Behind the Scenes of Issue 93

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 93

Monthly donation results, mini meetup with MrZealot, quick news, new vendors & coupons, meetups.

dovenyi
Published September 2, 2022

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 100K readers.

Hey y'all,

What a thrilling week full of odd encounters! :D 30% beauties, a 18-key abomination which tempts me to ditch some keys from my layout, and there are several crazy projects on the way I'm not even allowed to announce yet. ;)

In addition, I also met MrZealot aka Dénes "Ergogen" Bán for the first time IRL, and we had a great conversation.

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #93), a weekly roundup of this DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi – that's me. If you are new to this, you can read how this started out and what this is all about nowadays. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Quick news & links:

The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers on newyorker.com.
Dilemma officially released by Quentin (yesterday). I can't see any changes since I featured it last week.

Monthly donation report

As already indicated, I will regularly review the monthly donations and compare the sum to the amount of time I put in this project.

All this to evaluate if I should ditch some features to spare some time for other hobbies, projects, myself, and my family – or to press the pedal to the metal and take kbd.news to the next level.

August result: 30.5% of my monthly goal received in donations.

Not bad at all, I expected less. And I'm more interested in the trend rather than in the exact sum.

Btw, this is a mid-term goal which was conservatively set to half of what I'd earn if I'd spent the same amount of time with my other long-time hobby… :D

One-dollar donations

On a similar note: If you consider supporting this project, please don't send $1. Wait some time and send $2 instead. ;)

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for even the smallest support, but PayPal deducts more than 50% in fees from $1 donations.

So especially setting up a $1 recurring donation doesn't make much sense. You spend 12x1=12USD in a year and I receive $5.7 eventually.

In this case it's better if you donate $6 once a year and we are at about the same level of support.

Or sending the $12 at once means I receive about $11 instead of $5.7.

A weekend in Szeged

Last weekend I visited Szeged, a beautiful city in Southern Hungary, close to the Serbian and Romanian border.

It's famous for a lot of things from a spicy fish soup to Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, but most notably it's the home city of MrZealot, creator or Ergogen. :D

I hit him up out of the blue, we hastily arranged a meeting, and had a great conversation – first time IRL. It's incredible how two introverted sociopathic nerds can talk about their shared hobby for hours.

Pic: Yours truly and MrZealot

Yours truly and MrZealot

Szeged is also home to possibly the largest collection of retro computers in the region, at least of those I'm aware of, but the exhibition was closed at the time of my visit… Aaargh!

4 years on Reddit

The day I discovered mechanical keyboards and r/mk was the exact day I signed up for Reddit so this means my reddit cake day indicates I'm four year long in this hobby.

I wanted to redo my cake day inventory from last year, but I totally forgot about this anniversary.

Maybe next week, however, the collection has probably doubled and a similar photo shoot will be a real challenge now with regards to both logistics and ceiling height. :D

Vendor database

New shops/discounts:

clickeys.nl added, and Sander was kind enough to offer you a €5 discount on your first order.
MajorKB added, and Alex offered you a 5% discount (KBDNEWS). He has a temporary WELCOME2MKB code with $3.00 off as well, so do the math which one works better for you depending on your shopping cart.

Meetup database

I think of this meetup database both as a calendar and an archive so I try to update recent events with galleries, videos, etc.

I'm not going to report all the changes here but as always, feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Unfortunately, there's no way I can keep an eye on all the obscure Discord channels these meetups are cooked up in, but that's why it's great to have 70K+ visitors and 2,500 newsletter subscribers who keep me informed. Isn't it? ;)

Donors

There's a new supporter on board who set up a recurring donation but doesn't want his name to be published. Thanks mate!

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That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Fri 2nd Sep 2022. Featured in KBD #93.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial