Celebrating creativity with the Halfmoon

Hi |FNAME|,

After months of work, Project Halfmoon is live! You can read about it below. I want to thank everyone who worked on it, which is everyone in our small company as well as the team of Halfmoon Founding Members who contributed their input throughout the project. This was fun!

Another project we finished this month is a page about this very newsletter, The Ergo. We put a lot of work into it (check out the audio tour) and I would love to hear your thoughts about it. Is this a page you'd share with a friend? Can we make it better somehow? Let me know what you think — ez@zsa.io.

And as always — thank you for reading!

All the best,
Erez

p.s - thank you, random Redditor, and to everyone else who's been recommending The Ergo to friends. :)

The Halfmoon is Here

Not a keyboard

It seemed like such a simple idea at first: Use half a Moonlander as a macro pad. It took way longer than I thought it would, and required a surprising amount of work, but it's done! I celebrated the launch by writing a few thoughts about creativity.

Featured User Interview

Matthew Hillocks

Senior Nuclear Mechanical Engineer

From welding and gardening to nuclear engineering and travel, this interview has it all. Check out the great photos, as well as the detailed hardware specs for Matthew's workstation.

"Since starting at ANSTO, I have been involved with the SyMo Facility, a first-of-a-kind nuclear waste treatment plant developed here in Australia."

Layout of the month

Iain's Vimifier

This layout was designed with Windows in mind as, unfortunately, it's my principal operating system. As a result, you'll find a lot of Windows specific shortcuts. It's also designed with game development, coding and vim in mind. In fact, TL;DR, it pretty much means I can use vim keybindings anywhere.

Things we liked

Stardust Cookie Cutter →

Forget cookie pop-ups

A free and open-source extension for multiple browsers that remembers your cookie preferences and answers annoying cookie pop-ups for you.

Arimaa →

A new use for a chess set

An abstract strategy game that can be played with a chess board and a chess set, and isn’t anything like chess (so, not a chess variant). Easy to teach, and quite fun.

Hero Forge →

In-browser custom miniature maker

Hero Forge is huge in the tabletop gaming community, which I am not a part of. Even so, I had lots of fun just creating random creatures in my browser. Entirely free (no account required) until you decide to buy a physical print or 3D-printing files of your creation. I bought nothing, but am quite proud of the heroic frog-cow-eagle I created.

Roland50.studio →

Make some beats in your browser

A web-based tool from Roland that lets you play with a bunch of their synths. This is the kind of marketing I can get behind — quite fun even if, like me, you're not at all musically inclined.

textfiles →

So many words.

If you were around in early Usenet and BBS days, this site will bring up some memories. And even if you weren't around back then, there's some great writing here. I only wish someone made the whole thing into a single epub file.