Behind the Scenes of Issue 118

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 118

TTT, new shops, meetups, in the mailbox, developments, etc.

dovenyi
Published April 3, 2023

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Hey y'all,

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #118), a weekly/fortnightly 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, subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Touch Type Tale

Ouch. I don't usually play games, in fact, I haven't played anything since Epistory (another typing game) and thought that the time when I stay up late to crush yet another evil adversary is over. But this week I got free access to Touch Type Tale – Strategy Typing (thanks Epic Games), a cool real-time strategy game developed by Pumpernickel Studio, and thanks to the mood and the unique typing control system I was completely dragged into this world for several hours if not days.

As an excuse, I changed the game language to Japanese to actually "learn" while gaming (this doesn't really work :D) and reported some bugs which rendered this particular language/input system combo almost unusable in the first days after the release. The devs fixed everything in a couple of hours so the next day I was back into fighting/typing my way through countless cities.

Pic:

I loved that you control everything by typing – from mining gold to moving troops around on the map. It really works, however, after the initial levels the whole gaming experience is one big typing frenzy (this is a compliment) while you desperately try to multitask – which may be not everyone's cup of tea, but there's a good chance fellow touch typers would enjoy it.

And there's a lot more potential in this typing control, I hope there will be other games with similar mechanisms.

If I have any complaints about TTT, it's I'd have loved an even longer campaign. Now I may try to beat all the weird dukes in the hardest "heroic" mode (which is quite challenging).

In the mailbox

Well, nothing in the mailbox this week, but I had a rather strange experience: After years of checking my local go-to classified ads sites almost on a daily basis, looking for interesting vintage keyboards, I was approached directly for the first time. I mean, a seller contacted me before listing his stuff on any site, sending me photos and asking me if I'm interested. All this because he thought his last keyboard went to the right place (to me ofc :D).

Pic: Stepped Q key

Stepped Q key

And if I was interested? Absolutely. A stepped Q key? It turned out that's something I didn't know existed but couldn't live without now. :D

Vendor database

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors:

PigModding added, and Seb offered you a 5% discount (coupon code: KBDNEWS).
mecx labs entry updated, Casey offers now a larger variety of products.
EunBu removed, the page redirected visitors to a scam site. (Thanks for reporting the issue darwin5197!)

Meetup database

New entries to the meetup database:

Vancouver MK Meetup, Apr 8.
The very first meetup in Lyon: Mechanical Keyboards Lyon #1, on Apr 8 as well. (Thanks Rudy!)

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.

Donations

New donations came from Karl Berggren and Lim Soon Nicholai Sim. Thanks everyone!
And thanks a lot to all the supporters who set up recurring donations earlier.

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.

And many thanks to everyone who supported this project in any of its development stages.

Developments

New developments:

Extending the cache system: meetups, split database opening page (I know, this would deserve a full overhaul – and a major update).
Now that the two newsletters have been merged and thanks to the markdown-compatibility of Buttondown, I hope I can come up with a script to generate the whole newsletter on a single keypress, saving me about 15-30 minutes per week which I could use for more productive stuff. Keyboard stuff ofc. :D

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That's all for today. Thanks for checking by. As always: Keep learning and building!

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Mon 3rd Apr 2023. Featured in KBD #118.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial