What a great hobby week. A few days ago I built a keyboard with my kiddo, and yesterday I got started on a build for myself. We built the KBD67Lite from kbdfans. While I’ve had a couple of mechanical keyboards, these were the first that I’ve built up from parts – fortunately, the kbdlite comes as a nice kit which made for a gentle introduction to lubricating stabilizers. (Which, by the way, makes a tremendous difference.)

Kiddo picked out keycaps that make this lovely gradient, and they feel really nice.

I went with gray keycaps on a white case. So far this board is a real pleasure to type on. Now that I have a good point of comparison with my Q1 board I can start to get a feel for how qualitatively different switches and keys can feel. By comparison, the Q1 is indeed a little pingy, for example, so I’m even more curious to see how some modifications to its components could feel.

After the build, I did some work in QMK to program a couple of MacOS specific layers for the KBD67Lite. Unlike the Q1, it doesn’t have a hardware mode switch, so I have to make a virtual one that lets me toggle Mac and Windows layers with a key combination. Fortunately I was familiar with working in QMK from all the screwing around I did with the vim mode I built, so it didn’t take too long to figure this out – and I’m happily typing away!

Building this kbd67lite with kiddo was a good Christmas day project. (I got one for myself, too – caps and switches should arrive tomorrow!)

Playing around with my last.fm stats Shiny app a bit more this morning, and I remembered how to get what I want out of a nested list returned from the API with only 20 minutes of cursing. Progress!

This thread of spreadsheet-based games contains a ton of inventive and fun stuff.

If vacation days are at least partly for making small color adjustments to your blog’s CSS, then I’m doing pretty good today. (Changes to my dark theme, borrowing elements from the various “pastels on dark” themes (which I think originated in TextMate?))

The first spits of rain are starting to fall outside as part of this winter storm forecast to slowly roll over us the next several days. It feels like a perfect time to curl up with coffee and books and music and …

I always like Jason Kottke’s end-of-year books recommendations. His list for this year has a few that I’ve read, a few I have wanted to read, and several that weren’t (yet) on my list.

Holiday tech support operations resume this year with setting up Dad’s 2009 MacBook Pro to migrate to my year-old model. Look at the ports on that thing!

Made one more small adjustment this morning to tuneR, adding a date range selector to limit the query. It’s fun to see how my top artists change when adjusting that window.

Up early with my coffee and the tree.