Weeknotes 3–4
The most notable thing I did was make a new theme. Other than that, I built a new keyboard, am designing a keyset, and am still playing a lot of Destiny.
Tumblr
I made a new blog theme, which you can see on my blog here. I used to do this back in the day (it’s my web design origin story) but haven’t for a few years out of disinterest and frustration with the cumbersome process. I banged this out over the weekend and kept it simple so I would actually finish it.
Desktop view.
Mobile views. I left all of the phone UI intact, for the true mobile browsing experience. Tumblr is very insistent that you use their app. I wonder if blogs on their own domain have these disruptions?
The process for this was silly, as is the tumblr theme ecosystem in general. I wrote most of the markup and styling up in a static HTML file, and then moved it over to Tumblr’s build-in theme customizer to insert the block tags (like {block:Posts}{/block:Posts} and stuff like that). The customizer is exactly as it was three years ago: slow to load, buggy to render, and still has a horrible syntax highlighting palette. I thought that porting things over and inserting tags would be fast, but it ended up taking as long as it did to write up the static code to begin with because of the slow loading and bugs. Ah, never change Tumblr.
I referenced a previous theme of mine to see how I did the markup, and there was a couple of times where I thought, why did I do this? at something that looked silly. Then I “fixed” it in my new theme and realized that I did the silly thing because it was a workaround for something nonsensical about Tumblr’s code to begin with. I wish that there was more investment into the development experience, since this is such a fun and low-friction environment for people to learn.
I would like to clean this theme up and publish it to the Theme Garden soon. I don’t really know if anyone checks that anymore—the sorting is weird, the collections have stayed the same for the past four years or something, and barely anyone installs my themes anymore—but just creating and putting something out into the world is nice.
Planck
I built Planck keyboard! This is a 40% ortholinear keyboard: it’s got 40% of the keys of a full-size board, and the keys are arranged in a grid (ortholinear).
Drop + OLKB Planck keyboard (high-profile, black) with GMK Olivia++ keycaps and Kiwi switches.
This was an easy build, and there was a helpful tutorial video that walked through all of the steps. I haven’t gotten around to customizing the keymap yet since it’s not compatible with VIA, which is the program I’ve used before.
A Planck is about the same size as a Nintendo Switch.
Black PCB with gold accents.
Inserting Kiwi switches into the steel plate. I had exactly 48 switches left to fill out this board.
I opted for this layout because the larger spacebar configuration would have required modifying and assembling stabilizers, which I didn't want to do.
The finished board. I later swapped out the quotation mark keycap on the right side with a black keycap. The bottom row has lots of arrow keys because they were the only keycaps I had that would fit.
The middle keys on the bottom row are flipped because it's more comfortable for my thumbs to hit #flippedspacebargang
Keyset
Relatedly, I am working on a keyset! This tends to happen when you spend too much time around mechanical keyboards. We’ll see how this goes! Here is a work-in-progress preview of a snek:
Extreme filtering provided by huji app.
Destiny
I am still playing a lot of Destiny 2. My brain is very consumed by the process of shooting things and collecting items. This is, like, the only thing I care about.
My current character.