The new reMarkable Paper Pro is bringing new attention to color E Ink displays. (reMarkable Photo)
E Ink writing tablets are some of my favorite devices. I got started with the Amazon Kindle Scribe, and ended up becoming a regular user of the reMarkable 2. I haven’t added to the stacks of yellow legal pads in my office for almost two years.
It’s my go-to device for scribbling stuff down and thinking things through. It feels almost like using a real pen and paper. Sometimes I have to remind my brain that it’s not actual ink or lead flowing out of the stylus. It’s easy to undo and erase, and add unlimited pages to a notebook. The battery life can be measured in weeks.
In many ways, it’s better than real pen and paper.
The market for these devices reached a pivotal moment this week with reMarkable’s unveiling of its new Paper Pro — now with color E Ink, not just black-and-white. Watching the unveiling and the demo videos this week felt like seeing Dorothy go from monochrome Kansas to the colorful Emerald City.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is not the first color E Ink tablet or e-reader — the technology has actually been around for a couple years — but given reMarkable’s loyal fan base, this device promises to bring new attention to color E Ink displays.
It’s not cheap: The reMarkable Paper Pro starts at $579 with a basic marker, but the price can easily exceed $700 if you go for a premium marker with a built-in eraser, or optional folios for protecting and/or typing on the device.
ReMarkable, based in Oslo, Norway, blends an Apple vibe with a Scandinavian ethos, pitching its tablets as an oasis of peace and mindfulness in a sea of distraction.
Now the big question is whether Amazon will join the trend with a color Kindle e-reader or Kindle Scribe. The Seattle tech giant typically holds its big device unveiling in the fall, so we may find out relatively soon.
Timothy O’Malley, associate vice president of U.S. operations at E Ink Holdings. (E Ink Photo)
The technology enabling the shift from black-and-white to color is the Gallery 3 color display, from E Ink Holdings, a company that spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 1997. So what’s really going on behind the screen?
On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Timothy O’Malley, associate vice president of U.S. operations at E Ink, about the evolution of the technology and the applications for E Ink displays.
“We have about a billion displays in the world,” O’Malley says. “Most of them are in shelf tag and retail environments, but most of the time, they look like paper, and people would walk right by them and not know that.”
Here’s how he explains the evolution of E Ink’s color technology.
We’ve been slowly integrating and improving, starting with two particles: black and white. Then we went to three: black, white, red. Then we went to four, but not mixing them: black, white, red, yellow. Each one of these steps is us learning how to get better and better at controlling the placement of the particles in this very tiny space.
Today, it’s four particles — white, cyan, magenta, yellow — and the cyan, magenta and yellow mix to give you the appropriate color. All of that learning and control algorithms, in order to get all that placement just done perfectly, in the nick of time … that’s been the journey of delivering color to these devices.
Among other topics, we talk about what’s next for E Ink, the evolving market for digital notepads, and some of the more surprising applications of the technology, including airline bag tags and color-changing cars.
“The 5th of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley,” wrote Steven Levy. The year was 1975, and dozens sat on the cement floor of Gordon French‘s garage, awaiting the historic first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
In that long-ago world where personal computers didn’t exist, each of them had answered the call of an announcement asking if they were already building their own — or at least an input-output device, “or some other digital black magic box” — and invited them all to “a gathering of people with likeminded interests.”
“Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever …”
In his book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” Levy writes that “it turned out that six of the thirty-two had built their own computer system of some sort,” and they became one of the most influential groups in the history of technology. The chapter notes that a shy 24-year-old Steve Wozniak was “dragged along” to the meeting by his friend Alan Baum, a fellow HP engineer.
Nearly half a century later — most of a lifetime — 10 of them reunited for a specialevent on Zoom. Steve Wozniak, now 76, remembered being a shy twentysomething who “never once raised my hand to speak.”
But Wozniak also remembered — they all very clearly remembered — what happened next: how they’d realized a shared dream of changing the world.
“I Want To Be Part of This”
The interview took place on a YouTube channel hosted by John Draper, who in 1974 was a legendary phone phreak — while still living at home with his parents. Wozniak had been using a TV as an output device for videogames — when he’d heard John Draper’s tales of connecting a teletype with an acoustic modem to a computer on the other side of the country using ARPAnet.
“When I saw that, I said ‘Oh my god, I want to be a part of this,” Woz remembered on the call. So he’d copied a modem schematic, bought a teletype keyboard, and jury-rigged his own connection across the continent-spanning ARPAnet. “And that was a real big hot thing in my life.”
But soon another club meeting had ended with a datasheet for an upcoming 8-bit microprocessor — which inspired Wozniak on a far-reaching path. Why cross the country to reach a computer if you already had your own microprocessor right here at home?
Wozniak thought, “This is how I turn my little terminal, talking to far-away TVs, into a real computer.” Wozniak couldn’t afford the latest Intel processors, but as a design engineer at HP, he could get a discount on processors — which led him to realize a dream he’d had for years. “I now had a formula to own my own computer — and it worked.”
“I just listened, and it was like the most incredible science fiction you ever heard. And I was just totally inspired by it.”
—Steve Wozniak
You can hear the excitement in Wozniak’s voice as he remembers what happened next. HP had a single computer that 40 people were sharing. But now, “I had this little tiny computer with my own TV set, sitting on my desk at Hewlett-Packard, and I could type in my own programs and come up with solutions … I was just having the time of my life!”
Wozniak, of course, would go on to build Apple’s first personal computers, which helped Apple become the most profitable company on earth. But Wozniak closes by saying the Homebrew Computer Club “was the heart of it all. It’s what turned me on to the fact that people were interested in things like computers we could afford.”
At the club, speakers from top local universities like Stanford and Berkeley would “talk about how it was going to change life totally,” Woz remembered — saying again that he didn’t speak. “I just listened, and it was like the most incredible science fiction you ever heard. And I was just totally inspired by it. All of a sudden, the geek was going to be important, and education was going to be better. And communication — being able to send messages to a lot of people to organize things quickly.”
Some of them were high school students — but the impact was there, Wozniak says, partly from having such good friends. “That was a real big motivating factor. That was so important. Why would I go on and try to do bigger things, start a company even — why would I do that if I didn’t have people around me saying, ‘What you’re doing’s good.'”
And Woz says when Apple went public, he gave tens of millions of his Apple stock to early Apple employees who’d come from the Homebrew Computer Club. “I just felt they deserved it as much as I did. Because that was really where all my inspiration came from.”
And he would also fly into computer clubs around the U.S., “because I wanted to tell them where Apple came from, where I came from: It was the Homebrew Computer Club.
“And having clubs is that important — you know, associating with others and sharing ideas and collaborating, that sort of thing. That was very important to me to get that message out.”
“It Was Really the People”
Electrical engineer Lee Felsenstein spoke about the club’s founding, and in the second part, he remembered how Wozniak “staked out the only seat in the whole auditorium with a power outlet.”
Draper jumped in to remember Woz typing in assembly code for his homegrown interpreter for the BASIC programming language — and got it up and running “… until somebody unplugged the computer. But he got enough of it running to really give a killer demonstration.”
Wozniak grinned and nodded, but quickly emphasized: “Less than the technology that came out of the club … It was really the people like Lee that had done good things … All the people in the club, that were so good in their hearts towards the purpose of what technology could do for us, was much more important than how to do it and which parts are better and which parts accomplish the job … And that really was more my inspiration.”
Woz also said that “I wanted computers for the normal people. I’d wanted it for years and years before that, almost a decade.”
Soon they were reminiscing about the old times — not all of it legal. Original club member Dan Sokol also remembered building his own blue box to sneak free long-distance phone calls from the phone company, just like John Draper — only to discover it didn’t work. So, “Woz showed up with John, John picked up the box, pushed each of the buttons, and said ‘Oh, your frequencies are off!’ and then tuned it by ear — and it worked after that.”
Another club member on the call also remembered building his own blue boxes — and how struggling musicians had figured out how to mimic the 2600 tone to get their own free long-distance phone calls.
Later in the call, Draper remembered working at Apple as employee #13 — and finishing up his telephone-interfacing “Charlie Board” (which, among other things, could mimic toll-free phone lines). Draper left instructions for Wozniak on how to use it, “And you programmed it to call Steve Jobs’ home — over and over and over again!”
Draper adds that the next day, Steve Jobs came in, “just madder than a wet hen.”
But then later, at a big east-coast party for phone phreaks, one of the guests reprogrammed Draper’s device into a full-fledged, free-phone-call blue box. Draper says his phone line was being “heavily monitored” at this time. “A few hours later, the Pennsylvania state troopers came with two helicopters and 17 state troopers … It was crazy.”
Wozniak picked up the story. “This time he got the same judge that told him, ‘If I ever see you again, you’re going to prison.'” While Draper served his sentence, Woz sent him a state-of-the-art printer, and Draper used it to help write the EasyWriter word processor while behind bars. (Draper remembers being selected for a work furlough program that allowed him to demonstrate his EasyWriter at a computer fair.)
“We couldn’t copy the disks fast enough to keep up with the sales,” Draper remembered on Reddit, “and I was still in jail.”
Soon Woz was telling a favorite story about how a police officer confronted Woz and Jobs over their blue box, until they’d convinced him it was actually a Moog synthesizer. And by the end of the call, they’re reminiscing about listening in on the FBI’s own phone calls.
“These are the good memories,” Woz says.
Becoming Part of History
Woz had a confession in the foreword of Draper’s — that he kind of regretted selling blue boxes to cheat phone companies. “I took care to always pay for my own long-distance calls, and to only use the Blue Box to explore the phone system.” And he also writes that Steve Jobs “started avoiding Crunch … afraid that it would put us too close to being arrested.” But Woz remained glad for the times he continued seeing phone phreaks in action “because it has now become part of history and the cinematic record of hacker technology.”
But selling blue boxes had a profound impact on Jobs and Wozniak. In a 1994 interview, Jobs said it gave them “the confidence that we could build something and make it work” — and also “a sense of magic — that we could influence the world.”
Jobs has also said Apple Computer wouldn’t exist without Draper’s blue boxes — and Draper agrees. In fact, if you believe Draper’s post on Reddit, “The initial money Woz needed came from selling them … which went into laying out and producing the printed circuit for the Apple One.”
But whatever happened, in the end, the “Homebrew Computer Club” really did see live to see the fulfillment of their deepest wish: a world that was filled with personal computers for everyone.
Angular v19 will make standalone:true the default for components, directives and pipes, according to Google software engineer Alex Rickabaugh.
“In v19 we’ll take the next step, and flip the default of the standalone flag in components, directives, and pipes, so you’ll never need to type ‘standalone: true’ again,” Rickabaugh wrote on Angular’s blog.
The standalone feature can be used to build an application that doesn’t rely on NgModules, which, until now, has been a fundamental building block in Angular applications. NgModules encapsulates related components, directives, pipes, services and other assets, which helps keep code clean and makes maintainability easier.
The standalone feature was introduced in v14 as a developer preview feature.
“Since then, standalone has been stabilized, and has become the recommended way to write Angular code by the Angular team,” Rickabaugh wrote. “The CLI generates components with standalone: true by default, and the Angular docs teach standalone first to all new Angular developers.”
Standalone makes Angular easier to learn, he noted. It also enables some new features, including:
loadComponent, which simplifies route-level lazy loading and relies on standalone functionality;
The Directive Composition API, which enables better composition model for component behavior by allowing standalone directives to be applied in the declaration of host component or directive; and
Deferrable Views, which transparently lazy-loads standalone components and directives at the template level to make it easier to optimize Angular apps.
Those still using NGModules will be glad to read that they’re not deprecating the standalone option or NGModules, so developers will still be able to write NGModule components by specifying standalone: false in the component decorator.
As part of the ng update for v19, Angular will apply an automated migration that will:
Remove standalone:true for existing standalone components, as it will be the new default.
Add standalone:false to existing NgModule components so they continue to work.
Developers also have the ability to set the strictStandalone compiler option to enforce that only standalone components are written in an application.
Developers Use AI to Upskill, Survey Finds
Developers are leveraging AI to learn a new programming language or understand an existing codebase, according to a recent GitHub survey.
In the U.S., 71% said these tools make it “easy” to adopt a new programming language or understand an existing codebase, according to the survey, which queried 2,000 software developers at enterprises in the U.S., Brazil, India, and Germany about their use of AI.
The survey respondents were primarily users of AI, with 97% saying they had experience with AI coding. A larger 2024 developer survey by Stack Overflow found that only 63% of developers reported using an AI tool somewhere in the development process — a number that includes all GenAI use cases, such as information gathering, according to The New Stack Analyst Lawrence Hecht. Only 32% of professionals agreed when asked specifically about the use of AI-assisted technology tools, Hecht added.
“Many respondents appear to be wearing rose-colored glasses,” Hecht stated, noting that one limitation of the GitHub study is the definition of what an AI coding tool is.
For instance, the GitHub survey found that 99% believe that AI coding tools will at least somewhat improve code security, which Hecht categorized as “wishful thinking,” theorizing that respondents may be conflating the use of AI in security tools with the security of code generated by AI.
Vue 3.5 Releases
Vue 3.5 is a “minor release” that “contains no breaking changes,” Vue and Vite creator Evan You wrote in a post this week. The release does include some new features, including:
reactivity system optimizations that yield better performance and improved memory usage with no behavior changes. It also optimizes reactivity tracking for large, deeply reactive arrays, which makes these operations up to 10 times faster in some cases, You wrote.
Receive Props Restructure, which is stable and enabled by default. It “significantly simplifies declaring props with default values by leveraging JavaScript’s native default value syntax,” he wrote.
It also incorporates some long-requested improvements to server-side rendering (SSR), including lazy hydration. Lazy hydration means async components can now control when they should be hydrated, by specifying a strategy via the hydrate option of the defineAsyncComponent() API.
Google’s Android team released Android 15 this week, with big boosts for collecting app telemetry data. It will be available on supported Pixel devices in the coming weeks.
Android 15 gives developers new insights and telemetry to “further tune your app experience,” the press release noted. A full list of the new features:
The ApplicationStartInfo API, which helps provide insight into app startup including the startup reason, time spent in the launch phases and start temperature;
The Profiling class within Android Jetpack, streamlining the use of the new ProfilingManager API in Android 15. This lets apps request heap profiles, heap dumps, stack samples or system traces, thus enabling a new way to collect telemetry about how an app runs on user devices;
The StorageStats.getAppBytesByDataType([type]) API, which provides insights into how an app is using storage, including apk file splits, ahead-of-time (AOT) and speedup related code, dex metadata, libraries, and guided profiles;
A new OpenJDK API that includes support for additional math/strictmath methods, many util updates including sequenced collection/map/set, ByteBuffer support in Deflater, and security key updates.
The update also incorporates improved typography, internationalization, camera and media features, as well as privacy and security enhancements.
A couple of days ag Elon Musk tweeted (it's still called that, right?) about how their recommendation algorithm easily can get things wrong since they don't know why you are sharing content with friends. This is a great example of a problem I have to deal with on a regular basis.
This is the tweet in question (screen shot to the right in case it get's deleted). It highlights a very common problem when it comes to both abuse prevention and streamlining content for users - you cannot be sure about why users take certain actions.
Let's look at a two examples from "my world". If a user deletes an email without reading it - what does that mean? Does it mean that the user don't want to see similar content? Or does it mean that they could triage the email based on the subject and decided they don't need to read this message (but is still interested in other messaged from the same sender)? Technically we cannot know...
What about somebody who is reporting an email as spam? Does that mean that they think all emails from that sender is spam? Or only that one email? Or are they using an email client with the options "junk" and "trash" where one means "delete" and the other "spam"? We can probably figure out if the last option is happening - but we still don't know if the action was intentional.
You might think that you can just ask the users for more information about their intentions. Sadly I think that rarely works with real users. I remember when I wanted to report a fake account on twitter and because I was not the victim directly affected it took me several attempts to reach a state where I could actually report the account. At that point I would have clicked anything just to proceed so the reasons I provided had less value. Generally I think users hate clicking through wizards so they probably just give up and your system do not get feedback on how it is performing.
At the end of the day, maybe it is acceptable to be mostly right. But even if you keep the majority happy, the user experience for the minority where your system do the wrong thing can be pretty bad. And if you don't recognize the fact that users will do unexpected things you'll likely end up making a lot of users disappointed.
If we ask you what the similarities between Ruby and Python are, it's likely that the answer will be they're both dynamically typed interpreted languages. But did you know there's a lot more than just that? 👀 In the 5th episode of season 2 of the Sad Python Girls Club podcast, Vinicius Stock, Staff Developer at Shopify, joins us to
explore the similarities between Ruby and Python, extending beyond technical aspects to their vibrant communities ✨
Tune in to learn more about how Ruby support in VS Code works, and how it relates to
our team’s efforts to support diverse scenarios for Python 🐍💎
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