Blog/Second iPad Impressions

This post is some updates to my previous post Blog/First iPad Impressions, after a bit less of a month of almost daily usage.

General updates

So regarding my previous complaints:

• June 18th, 2023
  • I've found the GoodNotes app, which has a fair price (~11€) and bought it.
    • it's nice, has a nice set of features
    • i installed it on my iphone, but couldn't get my notebooks synced, maybe it needs some more attention
  • Today i charged my Apple Pencil and went to the office. When I got there the pencil wouldn't work (wouldn't pair) and no amount of troubleshooting helped. I only managed to get it working once home (and charged it a bit more):
    • no diagnostics whatsoever, it seemed "just broken"
    • really disappointing, doesn't seem reliable/trustworthy

Everything old is new again, and some old friends (more updates)

So I was browsing the GoodNotes store for agenda template, but no template was really convincing (not to mention the ~10€ price).

I had a flashback and remembered about when I was a student and would print my agendas... And remembered about the Philofaxy blog.

I downloaded the "Week on two pages tm with journal 5 line" template, and after some light customisation (mainly removing weeks up to mid june and signing the front page) I have a digital agenda that looks like this and is also a throwback to the past for me.

I should write a page of praise about Philofaxy. Ten years and counting, and they still produce some really useful stuff, for free.

Maybe I'll include screenshots, one day.

Reality checks

So this section is about comparing the initial goals with what has been my experience so far.

So initially i wanted to perform essentially three tasks:

• read ebooks
• remotely connect to resources at home
• take notes

Reading eBooks

I tried reading ebooks in ePub format so far, and just tried opening a pdf for a quick tour of the built-in pdf reader.

The built-in books app is okay-ish, although it seems its developers mostly cared about it being pretty rather than functional. One thing i don't like is that if you try and read an ebook in landscape mode you'll be forced in two columns mode.

The built-in PDF reader also looks pretty basic: beyond some simple annotatios and maybe signing (this seems to be the gimmick) you can't do very much.

For further PDF reading capabilities GoodNotes seems to be of much better value.

Remotely connect to resources at home

So to on this matter, some additional context: i have my own OpenVPN-based vpn at home, and i have my private CA for SSL certificates I use within my LAN/VPN.

Using the OpenVPN client went really smoothly, no particular deal (except maybe getting the ovpn file onto the iPad, initially).

To get my private CA root certificate to be trusted, it took a bit more effort and I had to look some tutorials up, but I guess it makes sense to make it harder for random generic users to install an additional root certificate, given the potential security risks involved.

To remotely connect to resources at home via ssh, this is where things get sad. The most famous app in this arena seems to be Termius, which laughably wanths 10$/month to go beyond the basic features.

Termius also would want to store my stuff in some cloud (big no).

The biggest annoyance is the constant upselling attempts: some features are only available in the paid version, but the relative buttons are not grayed out, meaning very often I'll try and use a feature and find out it's not really available. I'm okay with having features disabled in the free version, but buttons for the unavailable feature should be greyed out completely and the app should not try and fool me into buying the paid version every time.

I've found iSH which is not really a connection manager but an Alpine Linux chroot virtual machine. It seems to work surprisingly well and i can do connection management on my own anyway (a couple of scripts, I guess). Alpine Linux is not my favourite distro but as a dumb terminal it will do.

Taking notes

Ok here the iPad really shines, because the GoodNotes app works incredibly well.

I'm completely satisfied, however i should notice that the real value is in the GoodNotes app, and the rest of the iPad is essentially overhead.

Companion hardware

In this section i want