- If you've been watching this channel for a while, then you probably already know that I'm a big note taker. But what you probably don't know is that digital notes have only ever been a small part of that. I love the appeal of analog notes and recently I've also loved meshing the analog with the digital using E Ink tablets. Now I'm gonna talk in this video about my personal use case for the reMarkable and also how I get all of that finally into Obsidian as a PDF and also in the OCR version. I'm gonna share my personal workflow, but I'm gonna let you know of some ways that you can tweak it as well. Let's get started. I have tried a lot of E Ink tablets, I've tried E Ink readers, actually I didn't plan this, but I've got my Kindle here. I've got my Xteink X4 here. I've got my reMarkable Paper Pro Move, which is what I bring in my EDC, my Everyday Carry. And I also have always at my desk, my full on reMarkable Paper Pro. Now the problem with reMarkable has been, while I love it more than you know, the Kobo line or the Kindle Scribe, which I also have, doesn't have the best workflow, and that's because there hasn't been an easy way to get all of that into Obsidian, which you know is kind of important for me. I'm going to show you how there is now finally, a way to tie that all in and it's with a community plugin. So in Obsidian, if you go to the community plugins and click browse and then just Search for reMarkable, and this is the one that I'm using reMarkable Sync by Tim Dommett. So go ahead and install that and enable that. What this is going to do is allow you to sync your reMarkable documents directly into your Obsidian vault into a folder if your choosing. So I already have that installed, so I'm gonna show you my settings for it. When you haven't done this yet, you're going to need to register. Now you're gonna have to click this and then you'll go, you'll be taken to your reMarkable page and you'll be given a code and it will be letters in this format. You put it in here and hit register. I'm not gonna go through that because I don't want other people to register using my code, but once that's done, you can select some options for syncing. The important one here is the sub folder. So I personally put it under plugins and reMarkable, and then I've had it sync every 30 minutes. Now you can have it sync, you know, more frequently or manually. You can also trigger that on the command pane, which I'll show you later. So I wanna show you the process from actually writing on the reMarkable to what it looks like on the reMarkable app and then how it looks in Obsidian here is my reMarkable right now. Okay, this, these are just some doodles that my partner was showing me. He was discussing neural nets and I wanted to keep this here because I wanted to show you how it looks. If it's a diagram, sorry, I probably should have chosen color other than science to demonstrate this, but I'm also going to write down some other notes. Let's change the font here. I'm gonna go with red because you know, favorite color and all neural nets, nets get diagrams from WhatsApp. He had his AI generates some other diagrams and I wanna make sure that I put a note to myself to include that. Okay, so we already know that this is what that looks like on the reMarkable. Now let's head over into Obsidian. So now we're in Obsidian and I could wait the 30 minutes, right? But I actually just wanna trigger it right now. So I'm just going to go and select the command, reMarkable Sync Sync documents. Now that's gonna happen. Okay, so let's see if it's already there. Looks like it is. Oh, and actually, alright, it's already been OCR'd. I will tell you about that later. But first, let's look at the PDF here, what it looks like. Okay, so that matches up with what we saw earlier. This is the first kind of diagram that he did. And then here's, and here's what I wrote down on the next page, but right now this is still just a PDF, so it is in Obsidian. So I've gotten it there. Great, but it's still not OCR'd. So OCR is optical character recognition. And what that means is it's transforming something that's maybe handwritten or it could be like something from a picture, an image, and it turns that into text. Once it's in text, then it can be just like any other note in Obsidian, it can be modified and it can be searched for. And so I find that it's a much more durable way to store things rather than just the PDF. I keep the PDF still because I kind of like the feel of it, like the colors that I chose and and what my handwriting looked like. And in this case, you know, it was someone else writing on my reMarkable. I wanna preserve that stuff, but I also want it to be searchable. So what I've actually done to automate it is I use OpenClaw. Now I've kind of gone over how I use OpenClaw in this video. I won't go into it here. I also understand that it is a little bit more of an intricate setup or a complex setup and it's not really something that I would recommend to everyone. So I'm just gonna tell you that I have a skill that watches on a heartbeat. So on a recurring schedule, it watches a certain folder, which in this case is my reMarkable folder that I set in the reMarkable Sync plugin. And it's always looking for new files that are dropped in there and once it's dropped, it OCRs it. And so I'm gonna show you how that looks like. So here's the one that it already created, and you see it's also some things like it, it uses some properties I like and it's funny because it's, it knows me, right? So it knows what we actually talked about and in fact in this case, I also had the transcript for it. So perhaps it's, it's able to assume more things and was actually here. So right, none of those words were actually written, but it's already saying, you know, yes, it, we were talking about neurons and perceptrons and this is much more complete than I really expected. Of course, some things it doesn't still understand because, because we didn't write any, any words here what the, what the words that I actually did write were here. Neural nets as explained by Noel and then get diagrams from WhatsApp. So that's actually pretty good. I got that spot on whether I wrote in print or cursive. If you also want to automate this part of it and have the OCR available, then I would suggest something like Claude Cowork. The Claude Desktop app is extremely useful. If you haven't used it yet, then I would suggest you try it, especially if you love taking notes. That's already a lot of context that would make AI immediately useful for you. But here's how I would do that on Claude. Just to speed things up, I'm going to use an app called Spokenly to transcribe. What I'm saying to Claude, you are in my Obsidian vault in the folder plugins. reMarkable. Look for the very latest PDF that I've put into there, and then please OCR, that if there's a diagram, then describe the diagram. And if there is text, whether handwritten in cursive or printed, then please make that text and print all of the, your findings into a note in the plugins Claude output folder. Okay? So that's what it is. Plugins, I, I just, I'm going to make some changes here and then also got this one wrong Claude output folder. Okay? Then I'll add, use the same file name as the original PDF. Great. So it already has seen the the latest PDF. Okay, looks like it's done and you know, I can look at it here. I can verify it in Obsidian. Let's see, Claude output. Okay, also created properties. It says it also described more than I expected it would. It's funny because the word neuron isn't ever in the original. I don't think it's amazing that they both got that. I guess I shouldn't be so, so surprised because now I think of it, I was using the same underlying model, which is 4.8. Okay, it looks like it described it, and then some other notes. You could stop here, but I would recommend that you would at least turn this into a skill so that you can just invoke this on demand. So I'll go back to Claude and I'll say, please turn all of these instructions into a skill and call it OCR. Now it's writing the actual skill for me, and I didn't have to write these steps myself since it's just done it anyway. It knows exactly what to do and it's also preserving the paths. So then all I have to do is hit save skill and now that skill is saved. What that means is next time when I have something like this, a reMarkable PDF to OCR, then I can just hit slash OCR and then I would probably like name the file that I wanted to OCR. If you'd like to go further. You can also turn this into a scheduled task. You can ask it to do that. I'm not gonna go that far because I already actually have this, so it would be kind of redundant. This simple workflow has really made it so that I can actually use my reMarkables. See, I love taking notes on my laptop, but the reality is that when I'm face to face with someone and I'm like in a talk or a conference, I just find it really distancing and and a little rude to be typing away on a laptop. I know I don't perceive it that way when I'm the speaker. I don't mind when people are doing it, but I just feel like I can be more present if I don't have a screen between me and the speaker. I also feel that this little reMarkable Paper Pro Move is so much easier to bring around than my laptop or even my iPad. Now that I know that everything's still going to end up in my Obsidian anyway, I just get to decide on the note taking method that I feel like at the time, which could mean still like typing things out in Obsidian or using my reMarkable or actually analog because that process that we showed except for the plugin for reMarkable Sync, that is still going to work for OCRing like photos that I've taken out of my little travelers journal here. If you'd like to learn more about how I use AI in my note taking workflows, then check out this video because I talk all about that and different audio transcription tools that I use.