Introduction
I recently got a BOOX Go 10.3 e-ink tablet this past Christmas. I use this device to take notes that require handwriting (Math/Physics), and annotating/reading a lot of notes/books/documents.
BOOX is a Chinese company that specializes in E-ink tablets that run Android. They have continued to violate the GPL license of Android by not releasing source code to their custom build. I don't like that they violate GPL, but sacrificing privacy sometimes necessary for convenience. As far as I know, there isn't a free and open source e-ink tablet with all the same features.🚩 A note about the BOOX company 🚩
Benefits of Android OS
Because this tablet runs android (which is a heavily modified Linux) we can do a lot of "Linux-y" things with it. I can run syncthing, GNU Emacs, and scrcpy on it. I have sideloaded fdroid which is my app store. I don't log in to google or the BOOX sync service. I created zero accounts for this device. If enough interest is gathered, I can release an article about my setup.
Default notes app export
The default notes app has the ability to export notes to pdf after saving. I use syncthing to access these new documents. It was super easy to set up
Organizing with epic Emacs tools
A big dilemma with handwriting notes is that they are hard to search. I devised a plan to organize these notes using denote (org-mode), pdftools, and org-pdftools.
Methodology
I start with one main file, I call it pdf-notes. This will be the main hub. Next I created other files for certain subjects. These have the keywords: pdfs and meta. They are "notes about notes" thus "meta" notes about pdfs.
The main note contains a heading for table of contents, and a heading for the actual content of the files. Both are generated with denote-org-extras-dblock-insert-links and denote-org-extras-dblock-insert-files. All of the blue underlines are org links to pdfs (from org-pdftools) that are in a syncthing folder on my pc. I can open up the link and start reading my notes again. I also use consult-outline and consult-line to fuzzy search around these files when needed.
Examples
open to see images
