Behind the Scenes of Issue 96

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 96

Quick news, Seeed competition, cake day inventory, updates on donations (26%), vendors, meetups, developments.

dovenyi
Published September 24, 2022

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 150K readers.

Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #96), 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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A newsletter on Saturday?! Yeah, sorry, I could probably met the Friday deadline if I'd spent the whole day with it, but eventually I decided to let it go and finish this issue at my own pace.

Donations

Thanks to Centorek's Alessio for his donation, and also to Skyler Thuss for setting up a recurring donation! And of course many thanks to all of you guys & gals who keep supporting this project.

Btw, after 75% of the month has passed, my donation meter stands at 26% of my longtime goal (or 53% of my short-term target). If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Quick news

I've updated the Kretsträd post with the repo which has been shared by wj-zhe. (Thanks for the heads-up Orange1232!)
An update on the MTNU keycap profile by Matt3o (related post).
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of ThinkPad, David Hill (Lenovo VP, former IBM designer and executive director of design, and kbd.news follower on Twitter ;)) talks about the interconnected nature of design and brand.
s-ol (hex caps and boards) has reorganized his git structure so some urls may be broken (related post).
PRK 0.9.18 is out – with RGB matrix, piezo sounder and Music Markup Language support (related post).
Monkeytype 1.16.1 released (changes).
Floppy disks may have 4 years left. On a similar note: Floppy Disk Museum on a floppy disk.

Seeed MK Competition update

Seeed's Amanda got back to me with updates on the competition.

So far, halfway into the contest, the number of applications stood at 68 a few days ago, which exceeds their initial expectations by far. From these 68 entries, Seeed sponsored more than 30 projects from all around the world, and more than 20 applicants indicated that they learned about the keyboard contest event through KBD.NEWS.

Thanks everyone who applied and referenced kbd.news in the application form! This may pay out in the long run.

E.g. I learned that Seeed is working on some keyboard hardware projects. ;)

Belated cake day inventory

When you're supposed to clean the house, your busy wife arrives unexpectedly, and she finds you in the attic arranging keyboards on the carpet.

And instead of filing for divorce, she stands dumbstruck in the door for a few seconds, then without the slightest sign of sarcasm, with honest appreciation in her eyes, she finally says: "Wow, like in a museum".

Pic:

Btw, this photo was shot while I was balancing on a ladder with shaky hands leaning out into the void. Next year I'll be in real trouble without a crane or something similar…

(I also tried to affix my camera to the ceiling and use self-timer to leave me a few seconds to hastily leave the scene – but it didn't really work.)

You can find the detailed list of keyboards in the photo in this post, and there was a discussion in this thread on r/mk.

Vendor database

NZ Caps added.
Modern Coup has had to adjust prices and can no longer offer a discount. Coupon removed.
CENTOREK started to ship to some countries outside of the European Economic Area (USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Meetup database

Chicago meetup added.

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.

Small developments

This time I had to update the meetup script to properly handle events with unknown fees. (I mean, when it's known there will be a ticket and entry fee, but no prices are available yet.)

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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 Sat 24th Sep 2022. Featured in KBD #96.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial