Writing forest management plans with 22 keys

Hi |FNAME|,

The email app we use for support lets us tag threads. So we can label an email "Moonlander" or whatever, to make it easier to find later.

This month I started a new tag: "Love ❤️". Every time we get a message of appreciation and love from a customer, we apply this label. This isn't for analytics or for crunching numbers — it isn't used in any reports (we're not big on reports). This is for us to click and just read through when we need a moment. So many emails; so many people.

It's an incredible privilege to be able to do what I do every day. I want to thank you not just for buying our stuff — thank you for that, by the way — but for being kind and generous, and for sometimes taking the time to write us even years after you bought a keyboard just to share how it's making a difference for you.

So thank you, and here's to a good 2024. I hope you and the people you love are safe and happy this holiday season.

All the best,
Erez

p.s: This month's ZSA Loves is all about the best books we've read in 2023. It's a big one, and as always, no affiliate links here — just books worth your time.

A roundup of changes

Search, QMK Next, and Keymapp on the App Store

Rather than one epic announcement, this month we've got a roundup of three recent changes. We now have site-wide (and blog-wide) search, you can try out the next version of QMK in Oryx, and you can get Keymapp on the App Store (for macOS).

Featured User Interview

Denise Ding

Voice Actor

“I'm the ‘everyperson,’" says Denise, before going on to describe her interesting and highly specialized work as an early-career voice actor and a freelance transcriptionist. Denise may not be a traditional power user, but she’s made some clever tweaks to her keyboard layout to minimize the need for other peripherals and let her switch jobs on the fly.

"I dabble and am a master of nothing… however, I do the Etsy-store thing so that all my doings don’t end up ﬁlling up the entire space—as you can already see from the pic… it’s pretty full."

Layout of the month

Layout of the month: 22-key HandsDown Neu-ish

This is my 22-key layout for all my typing needs, which these days includes writing forest management plans, using Excel, hobby writing, and taking notes. The layout is inspired by the HandsDown-Neu layout by Alan Reiser and is designed to reduce overall movement, same-finger bigrams (SFBs), and outward pinky rolls. To maximize these goals beyond what the original layout was capable of, some less-used letters are placed on a second alpha layer. I learned to type on QWERTY, but switched to COLEMAK-DH before deciding to go for a truly optimized, custom layout. Your mileage may vary.

Layout of the month: 22-key HandsDown Neu-ish

Things we liked

Poor Charlie’s Almanack →

A classic, beautifully rendered

This is one of the more generous things I’ve seen in a while. This book is a big classic, and was not easy to get. Thanks to Stripe Press, it’s now available online, for free, in full. Beautifully presented. Also available for Kindle and as a physical book and audiobook. RIP, Munger.

The Periodic Table of Tools →

From Hammers to Vise-Grips

I love tools. This interactive periodic table divides them up into broad categories which you can then dig into. The photos are lovely and there’s nice commentary for context.

Monaspace →

An innovative superfamily of fonts for code

I don’t think I’ve seen a monospace “Comic Sans” style font before. This “superfamily” of free coding fonts from GitHub has that, as well as four other fonts that all work well together. Also includes an interesting feature called “texture healing” — the site explains it well.

All the Ways to Make Bubble Tea →

An ode to boba

One of my fondest memories from Taiwan is the time I got to go to the tea shop that first sold bubble tea. This site/story is basically like an extremely fancy bubble tea menu that calmly takes you through all of the different options. I only wish I could order an actual cup of bubble tea in the end. I loved the watercolor vibes.

compromise →

Semantic text parsing for English, in JS

Yes, this is a little bit more developer-y than most links I feature, but the website is something. Even if you don’t think you’ll ever want to use a JavaScript library that can extract meaning out of text, it’s worth checking out just for the combination of prose, graphics, and absolute positioning.