If Charles Frazier lacked confidence, he wouldn’t have quit his job as an English teacher to finish working on the book

Now that I’ve used the reMarkable 2, my love for single-purpose devices has been rekindled. Instead of trying to be good at everything, reMarkable focused on being great at one thing: using a pen — and the tiny Norwegian company that built it knocked it out of the park.

One of his friends finally snuck an unfinished copy of the manuscript to a literary agent, who signed Frazier on the spot. That’s the only reason anyone knows anything about Charles Frazier. It’s hard to imagine how long he would’ve kept revising it.

But there’s another problem: because the Flow is declarative and is only run (materialized) upon collection, if we have multiple collectors, a new flow will be run for each collector, completely independent from each other. Depending on the operations done, such as database or network operations, this can be very ineffective. It can even result in erroneous states, if we expect the operations to be done only once for correctness. In our practical example, we would have one new GeoQuery listener added for each collector — possibly not a critical issue, but certainly a waste of memory and CPU cycles.

Frazier’s problem was that he was just too good at what he did. He loved doing it too much. It’s a strange problem to think about, but not as rare as you think. We all know someone who has the same issue. There’s a chance you are that person. And if you’re not, there’s even better news: There’s absolutely no reason to be jealous.

Unlike almost every other tablet on the market, the reMarkable isn’t packed with features or full of apps; after opening it and tapping around for a few minutes, you might realize it doesn’t have a ton of functionality. But, that’s the entire point of this tablet: It’s a focused device that does very few things, but tries to do them really well.

But that doesn’t explain everything. If Charles Frazier lacked confidence, he wouldn’t have quit his job as an English teacher to finish working on the book. He had to believe in it on some level.

 
She was the smartest girl I ever met. She knew four languages, not counting Old English — or the Japanese she picked up from living in Tokyo. Given all of this, you might wonder why it took her almost ten years to finish her PhD, more than twice as long as her friends.

 storage for free, so I had to look at paid options with Google One. The cheapest plan that offered enough to storage was the 10 TB plan at $99.99 per month. This was way more than I wanted to pay, and it didn’t seem to be available in the UK either.

The first problem with this approach is the handling of the Lifecycle, which LiveData does automatically for us. We achieved a similar behavior through the use of launchWhenStarted {} in the example above.

In my opinion, it succeeds at the goal of being focused, especially as a digital notebook for an age in which we’re assaulted by distractions constantly — I love my Kindle for the same reason I fell in love with reMarkable; it doesn’t try to slather on features, it just gets out of the way to do the task at hand. Sure, the reMarkable 2 isn’t cheap, but that’s a price to pay for a device this focused from an independent company, rather than a tech giant.

We use launchWhenStarted {} to collect the Flow so the coroutine will be automatically started only when the Activity reaches the onStart() lifecycle state, and will be automatically paused when it reaches the onStop() lifecycle state. This is akin to the automatic handling of Lifecycle that LiveData gives us.

Occasionally, that focus left me wanting a little bit more integration with my existing workflows, be it syncing my notes into an app like Notion or playing nice with my saved articles in Pocket. Given the hackability of the device, however, it’s likely the community will come through on this front in time and build on top of the device where the company left off.

Now that I’ve used the reMarkable 2, my love for single-purpose devices has been rekindled. Instead of trying to be good at everything, reMarkable focused on being great at one thing: using a pen — and the tiny Norwegian company that built it knocked it out of the park.

She didn’t have problems with confidence, or getting dates. Somehow she managed to live a full life, just stitching together gigs and living that photogenic minimalist lifestyle.

Based on its success, Charles Frazier got an $8 million deal for his second book, with nothing more than a 1-page proposal. Cold Mountain swept the award scene that year, and went on to become a hit film that earned seven Academy Award nominations.