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Last week's events, 40s day & KDB Issue 13

Last week I put together some new write-ups about diodes in keyboards, keyboard related Japanese expressions and a general guide on how to turn your pencil sketch into a working keyboard: concept to reality.

The Japanese stuff may require some explanation. Ages ago I've been in Japan for a short time and started to learn this very intriguing language. After a few months I gave it up since this project would need dedication and daily immersion. The time and effort put into language learning is hard to justify when you don't need that specific language in your daily life or work.

Years later I found myself deeply involved in karate what gave a second boost to learning Japanese: by this time there was Duolingo around just like a plethora of apps to learn kanji. Still, after a few months I gave it up again.

With this background last week I stumbled upon the build logs of crkbd and Helix in Japanese and was quite surprised that with remembering only hiragana and katakana I could decypher the majority of katakana words.

That fun game resulted in the Japanese keyboard vocabulary.

KBD Issue 13. Last week I had to dig through 2577 posts on r/mk only and 40s day made my job not easier.

So the week started with 40s day - the 40th day of the year. I hoped for great projects and some build logs but the event in practice turned out to be a one-day flood of r/mk with low-effort posts. I write on a 40-one too, but honestly, this flooding made no sense at all. What was the purpose? It could have been a good opportunity to promote 40s but without context and details this turned out to be a meaningless showing-off.

In addition, because of the nature of Reddit and most people ordering subs by Hot, most posts couldn't even reach visitors. Next year, such a campaign would make more sense with fewer but more elaborated entries posted during a longer time-span.

Issue 13 of the KBD is still stuffed with great ideas though, so check it if you haven't done it yet.

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