Embed your layout anywhere

MAY 2020

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Hi *|FNAME|*,

"Simple" and "easy" are not the same thing, as I am often reminded. This month, we wanted to do something simple which turned out hard: Let anyone embed their Oryx layout in a blog post.

To do this, we needed to overcome one little thing: Oryx didn't work on mobile. It's a desktop experience. This makes sense for creating and modifying layouts. When you're reading through a blog post (or this email), though, you're probably on your phone.

So, embeds are now available, and as a minor side effect, you can now view layouts in Oryx on mobile. This is an entirely new experience — not a few little CSS hacks. Check out the full post below.

All the best,
Erez

Embed your layout, anywhere

Show and tell

Layout tours are awesome (as you'll see in Graeme's tour below). What if you could take your layout, and potentially the tour that comes with it, and embed them anywhere?

Featured User Interview

Vegar Ottesen

Postdoctoral Researcher

Vegar created a 20-nanometer-thick reproduction of the ErgoDox EZ logo in platinum on silicon. He also helped develop Norway's COVID-19 test. In his free time, he goes alpaca wrangling in the Andes. So much great in one interview.

"These days, all my time is spent on producing novel COVID-19 reagents. I am one of the seven inventors of this system, which we are now mass-producing for the Norwegian healthcare service."

Layout of the month: BEAKL 15

This is my BEAKL 15 layout (Balanced Effortless Advanced Keyboard Layout). This layout has outstanding performance for both English and non-English prose and code. Instead of a "home row", its design is around a 3x3 "home block" using the strongest fingers of each hand.

Things we liked

mugur →

A high-level Lisp configurator for the ErgoDox EZ keyboard

If you're an Emacs user, you should totally check this out. Lets you configure and compile firmware for the ErgoDox EZ right from within Emacs. Open-source.

Orb.Farm →

A self-sustaining ecosystem, on your screen

Sprinkle some sand and water into a jar, add algae and fish, and watch life do its thing. Less stressful than the real thing. The pixelated graphics are fun, too.

This Word Does Not Exist →

The uncanny valley of dictionaries.

An AI generating vaguely-convincing but implausible words and their definitions. Did you know duckwood is a prickly bivalve mollusk with silvery-brown hairs, typically growing on twigs and branches and used as bait and as a doorstop for the fast-moving sea cucumbers?

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice →

Kevin Kelly does not disappoint

"Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford." - Kevin Kelly celebrates his 68th birthday with 68 pieces of unsolicited advice. Some gems in there.

EndeavourOS →

A terminal-centric Linux distro with a dynamic and friendly community in its core

This is basically Arch with sane defaults and a friendly installer. It's the spiritual successor to the now-defunct Antergos. Florian likes it!

Tip: We have a subscriber-only link archive with all of the links we shared over the years. Just for you. ❤️

Wallpaper of the month

Mario's based in Mexico, but he had Japan in his heart when designing this one. Florian, based in Karuizawa, confirms that this year's cherry blossom was beautiful, if somewhat surreal given the circumstances.

Thank you for reading!