My Battlestation

Typing out all the Harry Potter books would be crazy, right? What would be the point? Seems like a weird flex even by keyboard enthusiast standards. Yep, that's right. Typing it out once makes no sense. That's why I'm going to type out the books a few million times! For the benefit of humanity and especially of you, fellow keymap wizards. This is a demonstration of the power of alternative/custom layouts. Given the huge extent of this topic, we can barely scratch the surface here so consider this write-up a mere teaser. Imagine you are an aspiring writer with a brilliant idea, just about to start typing out your magnum opus, staring at a yet empty document on your screen. Cursor blinking, annoying orphan relatives locked up in the cupboard under the stairs. Your story, about a young boy who ends up saving the world, is quite complete. You "just" have to type out heaps of your manuscripts and notes: about 6.5 million keystrokes. Everything is prepared for the...

Figure 1: Not even all of these (mostly) KTT-made linears are the same! After all of my years of collecting, reviewing, and obsessing over switches, I can say with certainty that linear switches are the most misunderstood of all of the switch types. No, I’m not talking about mechanically either, as all of the claims of them “just going straight up and down” are somewhat kind of true. (Not too much though, don’t get that excited.) The part that is often misunderstood, though, is usually in what is being implied when people say that these switches just go straight up and down – “All linears might as well be the same.” If the title of this article didn’t make that obvious enough to you, I find that sort of idea to be completely and utterly wrong. The people who make these implications wouldn’t say that a Cherry MX Black is the same as a Novelkeys Cream switch? They also certainly wouldn’t ever claim that every Gateron-made linear is the same as every fancy TTC one out there...

I recently decided to try adding screw-in stabs to my Shift V2. As this was my first time adding screw-ins, it took me about 45 minutes to get them on the PCB. The next hour was then spent unsuccessfully trying to get the PCB to sit nicely in the top of the case. I started unscrewing some of the stabs, trying to figure out which one was the problem. I did also manage to figure out that it's best practice to have the screws a little loose when you go to pop the PCB in the case. But that only worked for four of the five stabs. The fifth stab, the Num Enter stab, would sit properly. Once I got it narrowed down to that stab, I started looking at the case itself. That's when I found the problem. There is a little post that interferes with the screw-in stab's screw (pictures included; you can see the damage from the screw being mashed into the post). I assume this is a carryover from the V1 case, for which the included PCB did not have holes for board mounted stabs. So now the questions:...