That’s the Phase65 that ran like 2 years back.
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@Wooden-Toilet You flushed 
@pixelpusher’s dreams straight down your drain… 
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You’re right lol I shoulda stopped it at Phase One 65 
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So little information about it but it was apparently very expensive and had some questionable design choices in the end. Love the idea of it though. 
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Has anyone ever run into any issues with the ball-catch case structure on the Neo 80 or Neo Ergo? I’m curious to hear how that has worked over time and if it has ever started to lose its grip in any way.
With such a simple assembly process, the Neo Ergo strikes me as an ideal switch tester board.
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Yes! I’ve generally been keeping my eye out for the ideal switch-testing workhorse, and in my mind it’s something pretty darn close to this.
- A layout on the small side but not tiny
- Hot-swap of course
- Easy to open and close quickly
- Durable against repeat openings and switch installations
The ball-catches are something I’m definitely curious about - I feel like pairing those with some magnetic pins and some kind of hardy plate would make for a great testing board.
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This is exactly what I’m looking for too. I’ve considered the couple boards that have rare earth magnetic enclosures, but I feel like they’re still susceptible to popping open in my messenger bag, whereas the ball-catch method seems a bit more robust.
Good point on the plate durability. I’m thinking aluminum would be the safest bet, but PC or FR4 could probably be sturdy enough too.
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I’ve actually worn out an FR4 plate. Not completely - it’s still technically usable - but the clips at the front and back hardly engage on most switches, with some falling right out. I still use that board, but it has a more fresh plate now.
I’m considering some kind of steel? 
Might sound goofy but I’d like if I could run my whole collection through the one plate without too much change. For science, of course.
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I’ve been using tape to tighten up loose FR4 plate slots.
Some wear out faster than others.
Some switches wear out plates faster than others.
Hotswap Blues.
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I’m kind of impressed!
The only steel plates I have are the ones that came with my Planck and Preonic and they’ve destroyed more switches than any other plate I’ve ever used. Not sure how much of that is the material or too-tight tolerances.
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Anyone here good with Blogs?
I want to start a Blog similar to ThereminGoat or SwitchOddities, just showing off my weird Switch Collection or Vintage Boards/Switches and random keyboard bits and infos. I asked on the SwitchModders discord before, and they recommended SquareSpace, if i remember right.
I’ve Previously only worked with Blogspot before, but that was… 15 years ago or something, so i’m sure a lot has changed since then.
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Anyone recognize this spring?
It’s the stock spring for Gateron Pro Ultra Glory Red. It’s a switch that’s been growing on me bc of the spring which looks at a glance like a typical 20mm single-stage but feels really nice.
While not as top-heavy as typical multi-stage springs, it has this very slight bump-like feel about 1/3 way down that feels different from extruding bump but more like buckling. Multi-stage’s bump feels very mild version of like tactiles with bump at the top. This one does not.
By the clean look, it looks like Korean steel but all 20mm+ springs known to be made with Korean steel has more sparse coil than this one.
there are a lot of options, squarespace is notoriously terrible as are other blog-in-a-box providers (wix, etc) who lock you into their service and provide minimal or no export options should you tire of them.
Wordpress is the thousand pound open source juggernaut with free and paid versions, but as one of the biggest options out there your blog will be inundated with spam and hack attempts. The developer’s focus is increasingly trying to nickel and dime users into paying for reliability. At least you can export your data and switch to a different platform should you need to. There are thousands of themes and plugins for wordpress, so you have the most choices with this one.
Ghost is focused on newsletters instead of blogging. It uses node which presumably means it loads some number of modules without checking anything but they’re smaller than wordpress so also a smaller target.
I’d go for either wordpress paid or ghost paid at this point depending on if your focus is writing and reaching more people on the web or newsletters. If you’re up for learning how to use a VPS you could run either on your own, which will be cheaper than any of the blog-in-a-box providers but also mean you need to make sure your backups are good and you can keep the site software up-to-date and avoid installing plugins and themes that you either won’t actually use or come from sketchy providers.
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It’s been a while since I’ve looked at hosted blogging tools (my experience is more in self-hosted code), but I agree with @TimeDoctor. I want to echo that the most important feature you need is a simple, FREE, way to export your content and data. Create a little bit of realistic test content with any tool you choose and try the export option to see what you’ll be dealing with if you ever want to move that content. Do both the original and resized/optimized images get included? Is it some weird proprietary format or something universal like JSON, CSV, SQL, or HTML?
So WordPress… gets pricey really fast these days. It seems like the $25/month plan is what you’d need to buy to install plugins and themes, which is where WP really shines. The two things that I could see being worth it is WP Patterns which allow you to very easily change up the style of each post and page to better suite the actual content and custom post types. There are likely some no-code-required WP plugins that allow you to create custom post types, but you may want to look into it before taking the leap. The short version is that they allow you to create posts/pages/tags/categories specific to something. The WP how-to I linked above does a pretty good job explaining it, but it seems like it could be helpful for something as specialized as keyboard and switch collections.
That said, there’s a dozen reasons why it’s so popular: it’s a fairly powerful CMS with an extremely active developer and support community.
I should also mention that you could use something like Notion (export instructions) if you’re interested in more organization and display rather than writing articles. And there’s always Medium (export instructions) if you’re planning to go the long-form writing route.
Finally, while I haven’t tried it, there is a way to do theme-able project pages from github but we’re really getting away from “blog” at that point. Feel free to reach out here or via DM if you have follow up questions!
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Jekyll on GitHub Pages and ReadTheDocs hosted on GitHub Pages are two solid, free and opensource options, you wouldn’t readily think of for static web page blogging, but they do work great.
At the same time, both options will teach you how to develop properly, putting content (preferably in Markdown) before format, whilst adopting distributive revision control.
It will sure give good use to those keyboards you have lying around. 
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Why is squarespace notoriously terrible? I’ve only heard good things but am not in these circles at all. It would seem like a much simpler option than Wordpress, having administered a Wordpress site following initial professional setup (by someone else). Is it more related to it being a walled garden, if that applies here?
Not defensive, just curious
@ventamora I would totally read that. Good luck with it.
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What’s the ideal angle for Cherry profile keycaps?
Where the R3 row sits flat (ASD row), with MT3 I’ve read it’s 5-7 degrees but I haven’t found anything on Cherry profile.
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Honestly I’d say it’s personal preference TBH, plus for Cherry R3 to sit flat/level you need a really shallow angle. I’m typing this on my 3.0 which is 6 degrees & Cherry R3 is still at a good 22.5 degree angle. Then personally I’ve always found Cherry most comfortable around 7 to 9 degree typing angle.
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I second this. I use Ghost personally, but that’s only because I already had a server I could install Ghost on and not have to pay any extra hosting fees since I already had the server for other things.
GitHub pages is actually really great, and there are guides on setting it up as a “blog” sort of thing.
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Sorry for the late reply! You’re right, It’s mostly that squarespace is a walled garden of sorts but one to me which maximally exploits creative people and then leaves them with practically nothing when the costs become too great. A lot of the keyboard businesses that have ended no-longer have an active web presence because they were running square space and so anyone who got a product from them has to hope that archive.org got the website and then the firmware files and so-on are just gone. The fault of the business owner? Sure, but it’s also an issue of the web host charging too much for the website to remain operational as the number of users scales down.
Sites based on an open-source platforms have the opportunity to export their data and back it up or even move to a cheaper hosting situation. With squarespace as far as I know there is little or no chance of that.
Additionally, while Squarespace has made some positive business decisions (getting rid of nz websites, buying podcast ad space from small podcasts even when the podcast ad market is down), but largely they’ve made decisions that increase their profit at the expense of their workers and the creative people who use squarespace.
I’m sure squarespace provides a useful product for people who can afford it, it’s great that publishing your thoughts on anything with squarespace are relatively easy, it just stinks that it ended up being essentially GeoCities for our modern age but with high costs, exploitation, and no attitude towards education or preservation.
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