Quick weekly BTS #2023/29

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Quick weekly BTS #2023/29

Quick news, how many boards do I have, new donations, VC-20 in the mailbox. Contemplating about layout design. Shops & discounts.

dovenyi
Published July 21, 2023

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 140K readers.

Hey y'all,

Again, I post this half-finished and will make changes and add more photos later, so another quick weekly summary. Take this format and workflow as the summer mode, and if it's too messy for your taste, get back in a couple of hours. I just want to keep up with the strict weekly pace because of the upcoming meetups.

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Welcome back for a quick weekly recap and behind-the-scenes write-up. If you are new to kbd.news, 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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For your ears

There's a music festival in my city these days and as this post goes online, Nick Johnston is on stage holding a guitar clinic. Years ago I listened to his space rock a lot. Check it out while reading:

Quick links

Reading for the weekend:

Bonsai C3 is back, with an exclusive price for you. We exchanged some mails with David (CustomMK) about the microcontroller market, pricing and how to announce this restock. Thanks for the insight and the coupon code!
Corsair is acquiring "certain assets" from Drop.

“Personalized Keyboards that can be modified by the consumer is one of the fastest growing trends in the gaming peripheral space. Drop has proven to be one of the leaders in this space and with Corsair’s global footprint, we expect to significantly grow the Drop brand worldwide” – Andy Paul, Founder and CEO of CORSAIR.

Initially, it was not clear if the deal involved geekhack (acquired by Drop in 2018) so I reached out to HoffmanMyster for clarification:

"All that is known at this point is that there will be no changes to geekhack for the foreseeable future" – HoffmanMyster.

Ofc it's hard to say if that might eventually change, but rest assured he is incredibly invested in geekhack so will be advocating for it whenever possible.

Ryan Schenk's Tern, a Hummingbird variant, and Dwctor's Kaly42 inspired by a caliper(?) made it to the front page.
Let's call this 24-key split Nydas after Andy, an Australian data engineer who enjoys making sub-40% custom keyboards.
Amtelco KB163 posted by Argan12345. A huge battleship with Cherry Blacks, used by call center folks. Video by Click and Thock.
Still too small? What about 170 keys? A bespoke Genovation K170 posted by piccino. ("My colleagues make fun of me, but I'm 10 times more efficient.")
Skywatch is an interesting monoblock orthoish split with Pimoroni trackball and display, designed by celikozkan. Just a photo at the moment, may feature it later if I have more info about this project. Özkan told me he will share all the files.
SpUnLy58 is a splayed unibody by Giraffasax with custom MBK caps. To be pushed to Github after rerouting.

Donations

Thanks to macakeg for his donation, and Anatolii Smolianinov for setting up a recurring donation!
And many thanks to everyone who supported this project thus far, especially for regular supporters.
If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

How many keyboards do I have!?

I had a strange feeling last weekend: it came to me that I might be closing in on the 100 keyboard mark. Or have I already exceeded it? Hard to tell without a decent registry, so I opened up a blank spreadsheet and started to list all the vintage boards I've acquired and contemporary ones I've received during these past five years.

It will take some time to complete the register because I have all my boards spread over my university office and various places at home, most of them residing in the attic where temperatures are unbearable these days. (I may move them to the cellar for a completely different reason though: the war in Ukraine. More about this maybe next time.)

Many of you've seen this from last August. No idea how I could shot a similar photo this year:

Pic:

In the spreadsheet I try to go into (probably unnecessary) details: listing dates of the purchase, payment, delivery, etc., also who I bought the particular keyboard from (with contacts), and even the circumstances of the purchase. And prices! Those dreaded prices, listing shipping fees, VAT, customs separately – I'm already scared to see the final sum after processing just about 30 boards. I'm working my way backwards, can clearly remember the first ones, but there's a big black hole in the middle. And btw this subproject involves a lot of research since my emails have changed in the meantime, product listings are not available on ebay and all the similar local marketplaces after all these years, and some of the purchases were made in the ancient face to face way, without any digital trace.

BTC

Another behind-the-scenes snippet for you: I'm struggling with retraining my muscle memory to markdown, a relatively "new" markup for me because I've been using some pretty ancient markup to format these posts on kbd.news – inherited from the early days of Wikipedia. Yep, that means I've been using the old formatting for probably almost two decades in various personal projects of mine, so no wonder that I have a hard time to abandon this custom.

And yep, I just type out links and formatting in plain text in a general sql editor, there's no admin interface or gui or whatsoever behind this blog. (If this sounds pretty steep and crazy, then let me tell you about one of my acquaintances who uses the SQL command prompt for everything…)

That said, I could happily live with the old markup for another two decades were it not the newsletter – which uses markdown, so to be able to copy text between the two I realized I better standardize the way I handle stuff, especially links.

In the mailbox

I'm not very proud of this purchase. Not at all. I paid much more money for this ugly yellow Commodore VC-20 than I panned, and it turned out to be much more yellow than expected based on the photos.

Pic:

Btw, the VC-20 is the German version of the VIC-20. If you know some German, and know that V is pronounced F there, and also know what VIC pronounced with F would mean in German, you know why it was rebranded for this market. ;)

Pic:

Another thing I learned is that the very first C64 version used this exact same breadbin case (which is slightly higher and bulkier than later cases), and also the same brown function keys. One of those rare early models is on sale now and it seems it will be sold for an irrationally high price.

Pic: I'm not sure you can fathom the sheer bulkiness of this thing: 9 cm to the keytops

I'm not sure you can fathom the sheer bulkiness of this thing: 9 cm to the keytops

Meetup database

Upcoming meetups, new entries and updates to the database of keyboard meetups:

DFW TexMech Meetup this Saturday (22 July).
Madison Mechanical Keyboard Meetup – tomorrow as well!
The 3rd Meetup-BR was held in Sao Paulo, on 15th July. Learned about it after the event.
Another missed event was the 3rd YugoMK Meetup in Beograd, Serbia. Check out the photos and videos.

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.

Vendor database

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

Added Skree but have just contacted him for more info.
Mekanisk opened a shop in Germany. 1-3 day(s) fast, affordable shipping in the EU.

Logical layout design

WPM

I don't think chasing and comparing WPMs makes much sense. I mean, you can't really replicate the sterile laboratory environment of an easy 15 sec + common 200 English words run in a real-life situation with punctuation, numbers, symbols, thinking about what to write and how to phrase. Can you?

That said, I could use some kind of average WPM as indirect measure for demonstrating different aspects of keymap optimization. I tried to get some advanced stats from Monkeytype's Jack to figure out a more realistic "average WPM" without much success, so here are my numbers:

Pic: My personal bests after three attempts in each category

My personal bests after three attempts in each category

This is almost as scientific as it gets since I don't usually use monkeytype so the personal bests you see in each category above are the results of three trials made per each setting, all this with my barely used account, not even meeting the criteria to be placed on the leaderboard (2 hours typing would be needed for that).

No surprise that WPMs seem to correlate with the length of typing sessions (either time or words). Negatively ofc. There's a 20% drop in my typing speed when comparing short bursts vs "longer" sessions – and it was still just 2 mins.

Hold on, it gets even worse. I tried to observe myself and made some more really, honestly, cruelly realistic measurements in real-life situations, and my gross WPMs (total time spent to finish an email/code divided by total character count) were somewhere in the 10-20 WPM range if approached in this ultrarealistically honest way…

So does it make any sense to look at WPMs? Well, only in certain rare cases, and if you know what those numbers mean – just like with any statistics.

Keyloggers vs texts

Some thoughts about the usefulness of keyloggers vs compiling your corpus based on preexisting texts like your diary, outgoing emails, comments, posts, etc:

I've always thought about the keylogger approach as something that may be just a little bit too much for compiling a personal corpus: not just because of the security concerns but also because these logs include all your typing errors, which I deemed practically impossible to fix. (You hit the wrong key, delete it in one of the dozen ways I can think of, press the right key. Registering backspace/del/whatever does make sense, but not the original wrong keypress – and there is no easy and 100% fix for this, believe me, I tried sanitize such logs.) Monkeytype or gaming sessions may pollute the log too, completely messing up the stats.

So to finetune my layout and to test my engine I use longer texts, e.g. this week I've put a bunch of my emails into a large textfile – the corpus is now worth of a thick book, length-wise. It's more than enough to do language statistics on and also to use it as a base for layout optimization.

I did the language stats, fed them into the model, and it returned some promising layouts with great stats and improvements in all the relevant indices. However, the very first thing I wanted to type out tricked me: my name.

It turned out that I don't really type out my name in longer texts. In emails I have a signature set up, and don't type it in posts, articles, comments either. Fun fact: I found it typed out only four times in all the mails I've sent out in the past 8 months (referring not to myself but to my family or family members).

Nevertheless, I do have to frequently use it in all kinds of online forms (signing up, logging in, purchasing something). Your username may be your real name or can include part of it. Your email addresses? Pretty much the same. Emails of your family members? May contain your surname too. So it seems I use it often enough to care about but not in any of the stuff I considered when compiling my personal corpus. As a result, the optimization model can't take it into consideration in any way.

In this particular respect, the keylogger approach would work better – although it has it's own serious flaws.

Developments

New developments:

Fixed the meetup map when cached… Also some minor fixes like plural title when there are multiple videos available.
LLD stats, scripts, articles in the making
Vendor database maintenance

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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 Fri 21st Jul 2023. Featured in KBD #128.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial