Behind the Scenes of Issue 107

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 107

Giveaway & advent calendar follow-up, vendor & discount updates, small developments, dark mode test, etc.

dovenyi
Published December 16, 2022

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Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #107), 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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Advent Calendar & Giveaway status

Calendar: Editing, uploading and formatting articles of the advent calendar take most of my time these days. Sadek Baroudi helps me with proofreading (thanks!). On the other hand, I may run out of these posts in a few days.

Giveaway: I have all the winners, all their shipping info was sent to the 50 sponsors in the recent days. I got some follow-up questions from some vendors, e.g. I'm waiting for a few people to choose the design of the deskmat they won, so that slows down the process, but otherwise I hope everything will be arranged in the upcoming few days. 80% of the sponsors confirmed they received the list of winners and/or have shipped the prizes already. I haven't received any feedback from 10 shops though, so that will be another round.

Vendor database

MIKIT (Hong Kong) added.
KeebHub added.
Velocifire (China) added.
Sage Crow Design (UK) added.

Just arrived: The coupon no longer works at mechboards.co.uk at checkout. (They stopped providing coupons because they were uploaded to coupon sharing sites). Just received the heads-up, give me some time to update the site accordingly.

In the mailbox

I got a bunch of low-pro keycap samples from splitkb and moergo: POM MBKs and MCCs with homing and convex variants.

Pic:

My first impression: I love this material. :D I'll take some shots later and do a comparison with other caps. Right now we have the ugliest winter weather here with almost no natural light so I either set up a proper home studio or wait for some sun.

Meetup database

New England Keyboards Meet added (Dec 18). Thanks Cody!
NYC meetup updated with gallery.

As always, this meetup database is both a calendar and an archive so feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Donors

No new donors this week.

Thanks everyone who supports this project regularly, recurring donations keep this project alive.

Maintaining kbd.news takes a lot of energy and time. If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Small developments

back to top button – OK, a keyboard enthusiast simply hits Ctrl+Home, but for mere mortals there's a button now. (And your hand may rest on the mouse anyway.)
I started to reimplement dark mode. For now there's a button concealed in the footer, at the very bottom of the page. I'm still working on some pages where hardcoded backgrounds have to be replaced. I tried to recolor all the eye-burning buttons and divs but there are still some rogue colors here and there. Give me some more time to fix that. That's why this feature is almost hidden in the footer so only ardent readers who get to this point of my weekly write-up will know about it. ;) Anyway, feel free to try dark mode, I've been using it for a few days. (Btw, it's implemented via localStorage, that's why it may flicker on pageload. I'll do the cookie part later to fix this.)

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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 16th Dec 2022. Featured in KBD #107.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial