Justyna Dorsz

Tools

Grammar

I struggle with grammar, so I’ve bought LanguageTool, which is a tool for finding grammar and style errors in your writing.

LanguageTool is less know that Grammarly, which you might have heard of. I was considering buying Grammarly, but found out that there are some privacy issues — Grammarly stores and have the right to view all your text! LanguageTool doesn’t do that.

Over the next few days, I will go through my posts — a few hundred of them — and fixing all the mistakes that LanguageTool finds.

Edit(July 9, 2021): Decided to refund LanguageTool. It didn’t catch most of the mistakes in my writing. I was within 14 days from the purchase and they refunded me with no problems.

reMarkable 2 Review

I bought a reMarkable 2 tablet in January 2021, and I’ve been using it every day since then. It’s one of the most useful devices I own. I use it more than I use my phone. It’s always next to me when I work, and I often take it with me wherever I go. But no device is perfect. Here are my notes after 4 months of using reMarkable 2.

What exactly did I buy?

I bought:

  • reMarkable 2 tablet – $399
  • Grey marker – $49
  • Folio – Polymer weave – $99

The pen is not included with the tablet by default. When you are buying a tablet, you should select a marker too, unless you plan to use the tablet for reading only. There are two marker options: gray, and black. The main difference between the two is that the black one has a built-in eraser.

Optionally, you can buy a folio.

reMarkable 2 – Good
  • Great for jotting down notes and random thoughts during the day. I used to have hundreds of paper notes on my desk, and it was a mess. Now I only have my reMarkable.
  • Good for sketching. It’s easy to export a page to a PNG file, so I can quickly turn my drawings into designs and submit them to online stores.
  • I am more productive! Having my to-do list on my computer is not ideal — I use both my screens for work, and so I need to switch apps to see my to-do list. Now that I keep my to-do list on my reMarkable 2 tablet I can have it always open and on hand. Whenever I start to procrastinate, it’s enough to just look at my reMarkable — showing my next task — to get back to work.
reMarkable 2 – Bad
  • By default, each page has one layer. You can add more layers if you want. For example, you can have one layer with the initial sketch, and then another layer where you add notes. That’s all good. However, a page with more than one layer is very slow. You might not notice it when you just draw or write. But when you try to erase something on a page that has more layers, you need to wait a few seconds. That’s inconvenient. A few times, I thought my reMarkable froze. At this point, a document with two layers is unusable, and so I only ever use one layer.
  • The marker gets dirty easily and is very difficult to clean up. So difficult that despite trying various methods, I didn’t manage to clean it. I ended up having to scratch off the marker’s coating with sandpaper. You could maybe avoid this problem if you bought the black marker instead of the gray one.
  • No backlight. You can’t use it when it’s dark unless you have an additional light source.
  • It’s fast enough for writing and sketching on a page, but switching between pages in a notebook takes a moment.
One of my sketches
Other notes
  • It’s black and white only. It would be great if there was at least one other color for highlighting and important comments. If there’s ever a reMarkable 3 with at least one other color, I will buy it.
  • On their website, they claim that the reMarkable 2 battery can last up to 2 weeks of moderate use. I use it a lot, and I need to charge it every night.
  • The marker has a tip that wears down with use. When you buy a marker, you get 10 tips (one in the marker and 9 spare tips). When the tip gets blunt, you need to swap it for a new one. I need to swap tips every 3 or 4 weeks. The good news is that you can buy additional tips on their website, and they cost about $1.5 each.
A sketch that was later turned into a t-shirt design.

There’s a 30-day guarantee — you can buy and test reMarkable 2 for 30 days and if you don’t like, return it. But be prepared that you will want to keep it.

You can buy your reMarkable 2 tablet here.

My favorite tool is $40 off

Guys, reMarkable 2, which is amazing and I use it ALL THE TIME is now $40 off. Here is a link.

If you are unsure whether you want it, you can order it, test it, and return it for free within 30 days. But be prepared that you will fall in love with your reMarkable 2 and will not want to return it. Ever.

I use it for my to-do lists, random notes, writing blog posts, and for sketching. Here is my reMarkable 2 Review.

My reMarkable, with gray book folio and gray marker

What tools do I use?

There are 2 things that a designer needs: a graphic tablet and a graphics editor. Here’s what I use:

GRAPHIC TABLET

I bought my graphic tablet 9 years ago and it’s been serving me well. It’s a Wacom Intuos. The one that I have is no longer available, but you can get a new version.

Wacom Intuos Pro (Source: wacom.com)

If you can afford it, then it’s best to buy Wacom Intuos Pro because those have a Touch Ring which is very useful to change your brush size.

A more affordable alternative is a Huion Graphic Tablet which I also recommend. I haven’t used it but I’ve only heard good things about it from other artists.

You can also buy a used tablet but keep in mind that the pen is the most vulnerable and easily breakable part. So even if a used tablet works fine, it’s likely you will need a new pen.

GRAPHICS EDITOR (Painting Program)

I use Adobe Photoshop for which I pay 12€ monthly. It’s not much and I think it’s worth it.

There are free alternatives: Krita and Gimp. If you are just starting out, then try either one of them. Personally, I would go with Krita because my brother uses it and likes it. Anything you want to draw you can draw in either of them.

Best way to take notes

There is one app that I use every day, many times a day — Roam Research. And I can’t overstate how vital this tool is for me. Roam is a note-taking tool but on their website, they advertise it as “a tool for thought” and they might be right. It certainly feels that the way I see connections between topics changed since I started using it.

I’ve tried many other apps for taking notes like Evernote and Notion. I had high hopes at first but inevitably I stopped using them after weeks or even days. A note talking tool must be, first and foremost, easy to use. If there’s a barrier to taking a note, let’s say if you have to open the right directory and find the correct file, open it, and then add your new note — then it’s unlikely you will take as many notes as you could.

And if we don’t take notes, we forget.

To take a note you open Roam and you already have an empty page with today’s date and you start writing — that simple. In Evernote and Notion, you can create new content fairly easily at first too but after a while you spend more time organizing your notes into hierarchical structures that those apps enforce and less time actually writing.

Creating a link to another note in Roam
In Roam you put brackets around a phrase and this creates a page and links to that page.

This is not a tutorial to Roam, by the way, because Roam doesn’t need one. The only thing that you need to know to get started is that you can put any phrase in [[brackets]] and it automatically creates a page and links to it.

And this is how you create a link to another note in Notion:

Creating a link to another note in Notion
Are you serious, Notion?

If you want to use Notion then don’t even look in the direction of Roam —once you see how easy to use Roam is you, won’t be able to switch to any other tool.

I like Roam so much that I recommend it to all my friends but it’s a surprisingly tough sell, maybe because it’s so different than what we are used to in note-taking apps.

I use Roam but there’s also a completely free alternative to Roam – RemNote.