Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial
Behind the Scenes of Issue 108
Giveaway & advent calendar follow-up, vendor updates, etc.
Published December 23, 2022
Hey y'all,
Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #108), 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.
---
This is just a quick editorial today. More behind the scenes stuff in my year-end article for the advent calendar.
Happy holiday season for you, this is probably the last issue this year.
Giveaway follow-up
Still working out details with some vendors, but most of the prizes should be at the winners now (or on their way), e.g. Tyler sent me this photo with a deskmat he won:
Advent Calendar
As you may have seen, I have run out of articles for the calendar, but it's all good. I expected this, and to be honest it was a lot of work so as much as I loved reading these posts I'm also glad it's over. I'll post the remaining ones when/if they arrive.
r/mk Week of Giveaways (winter) & Drop Christmas game
Lot of opportunities to win something, right? I hope some of you had success. The second "week of giveaways" on r/mk is over, at least after banning giveaways in late 2021.
Just my two cents: the 9 day time-frame is way too long imo. Other kind of posts stand no chance, giveaways fill the hot list and generate thousands of meaningless comments. This is exactly why they were banned in the first place.
I commented on my favorite food, drink, color, animal, you name it. The most successful giveaway post scored 17K upvotes and 23K comments. Does this really make sense?
This may sound like a perfect case of sour grapes because I commented on 90+ giveaway posts without any success. :D
At least I came across some vendors missing from the vendor database so I could add a few of them.
Btw, on the last day of the Drop "12-day runup to Christmas" game I got a BOGO code: a free MT3 set. I wasn't too excited because there are no free prizes living in the EU: I have to pay about 30% (VAT & customs) even for gifts. So my first reaction was putting something in my cart to check the shipping fee (which is part of the basis of VAT/customs calculations). The process took about 3-5 minutes, but the code didn't work. The error message simply stated it's invalid.
I wasn't too upset, I don't really need another MT3 set, but thought I report the issue to Drop. The answer was the same evasive wall of text I could have expected: the code is expired and they can't do anything about it. Again, I can live without another MT3 set, but the answer was total bullshit. The time it took to enter the code after "winning" it was no more than 5 minutes.
Vendor database
- VoxelMods (US) added.
Meetup database
- Last-minute additions: Hawaii and the monthly Tiny Little Tech Shop Meetup in Jacksonville, FL (both over).
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
- A new recurring donation: Thanks Mats!
And a big shout out to everyone who supports this project regularly, recurring donations keep this project alive.
As I write it in my year-end summary, maintaining this site takes a lot of energy and time. (According to the Reddit Recap stats that's 100 hours per month on Reddit only.) If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.
---
That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Happy holiday again.
Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.
Cheers, Tamás
Published on Fri 23rd Dec 2022. Featured in KBD #108.
Related
Behind the Scenes of Issue 39
Lots of changes and developments, Issue 38 follow-up, most popular posts, to-do and priority list.
Behind the Scenes of Issue 55
Testing the Adafruit KB2040, CircuitPython and KMK. New guides. I won again. Giveaway & Issue #54 follow-up. BMC chaos.
Behind the Scenes of Issue 25
Issue 25, personal favorites, new domain coming soon, performance tweaks, issue 24 follow-up, new supporters and subscriber record.
Behind the Scenes of Issue 74
On longer format articles, 40 discount codes, keyboard lexicon update, duplex matrix cultural dissonance, Datalux acquisition, etc.