled to take just over two and a half hours.  I wasn't optimistic, given the news, but my phone app said my 4pm train was "on time".  Hmm, maybe not as bad as being suggested?  I arrived at York rail station.  Nothing going south.  I enquired about the departure board, which was also saying "on time".  Apparently that's set somewhere else, and the station has no control over what it says, and those who do ... hadn't updated it.  The very helpful LNER rep suggested I try again tomorrow.  So I left the station.

This morning, I arrived at York rail station.  Nothing going south.  But I had a plan, and a whole day to execute it.  I got on a train to Manchester Victoria (which was packed), then walked from there to Manchester Piccadilly, where I got on a train to London Euston (also packed).  On that trip, at one point looking out the window, I thought: "It's not too bad; that river doesn't look very high. Oh.  It's a road."

From Euston I walked to Kings Cross, to find the station shut, with a huge crowd milling about inside.  A crowd started growing outside as we waited for the doors to open.  The doors did not open, even after the crowd inside had dwindled.  I was wondering if I should try going to Liverpool Street instead.  But then, someone discovered there was an open door around the side, so we all flowed round to that one.  I got into the concourse area just as the train to Ely departed.  

So I got on the next train to Cambridge (reasonably full), and there got a train to Ely (empty).  Finally. 

The train to Ely wants me to "text British"?  As opposed to texting foreign?  A bit peculiar!  Oh, the next screen starts "Transport Police..."

I had my ticket checked a few times along this route, on trains, and at gates.  I'm not sure what the point was, given I was not only on the wrong train going to the wrong station, I was travelling on the wrong day.  None of the people doing the checking batted an eye at this.  Maybe they were just checking I had a ticket?

Four trains, 7 stations, 7 hours start to finish.  But I made it.

atypical Kings Cross

My flight back from Japan landed at Heathrow at 6:30am, and my luggage was off very quickly.  Because I was in no rush, everything was very efficient, and I found myself at Kings Cross station at 7:50am, with over an hour to kill until the first train home.  Time for breakfast!

At 7:50 on a Sunday morning, Kings Cross is spookily deserted:

I don't think I've ever seen the concourse floor before...

Even Platform 9¾ was virtually empty:

Everything was back to the normal organised chaos by the time my train arrived, though.

view from a hotel window

I’m in a hotel near Heathrow, at the EPSRC Global Grand Challenges Retreat, talking about cross-disciplinary research.

When tackling a #WickedProblem, even defining the problem domain is a political act - Susan Stepney on tackling #globalchallenges through cross-disciplinarity at the @EPSRC #EPSRC_EngineeringGGCR @GCRF pic.twitter.com/kszFUo9Hyr

— Ellie Gilvin (@egilvers) March 3, 2020

I took the Heathrow Express for part of the journey; the in-train announcements looked as if they had been hacked by an alien.

the black line wasn’t visible, but even without it, the messages didn’t make any sense

The view from my room window is over the interior of the hotel, with a rather bizarre moon on display.

once in a blue moon?

the Master’s Tardis?

Seen at King’s Cross on my way home from Swindon.

So who uses a black phone box?

prices are weird

I had a trip up to Durham today, to visit a colleague.  I bought a coffee at York station to drink on the early train: £2.05.

On the way back, it was lunchtime, so I popped into a Sainsburys near Durham station, and bought a Ginsters Chicken and Mushroom slice, a banana, and a 500ml bottle of Highland Spring water: £1.80 in total.

Caffeine is really expensive, compared to food!

train mondegreen

Announcement on the train the other morning: “This is your 9.17 Cross Country service to...”

The word “nine” was pronounced something like “noyn”

So I heard it as “this is your annoyin’ 17 Cross Country service to ...”

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

if this is Tuesday, it must be Amsterdam

So I’m now in Amsterdam, for the Conference on Complex Systems.

The view from my hotel window this morning shows how convenient it is for the station:

maybe a little too convenient for the station?

Today was our second EvoEvo project workshop, with lots of interesting talks about the evolution of evolution, mostly in in silico models.

more nice train food

In June I found some surprisingly great food for sale in the Brussels Eurostar departure lounge.  Yesterday I was there again, but they were sold out of that particular baguette.  Pity.

However, I can just as heartily recommend the individual-size bacon quiche.

The chicken and bacon bagel, not so much.

nice train food -- really!

Past security in the Brussels Eurostar departure lounge there is a cafe-bar that sells brie, honey and walnut baguettes. Delicious!

(Well, it was actually a brie, honey, walnut and rocket baguette, but I removed the rocket before eating.)

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

bricks galore

Today was a holiday in London, at the Lego BRICK 2014 festival, in the ExCel.  (That’s the same huge building as the SF WorldCon this summer, but in a different huge hall.)

There were some tremendous pieces, like Westminster Abbey.

Westminster Abbey

There was a good display of the latest generation of Lego Mindstorms, EV3, including a robot scorpion

beware!

and the Cubestormer, the record-breaking Rubik’s cube solver:

watch it in action on YouTube – don’t blink!

Not everything was a massive construction.  Some smaller pieces helped demonstrate the versitility.

the Platonic solids

Small bricks are just large pixels, so there were many pictures on display.  My favourite was this transition of millennia:

Lego Lascaux, complete with Lego prehistoric artists

the original, for comparison

It’s easier to do things like this with the large palette of colours available today.

a far cry from the old black, white, red, blue, yellow and green...

Trains were much in evidence, combining two standard passions.  Possibly my favourite was the nested train systems:

nested train systems

The upper small oval track system was itself mounted on two trains, one running on the lower large oval track, the other on the central narrow blue oval.  That itself was fun and clever, but then we spotted that lower train had a wagon hosting a tiny train running on its own little track, too!

It wasn’t just the Lego itself that was a blast from the past.

Thunderbirds Are Go!

It all started getting a bit self-referential with the merchandising, though:

the videogame based on the movie based on the toy

full circle: the toy based on the movie based on the toy

We had a great time looking at all the displays, and also bought about £10 worth of bits (given the price of the entrance tickets, and the train fares, it was quite an expensive £10 purchase). Being a Friday, it wasn’t too crowded; I expect the Saturday will be packed.

Also, I can highly recommend the ExCel’s Orange and Chocolate muffins: they are delicious, and go brilliantly with the coffee.