Behind the Scenes of Issue 124

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 124

Lots of quick news, a few days off, new shops, discounts, meetups, etc.

dovenyi
Published June 5, 2023

Would you like to contribute to this year's MK Advent Calendar? Here are the guidelines for authors, along with last year's edition for reference.

Hey y'all,

As indicated earlier, I was unavailable for a couple of days, without internet nor cellphone signal most of the time. Feel free to ping me if you think I've missed something important in the meantime!

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Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #124), 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, subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Here are some projects which didn't make it to this issue but are worth checking out anyway:

Quick links

MTNU pre-order announced by Matt3o and GMK_Andy (here). As you probably know, this is the new mid-height spherical sculpted profile. The spherical Cherry? A lower profile MT3? Well, I'll try to cover this in detail, but there are no photos yet and I wasn't sure I could add anything new to the regular updates and announcements already made. Reached out to Matteo to inquiry if he has anything to say what hasn't been told already:

There's a lot more I want to say especially about ergonomics. I'm very invested in trying to make the keycap shape/angles/size right but what people often ask is just "more colors!" – Matt3o.

So stay tuned. :)

The Killer Whale posted by Hayashi Taro is a real killer. Unfortunately, I don't have more info on this one.
I love this WIP split by cslimma/mecx too.
ErgoThing by Durza777 – with flipping thumb clusters à la Moonlander.
Frandestein – a compact split with magnets by FranDes.
Waiting for more resources on the Samara by louckousee.
Oops! – an all-1.25u meme layout by quirk.
OkSet6700 keeps customizing his chair-mounted setup.

A few days off

I hope I haven't missed anything important while hiking with my family in the Carpathians last weekend. One of the many things I love about this area is that you can run into abandoned gothic ruins in the wilderness, e.g. this monastery dating back to the 1300s.

Pic: Poor man's Angkor Wat

Poor man's Angkor Wat

What's cool about this is that even the "graffities" and name tags are age-old, predating the very first mechanical typewriters – to get back to keyboards with a far-fetched plot twist.

Pic: 1800

1800

Vendor database

New shops and updates to the database of keyboard vendors this week:

Now that Simon launched this cool keycap customization service I featured here, I've added FK Custom to the vendor database. Use this link for a 15% discount! (You can't enter the code manually during the checkout yet.)
As reported by Heather, Pulling Keys' discount is now 5% on all orders, not just certain items.

Meetup database

New entries and updates to the database of keyboard meetups:

Orlando MechKeys Meetup (Jun 24) added.
There was a meetup in Puerto Rico (May 27) but I learned about it too late.

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

New donation came from: TS. Thank you!
And after we had a good chat and I posted the FalbaTech interview, Jan surprised me with an unexpected donation. Thanks a bunch!
As usual, many thanks to the regular donors plus everyone who supported this project in any of its development stages.

Maintaining this site takes much more energy and time than my fulltime job does. It really does. (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.

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

Until next time, Tamás

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Published on Mon 5th Jun 2023. Featured in KBD #124.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial