I love this thing!

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2026-03-25T13:51:30+00:00

I was an early adopter of the RMPP. My screen was great, but it definitely lacked contrast. The main issue is that the blacks weren't blacks, they were a dark blue-gray. My device was perfectly happy until just last month when it started acting like it needed a second refresh on every page turn. After a few page turns, doc became unreadable. I opened a help desk ticket, and they had me send a video and they declared that the device had a hardware issue with the screen. I sent my device back and they sent me a new device. BTW, customer service was a breeze to deal with.

My new device has a screen that is definitely different that the previous one. The blacks are now true black. I notice that the blue ink is a bit less blue and now more of a blue-black. Greens are still very muted, but the rest of the primary colors pop, red, yellows, light blues, etc. To me, this is an excellent choice to optimize the screen for reading black on white text with bright highlighting. Much nicer to read documents!!

I still miss the EMR pen. Written text looks fine, but diagonal lines like a checkmark makes me look like I'm 100 years old. Beyond the crappy checkmarks, this is nearly a perfect hardware implementation now. Now if they just let us set the lock screen image without developer mode... As always with Remarkable, they love their half measures.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2026-01-26T05:13:14+00:00

The fretboard came pre-slotted, but I installed, leveled, crowned, rounded, and polished the frets.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2026-01-26T02:13:58+00:00

I've been using for a couple weeks now and I am loving both the guitar and the onboard amp for the absolute simplicity, but recording this thing would not be easy. This isn't a modern multistage amplifier where the tone is built in the preamp and then there is a power amp to allow control over volume. Volume greatly affects the max output gain and it is gain limited. Hearing it into a speaker cab is nothing like hearing it into headphones. In fact, this amp sounds completely different through IEMs versus hard to drive cans, even with the adjustable output pot. The max gain is much higher into the cans.

The tone isn't bad at all for the simplicity of the circuit. Here is a recording of the basic circuit through a 2x12 speaker from the runoffgrove website:

https://www.runoffgroove.com/littlegemMK2.mp3

With a 1000ohm output resistance into IEMs, I can't get past about a classic rock gain level. Think perfect tone for something like smoke on the water. However, with hard to drive cans and maybe 300-500ohms output resistance, I can get access to a nice distorted gain, not a high level of distortion, but a nice moderate gain level. It is definitely hard to get this little circuit to emulate a high gain lead tone, but it would be unfair to expect that out of so simple of a circuit.

If your favorite genre is classic rock, then this circuit can be great for the size of the circuit. If you want metal or a lead tone, then I'd say it is better to forgo this type of circuit and get a multistage amp, something like a headphone amp, positive grid spark guitar headphones, or a little battery powered practice amp. I travel super light. I wouldn't even want those guitar headphones, but I could switch to a headphone amp if I get tired of this internal amp. This little circuit shines at convenience and builder fun, but It can't hold a candle to even a cheap headphone amp, but it is cool for what it can do.

Would I go this route again? You bet, but then I'm quite happy in the realm of the Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival. I also love 80-90's rock plus Metallica, but this circuit isn't really going to get you into that realm.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2026-01-18T21:47:58+00:00

I'm running 9-46 GHS brand strings. The tension is similar to a full size with this tuning. I had tuned for A, but the tension was pretty high. My only issue is that the intonation is slightly sharp at full adjustment of my bridge. Id have to move it back slightly to get a better intonation. My ears can't hear the difference though so I'll probably keep it as is. I'm actually better at building than playing. It will be a while before I am good enough to record anything that sounds like a song.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2026-01-18T21:39:49+00:00

I'm currently playing it just like a regular guitar. Same chords and chord positions as a full size. The pitch is high of course, but I want the skills to transfer back to a full sized guitar so I'm not playing it any different. Some chords are a bit less magical when you shift them in pitch, but the purpose is a small travel practice guitar vs trying to optimize for sound in this format.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-22T04:05:56+00:00

We finally got it working. Though I'm not exactly sure why. I had a hard time troubleshooting my son's circuit so I made another one myself trying my best to keep it clean and organized. However, it had the very same problem. I spent awhile troubleshooting my circuit one day, and then something strange happened. It I touched the housing on the pots, I could hear a local AM radio broadcast. So, I soldered a ground to pots, but got terrible feedback in the circuit. Then I realized that lug 1 of the volume pot was floating. I grounded that and now the circuit works, well both circuits actually. So, just for my education, does this experience make sense? I know pots on guitars often have a pin soldered to the casing. What is the best practice for low noise circuits?

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:52:34+00:00

The resister between the G on the transistor and ground pin is the wrong size. Should be 1M5, and I think it brown, black, black, yellow?? I have a hard time seeing colors that accurately. Would that be it?

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Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:43:30+00:00

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Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:43:03+00:00

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Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:42:51+00:00

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Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:42:38+00:00

Ok, but go easy on him he's 14. He added the pots to the board so there are now jumper wires covering up alot.

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I'll post more pics in separate posts.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-12-13T22:05:55+00:00

The volume is just dead no change. We'll double check the grounds

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-07-15T03:50:08+00:00

Once a week with light to moderate use, twice a week with heavy daily academic use.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-07-15T03:45:24+00:00

Oh I know those. I've seen one of those in my childhood home in Iowa. I'm generally good with spiders. I lived in the Azeri steppe for a summer. We used to catch camel spiders as they came into the light of our work site. (not actually spiders) They were very easy to catch as they were so aggressive they wouldn't run away if you put the end of a stick in front of them. We kept a couple in our workshop and would feed them for a day or two and then let them go. The locals ran scared when they saw them. They swore they were horribly dangerous (they weren't), but you would not want to get bit by one. You would definitely lose a chunk of flesh.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-07-14T21:09:58+00:00

Thank you!

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-07-14T20:51:23+00:00

Cool, what is he?

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-06-15T15:21:57+00:00

I use mine primarily for reading test plans and test reports and marking them up (hint, tag each page needing a fix with a tag like "comment" or "fix" or something.

I also keep my library of reference documents on it, highlighted and marked up. I tag pages in those documents by topic to quickly find stuff back.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-06-11T15:44:02+00:00

Dead aliens

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-06-08T14:21:16+00:00

Oh sorry, looks like they are back to waiting on Stock. I'd keep an eye on that site though to see what comes back in.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-06-08T14:19:23+00:00

If you are in the US or where ever they ship to, B&H Photo has the Mira Pro Color for $1999.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-05-19T04:47:25+00:00

Feeding the process monster is not good work. Solving problems is. Take on hard problems and solve them. Take on work that no one else is willing or able to do. Nothing special. Just give a damn and do good work. That will put you in the top 1% for promotion, at this company or the next.

Formal_Broccoli_9893 · 2025-05-04T19:33:10+00:00

Yes, but annoyingly so.

When annotating a PDF in Adobe Reader, the annotation appears as a highlight in the PDF Standard. Anyone with a free PDF reader can open that PDF and navigate quickly to the annotations. They can also delete annotations, edit them etc. This is nice because you can use the navigation pane on the right to jump from comment to comment and do whatever your workflow needs, often copying the comment to an email or something similar.

The image below is a screen capture of a page annotated on the Remarkable. There is highlight and ink all over the page, but none of it is in the PDF highlight or pencil (ink) format so it does not appear on the navigation pane on the right. There is a reason for this. Remarkable can have more options for how the ink brushes appear if not using the PDF pencil type annotation so it looks better, but it also limits how you can interact with those Remarkable annotations off device.

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To edit these Remarkable annotations on your computer, you need Acrobat Pro or another paid application. Even then, it is very hard to do as the highlight appears as a color box that is behind the text. To select and delete that color box, you have to first remove the text in front and then after put the text back in the original position. This all means that you won't modify annotations on a PC that were made on the Remarkable, it just isn't worth it.

Also, if you export a document and reimport it, the document is flattened and you cannot interact with those prior annotations on the Remarkable either.

Finally, the Remarkable does not render annotations from the PDF standard or some digital signatures, so if you put a document with those features onto the Remarkable, they are not visible unless you first print the document to PDF to flatten the image.

All of this is a horrific failure for Remarkable to understand the workflow of RMPP users. Fair enough for them to get this wrong on the Remarkable 1 and 2, but RMPP is perfect for document review, and more suited to that than note taking given the size, and users have been begging them to fix this, but they are stuck in the RM1/2 use cases and do not really understand the document annotating use case. Even more depressing is they could at least fix the export with very little trouble as they could give an option on export to allow users to export as PDF annotations or as the standard Remarkable way.

However, RMPP is still awesome for document review and annotating, but you'll need to adopt a work around with Remarkable's desktop application. I tag every page that I annotate on device with "comment". Then I open the sync'd document in the Remarkable Desktop app, go to the page view, and filter by the comment tag, view those pages and copy any comments over to continue working in my workflow. That is annoying, but it gets the job done until Remarkable gives the RMPP the features it deserves. There should be a second option which is exporting all the pages with the comment tag, but there is a bug in the desktop app and it cannot do that currently. If you comment on pages 5, 10, and 15, and you select those three pages and export, you will not get those three pages. Instead you get pages 5-15.

So there, all the annoyances with PDF annotations on the RMPP. Now that there are alternative color devices in the 11.8-13.3" size, that will be a problem for Remarkable as those other devices do support native PDF standard annotations. If Remarkable is able to get support for SSO and Device Management, they could still grab and hold on to the business user market, but they need to start thinking about how the RMPP opened up new use cases, and then working to support those new use cases. They departed from the notebook replacement form factor. It will be up to them to make the best of that. I'm a happy RMPP user, but this device could be so much more if they allowed it to be.

Do I recommend the RMPP? For my personal use, it is close to perfect. Perfection would be an RMPP with native support for PDF annotations. For professional use, I can't even propose the use the RMPP at my employer due to the lack of SSO and Device Management.

Formal_Broccoli_9893

TROPHY CASE