3145 pieces… 
I mean it’s no Eiffel Tower, but that’s still pretty impressive.
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After literally years of hemming and hawing over getting an e-paper tablet, I finally bought a Note Air 4C and I think I’m in love.
I decided to jump since I wanted to get it before tariffs cause the price to creep any higher. (So far they are holding steady, actually, but the site is warning about impending price increases.)
Quick bullet point review:
I like:
- It has a front light!
- Google Play Store enabled is a plus.
- The handwriting recognition is incredible, probably 95%+ accuracy on my chicken scratch. It even translated some of my wife’s indecipherable scrawl with perfect accuracy.
- Pen is super responsive, lag is almost imperceptible.
- I thought I wouldn’t be into the color, the palette of which is quite muted, but graphic novels look great on it.
- Incredibly fast refresh rates, acceptable ghosting, plus lots of features for configuring full refreshes and app-specific quality settings.
- The OS has lots of configuraiton options and it’s pretty easy (once you figure out your way around) to configure the settings to your taste.
- Calibre recognizes it and manages ebook loading/unloading with ease.
- The built-in reader app is great.
- Form factor is big enough to read PDFs without too much squinting, but not so big as to be ginormous.
- Clever cover design supports both portrait and landscape stand-up modes.
- Great battery life.
Not so great:
- Color e-ink screens are quite dark. Unless you’re basically in full sun you will probably want at least a little frontlight on all the time.
- The magnets on the cover are adequate for regular use but if you do anything a bit outside the ordinary (e.g. fold up the cover in “stand” mode and use that to hold the tablet) the device might pop out.
- The pen’s magnet could be stronger and there’s not a great alternative mechanism to hold it. It’s in your hand or (somewhat precariously) on the magnet mount.
- A smidgen heavy for extended one-handed holding (e.g. in bed).
- Pen/brush selection for drawing is a little limited.
Seriously, though, I’m really digging hard for cons. If you’re on the fence about an e-paper device and you value versatility, this is a good choice, especially if you think you’ll use the pen features. The other Boox options all have some compromises (different form factors, no frontlight, not pen-enabled) but this one really hits the sweet spot for me. And the configuration flexibility that you get between the OS’s built-in configurability and the Play Store access means that it beats out Remarkable and Supernote easily (for me, anyway). If you want absolute minimalism as a requirement, one of those competing products might be more to your taste, but it’s pretty easy to configure the Note Air to be as minimalist (or maximalist) as you want.
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Lately i’ve been mulling over an Android tablet over e-Ink. Anyone here have an android tablet? What’s the experience like? What do you use it for? What do you dislike about it?
I can primarily see myself using it for light browsing (videos and reading manga/ebooks). Lowkey interested if ones that have good pen support for drawing and note taking but is not a requirement.
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Oooh, yes! I’ve had a (refurbished) Samsung Tab S4 for years now, and I absolutely adore it. It comes with the S Pen, which uses Wacom technology for great accuracy in drawing and artwork-- that’s the main reason I chose it when shopping for a tablet. You can add a microSD card to boost its storage capacity, the Super Amoled screen display is absolutely beautiful, and you can get a case with a keyboard for more comfortable typing (or you can connect a portable keyboard using Bluetooth, and those are a lot less expensive.) Light browsing is a breeze with it.
Since it’s older than current models, it doesn’t have the biggest RAM memory, so if you’re shopping, I’d go with a newer version. Samsung offers a variety of specs and configurations so you can find something that best suits your needs. Another drawback is what I call Android bloat; as far as I understand it, the OS makes invisible backup files that will eventually eat up space on the main drive. I’m experiencing that now on my tablet (after over 5 years of use) and I’m not sure how to fix it myself. I may need to start calling around to phone-fix-it stores to see if they can handle it without doing a factory reset.
(Edit to add: if art’s your thing, I should probably mention that most of the popular apps like Procreate are Apple-only right now, but there are some good low or no-cost alternatives available for Android like Sketchbook and Krita.)
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I’ve had that the Tab S9 is a great, cheaper alternative to the S10. Based on your thoughts I might look into it
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I have a Boox Max 3 e-ink tablet/monitor. I got it used and it was still expensive.
It’s black-and-white.
It’s a good e-reader for larger-format books, such as most roleplaying rules and adventures.
It’s a buggy monitor, though, at least with the Mac. In text mode, text ends up jagged and unreadable. In graphics mode, white backgrounds end up medium gray.
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I’m looking for an accessible Linux-compatible laptop with an enormous solid-state drive.
I’m currently dual-booting macOS and Linux on a desktop. But that’s a pain if I can’t bring all the parts, can’t set up the monitor and all the disks, etc. I’d like something that’s easy to bring in the event of fires, or other fires.
Accessibility:
I’m sensitive to flashing lights, animation, bright screens, noise, etc. I’ve often struggled with screens which are just too ridiculously bright. I’m going to need to turn brightness down, and probably turn each color down too. Notebookcheck has data on some devices. I’m also going to need to avoid any 22 kHz squeal.
I’m going to need navigation keys such as home, page up, page down, and end. I’d like control and command/windows keys near the space bar, because remapping keys tends to break sticky keys and some diacritical marks.
I’m also going to need a Linux-compatible trackpad, which won’t require @#$% gestures.
There aren’t any local computer stores. And in the past, I’ve struggled with the pain bombardment in computer stores.
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Between the tarriffs, and backup problems, I feel I ought to find something sooner rather than later.
Intel chipsets are supposed to be more reliable, and in my experience, they’ve been quieter than ARM ones. But they’re currently a lot more expensive, too.
Lenovo laptops are usually supposed to be relatively Linux-friendly. And judging by Notebookcheck tests, they are supposed to have relatively low minimum brightness.
I am considering either Cinnamon + Mint or KDE. I mostly prefer Cinnamon + Mint.
I can’t figure out how to stop animated kinetic scrolling in gtk apps; there are some old bug reports from other users, and apparently this is wontfix because people put work into adding the pain, and it’d be more work to include options to block the pain.
I can’t figure out how to stop animated app loading in KDE, or stop blinding bleeping animated cursor blinking bleep in Qt, apart from a few apps with their own settings.
I assume dual-booting Linux and Windows would be simpler than dual-booting Linux and MacOS. And being able to use Windows would work around some bugs from Wine. But if each system relies on an index of the same shared partition, e.g. to search and find documents, find within documents, etc., it’s easy to screw up that index.
Lenovo have a partial list of Linux-compatible models, but it’s hard to make sense of the list: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426-linux-for-personal-systems
Here are the Notebookcheck figures, sorted by minimum brightness: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Benchmarks-and-Test-Results.142793.0.html?&sort=b_illumination_illumination_min&model_class=0&month=36&archive=1&condensed=0&id=0&perfrating=0&search=intel&or=0&condensed=0&showCount=0&showBars=1&showPercent=0&test_illumination_illumination_min=1&model=1&cpu_name=1&gpu_name=1&memory_installed=1
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I have a Samsung A8. Use it mostly for anime/streaming. Some light browsing and manga/graphic novels.
My kid also has one, locked down with Google Family Link. She uses it for a lot of games, music, and audiobooks.
I like them. We haven’t had any big issues except Apple Music app freezing the entire thing and doing odd things to the UI. Cleared up when we removed it.
We ditched Spotify (finally) when I figured out they had what amounts to hours of ticktok videos loaded as podcasts and no ability to turn off videos/podcasts in content control. When Spotify began to suggest these videos to our kid’s account. This is an issue for our 8 year old. The kids app is useful for only young toddlers. It’s terrible.
We’ve been trying out Tidal lately. Working so far and the only videos we need to worry about are music videos. A lot less tempting for an 8 year old to watch an inappropriate music video and a lot less of them in general.
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Spotify sucks when it comes to podcasts and i’m pretty sure its by design. They don’t want people really having any level of control, otherwise people would block the podcasts they don’t want to see. Twice now the app has randomly for no discernible reason autoplayed a podcast coughjoerogancough even though i was in the middle of listening to something else. If i had the chance i would block it so fast. I should pivot to a different app for podcasts, i’ve just been lazy about it.
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I DL 'em & just listen on the laptop w/VLC. Of course the ability to DL 'em is a big part of it.
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Me too. I was going to buy a new computer this summer because Windows 11 won’t run on my current (ca. 2017) one. But with the tariff business I decided to order it right away. At least I’ll have a faster computer sooner.
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One of the sites i like to look at for cardigans (but haven’t bought from yet) has a St James Infirmary Blues cartoon themed sweater and cardigan. and honestly i dig the look of it. I’m pro-cardigan so posting the link to that one
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wow, this is cool!
I remember being in college watching cable tv late at night and the Betty Boop cartoons with Cab and Louis Armstrong came on and just being blown away.
also, was thinking about coming to this thread anyhow because both myself and @Docosc both were chatting about how tar shampoo is the only kind that works for our dandruff in a different thread
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I’ve battled with dandruff pretty badly myself, i tried some different shampoos and none really worked for me. Thankfully what worked for me is Pura D’or shampoo and the conditioner as well, i bought it on a lark after seeing some random article (ad) talking about it. Weirdly enough the shampoo doesn’t even purport to help with dandruff, i got it initially to help with my hair starting to thin out and i noticed that my dry scalp was way better. Downside is that it can be pricey but i buy them through Costco as they have a larger bottle size but you have to buy the combo, but since i go through the shampoo faster i generally end up buying the 16oz shampoo bottles on Amazon.
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Oh my, they have both Madoka and Dorohedoro stuff! My daughter is in heaven!
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I’m a fan too, love the weirdness of the animation from that era. They have a Betty Boop cardigan/sweater too but i don’t like the look of it as much, but the one i linked to i think i’ll buy one sometime next month 
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Yeah! The designs on there are honestly pretty great, even their original stuff. If i could i’d buy a lot of the sweaters and cardigans, even the other accessories they have look cool too 
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does it do anything about the thinning? I know you can get minoxodyl over the counter now, maybe other stuff, too. but I’m pretty cheap and so far not vain enough to shell out for expensive shampoo. but maybe I’d spring for it if you noticed a change, $24 could be worse, I guess.
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I tried minoxodyl at one point, though it was dispensed as a foam for use on your scalp/hair and i haaaaated how it made my hair feel and i didn’t use it long enough to notice a difference. To your point i should give it another try.
For the shampoo i use i can’t speak to how good it is at reversing thinning, but i can at least say that since i started using it i’ve noticed less stray/loose hair when showering or combing my hair.
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