My Second Sabbatical

14/01/2024 Clicky Steve2024, Automattic, blog, sabbaticalLeave a comment

Every five years, Automattic encourages its employees to take a three month, paid sabbatical. Different people make use of this in different ways. Some undertake once-in-a-lifetime journeys; others indulge in the realisation of passion projects; while others still ‘just’ relax and unwind. The breadth and diversity of these choices reflect the attributes of the folks themselves, and it’s always really fascinating to hear their stories and experiences when they return. Irrespective of any individual preferences, there’s no doubt that the sabbatical provides an incredible opportunity to pause, reflect, and ultimately explore the value and meaning of a precious commodity: time.

Prior to heading off in 2019 for my first sabbatical, I wrote a post on this very blog, talking about what I hoped to do, or ‘achieve’ (if that is the right word) over that period. As I’ve now been part of the company for over a decade (gasp), I am therefore eligible for my second – and will be taking it later this year.

As I started to think about what I wanted to do this time around, it struck me just how similar the goals and desires I came up with were to those that I had back in 2019. In fact, pretty much every single one of the 10 things that I laid out in my prior list could easily equally apply again now – and probably will actually – to a greater or lesser extent. Some people might find that boring, or even concerning. After all, why on earth would you choose to do or focus on the same things, rather than try something entirely new?

I do understand that inclination – and want to ensure that I allow space to experience and explore novel situations. However, I also want to really deliberately make time for those parts of my life that either bring me comfort, or which I am passionate about. The types of thing which I love doing, but rarely get the chance to sink into in the manner which I would like.

In some ways I think about this like deciding on a restaurant to eat at. Going to a new place can be rewarding, but also potentially disappointing – and sometimes you just want to go to your favourites. The tried-and-tested. The familiar and dependable. Often, you might realise that you haven’t even been there for months anyway. I’m aiming for some balance, with that in mind.

While the sabbatical is still a few months away, I wanted to outline in advance some of the goals, aims, and expectations I have, as they will help shape and guide the decisions and plans that I make. So, here they are:

Go places. Getting away from Glasgow to explore and experience different parts of the world might be a predictable entry, but one that is also really important. In practice this will mean returning to places I have been before and enjoy – such as spending a few weeks in Tokyo and Seoul – but also discovering others for the first time (such as Prague). I am hopeful that other opportunities will also present themselves along the way, and I’ll be in a position to grab them.
Enjoy Scotland. Somewhat in contrast to the above, I would like to savour the place that I live. Scotland can be an incredible place in the summer, and I haven’t really been around to make the most of it in years gone by. I’d like to enjoy that – whether it’s taking the dog to the beach, sitting in the park with a book, or taking a trip up North to areas that I’ve never been before.
See Friends. Rather than sit in the house staring at my laptop, I want to get out and spend time with people – particularly those that I may not have seen for some time, or who live far away. I would rather this be in more interesting or creative ways than just ‘getting drinks’.
Create. This is an important one. I want to dedicate time, energy, and space to making things – primarily music. Hopefully, this will lead to something I can actually share, such as an album.
Perform. This is related to the above, but I’ve deliberately split them out, as they are distinct. It’s been a wee while since I last performed live, and I’d like to do that again. However, it has to be the right opportunity. There’s no point in just doing it for the sake of it. Hopefully the universe will present some interesting possibilities.
Say Yes. One of the memories that sticks out from my last sabbatical was a friend dropping me a message to ask if I’d like to go up in a tiny private plane that he was transporting across the country early the next day. The realisation that there was nothing preventing me from just saying yes!! was incredibly liberating, and it was an amazing experience, that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. In a similar vein, I want to create the space for the serendipitous to happen, and jump on the chances when they come along.
Tend to the Garden. I am taking some artistic license here, because I don’t mean literally gardening. Instead, I mean reflecting, re-organising, and bringing more of a purpose to parts of my life that have perhaps been neglected. That might mean something like tidying out a cupboard that I’ve been putting off, but could also be more meta-physical.
Do Something Totally New. This is probably self explanatory, but I’d like to break out of my comfort zone. In some ways it’s linked to ‘say yes’. However, this is more a deliberate reminder to seek out and commit to trying something completely novel. One thing I’ve been considering for a while is training to be a Legal Observer for protests and demonstrations. Perhaps now is the time to do that. Maybe I’ll take an improv class. Who knows.

Most of all, I just want to embrace the freedom of not being bound to a particular schedule, or structure. One of the biggest frustrations I have had over the past couple of years has been the feeling that it is all too easy to get stuck in routine, and I want to make sure that I resist that where possible over these months. That will of course be easier said than done, especially given that my wife will still be working, and I can’t just up and abandon her or the dog – but it is a principle that I am going to strive for.

A concept that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently is the idea of being intentional. Approaching situations deliberately, and not just letting them slip by without consideration. Questioning what you want from an interaction or day, and then acting with that in mind. Squeezing the lemon. Whatever I end up doing, I hope I’ll bring that mindset.

I’ll report back afterwards.

Planting a Digital Garden

25/10/2023 Clicky Steveblogging, digital garden, expression, Notion, thoughts, what is a digital garden, WordPress, wordpress digital gardenLeave a comment

One of the cool things about working at a place like Automattic is that you are part of this global network of inspiring people that often think deeply, creatively, and publicly about expression. Unfortunately, it is incredibly easy to become blind to the verdure, as a result of the daily obligations that our busy roles require.

Over the past couple of days I decided that the thicket of ‘low priority’ e-mail notifications I had allowed to build up was becoming unreasonable – even by my standards – and that I urgently needed to wrest some kind of control back. As I hacked through the undergrwoth, I came across some posts on my colleague Cheri’s blog talking about the idea of a ‘digital garden’ – which immediately sparked some kind of mental wildfire.

What is a digital garden?

So what the heck is a digital garden anyway? I am well aware that it may sound dangerously twee, but bear with me, as I think there’s something to it. There isn’t a specific definition that I am aware of, but if I had to boil my understanding of it down to a simple summary, it would be:

An open, personal collection of perpetually evolving notes and other media, which eschews attributes commonly associated with blogs or other platforms such as presentation via chronological order based on publication date.

That’s quite a mouthful, but effectively what this describes is an approach to a website that has an assortment of different snippets on various topics, loosely organised. Kind of like a personal Wikipedia, or a public notebook.

The concept isn’t really new, even if the nomenclature is – and it actually strongly reminds me of the way that personal websites used to be, before the web became more structured, and often siloed through the use of social media timelines. An important element of such a thing is the reliance on contextual hyperlinks, to tie pages together in a much more organic and idiosyncratic way, as opposed to rigid categorical linearity.

Reimagining blogs

One of the things that we know people struggle with when it comes to blogging is how to keep their site active. Commitments to a regular posting schedule quickly fall by the wayside in the face of internalised pressure to have something ‘worthwhile’ to say, particularly when the output has to be the finished article. Even with the best of intentions, disillusionment can often follow, with the process becoming more of a chore than a liberation.

Despite my love for – and involvement with – blogs, I too feel this sense of inadequacy keenly. That should be self-evident purely based on the date of the last post I made here, which was over 9 months ago. However, I also currently have 71 drafts in progress over on my main photo blog allmyfriendsarejpegs. While I am constantly writing and updating, the nature of these and my own perfectionism means that I am often stuck in a constant state of false progress, working on articles that will potentially never see the light of day.

Preservation, not Presentation

I find fascinated by the possible reconception of blogging that the idea of a digital garden brings. Removing the finality of publication, as well as the perceived need for time based updates means that you can focus purely on the act of writing and collation – as opposed to chasing what effectively amounts to a kind of news update or dated diary.

Over the past couple of years I have struggled with a declining interest in photography – something that used to be central to my identity. As part of an ongoing period of reflection on that, I’ve come to realise that part of the reason may come down to a gradual change in why I take pictures. I think that I have probably become so concerned with getting the right shots for an eventual, theoretical blog post, that I no longer enjoy or engage with the process itself. In other words: my preoccupation with the final presentation of the work has supplanted the reason for participating in its creation in the first place.

As I’ve begun to explore this revelation, I’ve consciously shifted my approach away from a concern with the eventual presentation of content, to one of preservation, where I take pictures or shoot video to capture moments purely for the sake of doing so itself – not thinking about what I will necessarily do with them later. That simple adjustment has completely transformed my way of thinking, and reinvigorated a lot of the passion that I once had in these kinds of expressive actions.

The notion of planting and growing a digital garden which is more concerned with the ongoing as opposed to the culmination strikes a chord with me partly because of this understanding, and is one that I find incredibly exciting.

The Plan

Going forward, I am going to experiment with the idea on this site. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any specific themes or established methodologies for doing so with WordPress, but it seems like fertile ground on which to explore.

My plan is to:

Move the date-specific blog portion of this site to its own dedicated area.
Create pages for specific ideas, notes, and musings that come to mind, as and when they do.
Replace the home page with a splash which will help people navigate this brave new world.

There are some challenges of course, including the fact that page updates won’t necessarily produce any kind of notification to readers, and it will be difficult for folks to track what is new. However, I am keen to embrace the chaos, and kind of like the idea of things sprouting up naturally in what may end up as a tangled, inter-connected suffusion. For that reason, I am not going to implement any specific automated systems of categorisation and sorting, as that would spoil some of the magic.

Irrespective of how this turns out, I am looking forward to breathing new life into this site, and perhaps feeling a bit less terrible about paying the annual domain renewal fees for something I rarely update.

Restoring Classic iPods, Part II. (plus scrobbling to Last.FM with LastPod!)

04/02/2021 Clicky Steve3rd gen, customized, ipod, ipod classic, last.fm, lastpod, project, restore, scrobblingLeave a comment

Last year I finally pulled together a post for a project that I had begun years ago, but never written up: Restoring a 3rd Generation iPod Classic. In that, I outlined my various mis-adventures upgrading the battery, hard drive, replacing the clickwheel electronics, the case, and… well. Everything.

Seeing this, a friend shared an article with me about someone who had taken things a step further, and basically rebuilt his entire 4th Gen iPod to stream from Spotify. While looking into how they had managed it, I fell down the rabbit hole of what has apparently become a fairly active iPod modification/restoration community. There’s even someone called DankPods who has racked up 600k subscribers in only a year. Damn. Maybe I should have made more of an effort to document things back in 2016 when I started working on these old iPods. I could have found YouTube fame.

Nah, probably not.

Anyway, what I did find was that there were now a whole host of resources for modifying and restoring these old iPods which weren’t necessarily available, or as clear as they were when I first started looking into them – and it’s piqued my intrigue for how I could expand on, or revisit this project.

Scrobbling to Last.FM

It might sound ridiculous, but one of the things I really missed when using my beloved 3rd Gen iPod was the ability to log all of the music I listen to using Last.FM, as I use that data to help discover new artists, and a bunch of other things. There were some tools available, but none of them really worked… and come on, I even scrobble my LPs with Vinyl Scrobbler, so it seemed ridiculous that I couldn’t do that with the iPod.

As luck would have it, I came across a little Java application called LastPod which solves this problem. I’m not sure how I never found this before, but I thought I would share as it’s the only solution that I’ve found which does the job. Essentially, you listen to tracks on your iPod (making sure the date and time are set correctly), plug it in to your computer, open up LastPod, make sure it knows where your iPod database is (a quick config that persists after the first time), and then… you can scrobble your tracks! There are a couple of caveats, including the limitation of only being able to scrobble each song once (so it can’t track multiple listens), and that you need to synch your iPod with iTunes or whatever after you Scrobble to reset the counters… but! It works, and I am unreasonably happy about this.

Flash Modification

Back when I was looking at options for increased storage in the iPod, there was talk of being able to use Compact Flash cards to store the songs, instead of the bulky hard drives they were designed to work with. However, this was reportedly flakey, and so it’s not a route I went down in the end. However… now, there are a bunch of different options for using the much cheaper and higher capacity SD/MicroSD cards in old iPods. As well as kind of cheap standard CF to IDE adaptors, there’s a brand called iFlash which makes specific adaptors to allow you to use up to 4 SD cards in one iPod. Wild!

USB Charging

As I mentioned in my last post, despite being arguably the most beautiful of all the iPods, the big issue with the 3rd Gen Classic is that it only charges over Firewire. This means that you need a specific cable and plug to charge the bloody thing, or a dock. These are bulky, getting harder to come buy, and increasingly pricey. If you’re travelling, that means no USB power bank to juice up the thing easily.

It appears that some enterprising folks have found a way to address this problem though, using a MICRO USB 1A Battery Charging Module TP4056. This is essentially just a small PCB which lets you charge up batteries over USB. In theory, if you have already modified your iPod to use a flash drive, then there is space inside the case to install the board, and you can then avoid the firewire problem completely.

This is probably the most tricky of all the modifications though. I’m not 100% on the best way to wire this together, and lithium ion batteries are a bit of a fire risk if you cock things up. You also need to find a place to put the USB port (or pull the power from the usual 40 pin connector), and that means making a new hole in the case. Definitely not for the faint hearted… or if you are crap at DIY like myself.

Rockbox

After reading my last post, someone helpfully left a comment pointing me towards the existence of Rockbox – a free, open source bit of software that replaces the OEM music management functions on a whole variety of different portable players, including the iPod.

This allows you to bypass iTunes completely, and just load music up in disk mode, which could be pretttty useful. In theory it could also make Last.FM scrobbling a bit easier, though now I’ve found LastPod I’m less concerned about that.

Customised Shells

Such is the growing popularity of restoring these classic devices that you can now pick up drop-in replacement shells to customise the look, with some really cool colour combinations available. Here’s a look at some options from Aliexpress.

This reminds me of what happened with Game Boy modifications. Early on it was pretty difficult and hacky to do… and then people started getting better at it, and putting out better tutorials and kits. Now, there are full shops dedicated to selling brand new parts with an almost mind boggling variety of customisation options.

The caveat here is that most of the shells are for the 4th Gen iPod and up. The plucky 3rd gen is still a bit of a weirdo, and so there aren’t really any drop-in options if you want what I maintain is the best iPod design ever.

Built in OSX Support

One thing that surprised me when I plugged my 3rd Gen iPod into my newest Mac (running Catalina) was that it appeared to be picked up and detected better than in previous OSX versions. It turns out that when Apple started phasing out iTunes, they actually integrated the iPod directly into MacOS, so you can access and synch it from Finder itself. The feature set is limited, but it’s pretty cool to see an ‘obsolete’ piece of hardware still being supported by a major developer. Respect where it’s due!

My Restoration Plans

So… now that the modding community has caught up, and there’s all these new options available, I feel like I’m going to have to at least attempt to experiment with a few of them. I’m a bit torn at the moment between further modifying my current 3rd gen, and leaving it be… getting a separate 4th or 5th gen iPod to work on. So here’s my thoughts/plans:

FlashMod. If I restore any other iPods, I’ll definitely be using a FlashMod. There are cheap CF to IDE alternatives, but they can be a bit buggy, so I’ll need to decide whether to use them or just go straight for the iFlash devices which are the creme de la creme. In particular, I like the ability to use multiple SD cards internally.
USB charging mod for 3rd gen. This out of all of the modifications is the one I would love to be able to implement, as it would free up my iPod from the shackles of Firewire. However, I don’t want to risk mucking up the case, and I suspect that I would never fully trust the safety of the Lithium battery with my modification. Probably not smart to take it on a plane and charge… so perhaps this will need to remain a pipe dream.
USB charging alternative. I dug out a pile of dongles and various adaptors that I have (I knew keeping that box of random connectors was a good idea!!), and tried going from the Apple split Firewire/USB Y-cable through a Firewire converter, to Thunderbolt, to USB… plugging into my Mac. Miraculously, the iPod appeared to be charging (!). However… it wouldn’t initialise on OSX. I wouldn’t want to leave it like that, as the disk kept clicking to try spin up, but it does suggest that I could plug directly into a USB port and just draw power with the right adaptor. Potentially it might also work better with a flash mod. I’ve ordered some different adaptors to test out, and I’m hoping I can find a solution…
Rockbox. I am really curious about Rockbox, and if I have trouble updating the iPod again in future with iTunes I’ll seriously consider it. However, part of the reason I like the 3rd gen iPod is for its UI, and I think that replacing the OS would kind of ruin that experience. There are apparently themes available to get you close to the original, but I’m not entirely sure how legit that would be. If I got a different gen iPod I would definitely try it out though.
Customisation. This is where I could get in trouble, as I’d want ALL the colour combinations. If I’m not careful I could end up with 15 iPods.

Unsurprisingly the Classic iPods have been going up in price gradually as folks realise what you can do with them, so finding a bargain is getting tougher – again similar to Game Boys. Ultimately I suspect that if I do modify any other iPods I’ll look at something like the 5th Gen, as they can charge over USB. Currently though, the combined cost of the various parts would be around £120 all in, and I’m not quite prepared to spend that on another iPod project just yet. Watch this space.

Books 2020

04/01/202104/01/2021 Clicky Stevebook list, Books, readingLeave a comment

Growing up, I loved to read, and would gladly spend hours demolishing stacks of books of all kinds from the library. As the years went by and the afflictions of adulthood responsibility mounted, I found that I was giving over less and less time to reading, and that twenty minutes before I fell asleep just wasn’t cutting it.

Last year I decided to make a concerted effort to dedicate a good chunk of time to recapture some of what I used to love, and in 2019 managed to get through a respectable total of 23 books. I wasn’t sure if I would top that this year. However, after discovering that my colleague Andrew Spittle had read 72 (!), I doubled down, even upgrading my old Kindle to a fancy new one with a warm backlight that has been much easier on my ageing eyeballs.

Below is a list of all the books that I’ve finished in the year gone by. Not included are those that I started but discarded through lack of interest, or any kind of academic-only reading, as that falls into something of a different category. The last time I did this, some folks asked for more specifics on what books I liked best, so for this year I’ve added some notes at the end, which might be rough as I jotted them down as I went. Click through for those.

I was aiming to read 50 books this year, but only managed to complete 40 in the end. While that is 8 more than last year (you can find the 2019 list here), I’m pretty sure I could have managed 50 if I had pushed for it. That said, I did take up learning Japanese, and re-discovered both music and film photography in force during lockdown, which probably accounts for the gradual slowdown over the year. If you’re on Goodreads, you’ll find me as clickysteve.

Severance – Ling Ma (2018)
Golden State – Ben H. Winters (2019)
The Paper Menagerie – Ken Liu (2016)
Welcome to the Heady Heights – David F. Ross (2019)
Skin – Liam Brown (2019)
OddJobs – Heide Goody (2016)
Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries – Tim Anderson (2010)
For Fukui’s Sake: Two Years in Rural Japan – Sam Baldwin (2011)
Range: The Key to Success, Performance and Education – David Epstein (2019)
A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy – Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum (2019)
Photographing People – A Guide for Shy Photographers – Kevin Landwer-Johan (2020)
Dark Matter – Blake Crouch (2016)
Recursion – Blake Crouch (2019)
Mohammed Maguire – Colin Bateman (2002)
The Wall – John Lanchester (2019)
The Photographer’s Playbook – J. Fulford (2014)
PRACTICE LESS, PLAY MORE: The simple, three-step system to play songs you love on your guitar from day 1 – Steve Mastroianni (2019)
Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers – Dennis DeSantis (2015)
Recording Unhinged – Sylvia Massy (2016)
Unlocking Japanese – Cure Dolly (2016)
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
Revenge – Yoko Ogawa (2013)
One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking – D Trott (2015)
Three Japanese Short Stories (Penguin Modern) – K. Uno et al (2018)
Striptease – Carl Hiaasen (1993)
The Guest List – Lucy Foley (2020)
The Parade – Dave Eggers (2019)
Not the end of the World – Christopher Brookmyre (1998)
Hardcore Self Help: Fk Anxiety – Robert Duff (2014)**
Photographers on Photography: How the Masters See, Think & Shoot – Gerry Carroll (2018)
Double Whammy – Carl Hiaasen (2005)
The Alcohol Experiment: A 30-Day, Alcohol-Free Challenge to Interrupt Your Habits and Help You Take Control – Annie Grace (2018)
Native Tongue – Carl Hiaasen (2005)
In Your Defence – Sarah Langford (2020)
Exit – Laura Waddell (2020)
The Courage to be Disliked – Ichiro Kishimi (2019)
Cult of the Dead Cow – Joseph Menn (2019)
How to Ikigai – Tim Tamashiro (2019)
Lockdown – Peter May (2020)
Love Means Love: Same-sex Relationships and the Bible – David Runcorn (2020)

Continue reading →

Gherkin 40% – (Failed) Keyboard Build Log

23/11/2020 Clicky Stevefail, gherkin, mechanical keyboard, mechboard, project1 Comment

In the past I’ve posted about some of my DIY mechanical keyboard builds, including the first I attempted, the Commodore 64 homage. Around about the same time as that build, I had been seeing these ludicrously tiny keyboards online which were 40% the size of a standard setup… with just 30 keys total. Naturally, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to have a bash at building one.

The specific design I went for is known as the ‘Gherkin’, apparently because originally they were small and green. I wanted to stay close to this idea, and opted for a yellow colour scheme… Yellow PCB, yellow glow, yellow case… the works. There may or may not have been a splash of green in there. I wasn’t quite sure yet.

The Parts

I needed the following bits and pieces:

PCB
Switches
Keycaps
Diodes and resistors
A case
LEDs (for under the keys as well as to light up the case)
A microcontroller
IC Socket

I couldn’t face soldering in all of the diodes and resistors by hand, so I got a PCB with them already in place from /u/MrMontgomery on Reddit. He also sent over the LEDs, and the microcontroller that I would need.

For the case, I got a handmade yellow acrylic case from someone called /u/qlavier in Belgium. They make some beautiful things on their website, qlavier.com. I wanted an all acrylic case so the LEDs would really shine.

The keycaps were standard DSA profiled that I got dirt cheap on eBay from Hong Kong. Sticking with the Gherkin theme, I decided to do an alternating green and yellow pattern.

The Switches

The switches, of course, deserve a special mention, due to how important they are when building a custom mechanical keyboard. In the last build I went with Cherry MX Whites (Milky), which are pretty ‘clicky’, but not as loud as most others of that type. For this build, I had in mind that the Gherkin might end up as a travel keyboard due to its size… and I wanted the switches to be quiet, but also have a really good tactile feel to them. On top of that, I wanted them to support under-key LEDs, and to have a clear top to diffuse the light as much as possible. So eh, not too specific.

In the end I went with Kailh Pro Purple switches, which tick all of the boxes. They have a 50g actuation force, and aren’t quite as tactile as I might usually like, but they still feel pretty good. Plus, for some reason, in my head the purple colour seems to fit with the Gherkin theme. Don’t ask me why.

The Build

When I began the build, the guides available online were scant at best, and it was bit more complicated than the others I had taken on before. With advice from the folks at /r/mechanicalkeyboards I managed to figure things out in the end. However, ultimately it all became a nightmare, and I have shelved the project for now. Some specifics…

LEDs

First of all, you need to install the LEDs in place. This (perhaps obviously) is because they sit underneath the switches. The problem I immediately ran into was that I couldn’t find a schematic for the Gherkin PCB, and was unsure of what way the LEDs should go. MrMontgomery helped me out, in that the long leg of the LEDs goes into the hole with the round pad… and the shorter leg goes into the hole with the square shaped pad.

Switches

These were pretty straightforward. Put the switches through the acrylic top panel, through the holes in the PCB, and then solder them in place. At this point I really wished I had paid more attention to getting the LEDs straight, as they didn’t all immediately fit in the hole in the switches casing. I had to carefully bend them a bit, but they worked in the end.

Reset Button

This was another annoying bit. In order to flash the software onto the microcontroller, you have to create a connection between two of its pins to reset it into the required DFU mode. That’s fairly simple in theory… you can just solder two bits of wire to the necessary pins and then touch the ends together. In practice though, it’s a bit more of a pain. The reset function is something I found myself using a lot with my other custom keyboards, while you customise the layouts to something that works for you. This meant that I would have to find a way to easily trip the reset. In the end, I settled on a mini, yellow push button switch that just kinda flopped about. I toyed with the idea of an arcade button, but that would have been ridiculous, and wouldn’t have fitted in the case anywhere – at least not neatly. Of course, nothing runs smoothly… and the reset button didn’t work at all. For a while I had to resort to just manually shorting the pins, which was less than ideal.

IC Socket

Because of the design of the Gherkin, you need to install the Microcontroller after the switches have been soldered in. That causes some problems if you have a plate mounted case… or if you have any problems with the soldering that need fixed later. Why? Well, if you’ve soldered in the microcontroller directly to the PCB, you can’t get underneath it to de-solder the switches easily. For that reason, I was advised to use a (low profile) IC socket which the microcontroller just clicks into, so if needs came to it, I could just pop it out.

With that in mind, I bought a 24 pin IC socket, trimmed it down to size (12 pins) and installed that. Unfortunately I immediately ran into some issues, as it appears the IC socket had gotten damaged somehow (probably when I trimmed it down) and the Pro Micro controller wouldn’t slot in properly. This turned into a bit of a saga, as it took me a bit of troubleshooting to realise that this was the problem.

De-soldering the socket was a nightmare for the reasons above, so in the end I clipped it off and soldered the controller directly onto the board, at which point I managed to get everything working, aside from a few keys. After rummaging around online, I found this incredibly helpful image which helped identify which pin was the problem:

Unfortunately, by this point my Pro Micro had been so abused by soldering and de-soldering that it couldn’t be trusted. I had to remove it, and try another. In true grand idiot style, I then ended up going through a few different Pro Micros as I soldered the header pins in wrongly… lost the microcontroller in a house move, and various other mishaps.

To top things off, I tried to remove a few of the switches to clean up the top side of the board a bit, and ended up breaking them. I put a new microcontroller on, and got things mostly working… (after realising I had forgotten to put the switches back on first… eugh).

Ultimately though, I was defeated. A couple of the switches just weren’t working, even when I shorted the pins on the board directly. The only thing I could figure was that I had damaged the traces on the PCB somehow, and that would mean essentially starting from scratch, soldering in a whole new set of keys… etc.

I’m pretty disappointed, as the Gherkin was shaping up to look pretty cool. However, it was a learning experience. I now understand what is and isn’t critical when building these boards, and have come to understand a lot more about how they actually work, which has been helpful. At the end of the day, the Gherkin was going to be more of a novelty board than anything especially practical, so I can probably live without it.

That said… I’m not really good at giving up on things completely, and since I still have the custom case etc, I’ll probably return to this one at a later date. Watch this space.

Becoming a Coffee Snob

24/07/2020 Clicky Stevecaffeine, coffee6 Comments

Breaking ranks with the rest of the tech industry, I must admit that I have never been a huge coffee fan. I know. Sacrilege. The truth is that hot drinks in general have never really been my cup of tea (pun very much intended). Sure, I was partial to an iced latte, and the elaborate glass Chemex contraptions of the faithful were intriguing, but I just never really got it. I could easily have dismissed such geekery, but in actuality I was always a bit jealous. As someone partial to a wee dram, I know how amazing it is when you get past the initial stages of “this all tastes the same”, and can discover the variety and depth involved in something new.

Recently, I had come across a local hipster coffee shop which clearly took themselves very seriously, but for the first time I got a glimpse of the promised land. Much like the first time I actually tasted cherries in a red wine (no, not the Tonic), the coffee that these folks were serving tasted incredible. Rather than just being another cup of burned dirt water, it somehow tasted of caramel and raspberries – without any addition of sugar or syrups.

This damascus moment led to an insatiable craving, desperate to relive that delirious caffeinated experience time and again. It wasn’t long until I bankrupted myself and was in the process of selling all of my worldly possessions to return to that cafe every day and get my fix… until I realised that if they could serve something that good, perhaps I should do a bit of investigation into recreating it at home.

What I learned

In a very short space of time, I not only discovered the price of a semi-decent espresso machine, but I also realised that almost everything I thought I knew about coffee was wrong. I still know basically nothing, but here is what I’ve gleaned over the past wee while:

1. Buying ‘better’ coffee isn’t the answer

In my previous attempts to have better tasting coffee, I just assumed I could pick up a more expensive bag from the supermarket (you know, the ‘taste the difference’ stuff that comes in that tempting black bag), and that would be half the battle. However, that isn’t the case. Of course the way you brew it matters, but there’s far more to it than that. Wayyyy more than I expected.

2. Coffee goes stale. Quickly.

Coffee basically never goes out of date, right? Of course not. They’re just beans. Well… yes… but apparently to really get the most out of it, you have to drink it within about 30 days of when it was roasted. If you pick up a fancy bag of beans from a local roaster but don’t get round to drinking them for a month or two, you’re far less likely to taste all of the exciting flavours that the coffee has to offer. Note that supermarket coffee almost never has a roasting date, and you can begin to piece together why it all might just taste the same – even if you do buy the fancy black bags.

3. Different ages of coffee are better for different types

Not only does the date that the coffee was roasted matter, but the type of drink you make with it at what stage of its life-cycle within the 30 day golden period also makes a difference. I won’t claim to know the reasons behind why, but an espresso will supposedly taste better made with beans that were roasted between 12 and 30 days prior – whereas beans which were roasted between 6 and 12 days will be more suited for filter coffee.

4. Storage is important

What do you mean I can’t just fold the bag over and stick a peg on it?! Oxygen, light, and moisture all contribute to coffee losing their freshness quicker. If you want to get the best out of that expensive bag you picked up from the floppy haired barista who told you the beans were foraged in the foothills of Botswana by a rare breed of hogs… you need to put a bit of effort into storing them properly. That means using some kind of contraption that will keep oxygen out, but also allow the CO2 that the beans give off to escape. The protips I’ve found involve using specially designed vacum sealed coffee boxes, along with oxygen absorber pads.

5. Freezing is fine

This is a controversial one, but if you buy a whole pile of coffee at once without realising that you would need to drink it within 30 days (ahem), then freezing the beans will help keep them fresher for longer. The caveat here is that you need to ensure that they are stored in an airtight container before freezing. Using some kind of vacuum sealed bag with an oxygen absorption pad should do the trick. If you are taking beans out from the freezer to use immediately, give the bag 10-15 minutes to acclimatise to room temperature before opening it and re-sealing once done to help prevent moisture building up.

6. Not all grinders were created equal

I had a coffee grinder. A good one, so I thought. It cost me £20 damnit! But, apparently it’s pish. Totally worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t allow you to properly control the size of the grind, or manage the consistency. That matters as you will want a different consistency of coffee depending on what kind you are brewing. For espresso, a fine grind is desirable, whereas French press requires a coarser grind.

7. You’ll need a new kettle

Okay, maybe this isn’t strictly the case, but if you want to get into the world of fancy pour-over coffee (and at this stage I’m fully committed to this madness), you will probably need to use one of those gooseneck kettles that looks like something out of a Wes Anderson film. To be honest, they look so cool that I would want one even if I never drank coffee again.

The road ahead

Even from a brief foray into this highly caffeinated world, I can see why so many people are so religious about it. For me, I’m not sure what the future holds. It’s been a while since I had an entirely new area to get excited learning about though, and I’ll hopefully be able to at least enjoy the journey. At least until I get addicted to caffeine and curse this entire experience.

On inspiration

12/04/202011/10/2023 Clicky Stevecreative, creative people, creativity, inspirationLeave a comment

Something I have been reflecting on a lot lately is inspiration; where it comes from, what feeds it, and how to make the most of it.

Over the years I’ve found that I go through periods where I become very intensely inspired about specific things – to the point that almost all I can think about is the project or projects that I’m working on. This can be extremely rewarding, but also incredibly frustrating, with no obvious way to manage effectively. It seemed like there was never any discernible rhyme or reason for when these times would strike or how long they would last; it could often be incredibly difficult to satisfy the creative impulses that came along, and most maddening of all – I wasn’t sure how to trigger them consciously.

In addition, it also felt like this kind of all-or-nothing drive was often easily misunderstood – including by myself – as a sort of careless impatience, or worse, an erratic string of obsessions which would fade away just as quickly as they had appeared – rather than a genuine, lasting interest. There’s nothing worse than feeling like something you have been working on intently for months and are passionate about might just be some latest flight of fancy.

Managing Inspiration

Rather than just jumping endlessly from one new thing to the next, I realised that I was actually cycling through a few of the same creative outlets – focussing solely on one to the detriment of all the others. These cycles could run from days to weeks to months to years, and I had no real way to predict when they might end.

The nature of this meant that I felt guilty about neglecting my other passions, and inevitably made collaborative ventures especially tricky. For example, if I was currently deeply inspired about photographic expression, I found it almost impossible to garner enthusiasm for writing songs as part of a band.

The all-consuming nature of this kind of heady inspiration also means that you lose some objectivity in relation to whether what you are doing is actually any good – the constant desire to create pushing everything else aside. Even just considering this possibility was enough to drive me to despair. TL;DR I needed to find a better way to manage these driving forces.

It has only been very recently that have I begun to get something of a handle on all of this. Now, rather than simply waiting for inspiration to strike and abandoning all other projects when it does until the juice runs out, I can strike something of a balance. Here are some of my observations and tips.

1. Avoid the gaps

Rather than see multiple outlets as being in competition with one another, I’ve come to realise (with insight from wiser people than I) that they can actually support and feed each other. For me (and I think many other creatively wired folk), having lots going on at once is far more preferable to hitting a period where I’m unable to do anything. Having various different passions means that I can shift from one to another and keep up the momentum across mediums – rather than hitting a total expressive block. It is much harder to find inspiration after that than it is if you are constantly inspired in separate areas.

2. Take a break

There are piles of books out there that will tell you the key to getting things done is to commit to doing a little bit each day. This path-of-least-resistance approach can be a great tactic to help get you over any initial procrastination, and build longer term habits. If you commit to playing guitar for five minutes a day, you are bound to find yourself playing far longer. However, when it comes to expressive outlets, the danger here is that you turn something you love doing into a chore, with the idea that you must constantly be progressing at least a little for it to be worthwhile. That kind of feeling kills creativity, and sometimes in order to find inspiration you need to give yourself space to take a break from something and then come back to it – without feeling guilty. This will pay dividends.

3. Grab inspiration when it comes

Of course, sometimes inspiration gloriously swells up from nowhere, and you need to make the most of it while you can. I came across a quote the other day from Margaret Qiao (from this awesome book) which puts it better than I ever could.

When you feel inspired, or have an idea, stop whatever you are doing and follow the inspiration. It’s very difficult to rekindle the spark once it goes out and impossible to conjure up on command.

This inspired me to write this post!

4. Seek out inspiration

Sometimes, you have no choice but to work on something – whether that’s because of deadlines, personal expectations, or because you are part of a collaboration. In these times, if you find yourself completely uninspired, it can be an incredibly taxing and difficult process.

As I mentioned, I previously just rode the waves of inspiration, jostling on the creative seas with no way to control what happened. I presumed that was all just part of the tortured artist process and revelled in the misery of it. However, what I’ve come to realise is that there are actually ways to help trigger periods of inspiration – you just have to actively seek them out.

For me, this has meant that before I have to work on anything specific but don’t really feel like it, I’ll spend some time on related things that I think is really interesting. For example, actively listening to bands who have really great vocalists before I have to sit down and write lyrics; watching a Japanese TV show I like before I study some of the language; or looking through pictures from photographers I love before developing some film.

This might seem painfully obvious, but in practice it’s something that I never really bought into before as nothing ever clicked. However, that’s because most of the things other folks find inspiring or share online won’t work for you. To give another example I never used to care much for photo books, but have fairly recently discovered that having a collection of these I can browse through almost never fails to inspire me to get out and take pictures.

5. ‘Write drunk, edit sober’

It isn’t clear who actually said this originally, but it isn’t all that important. Rather than taking this literally, when you find yourself struck by an idea, squeeze as much out of that feeling as you can while it lasts – but don’t worry about finishing everything then and there. Get the bulk down on paper, canvas, on film, or on a blog while you are drunk on inspiration – and then revisit to apply the finishing touches later. The urge to publish quickly can be unbearable at times – and sometimes you should – but the important thing is to make a start will you have the drive to do so. You can always come back to it later.

Build Log: Restoring a 3rd Gen iPod

24/03/2020 Clicky Stevebuild project, classic ipod, hackaday, ipod, ipod 3rd gen, restore, upgrade, vintage ipod9 Comments

A few years ago, I realised that I no longer had a good portable music player. Sure, there was my mobile – but I was still using an iPhone at the time, which could store about 10 songs before its pitiful internal, non-expandable memory got filled up. I longed for the golden days of iPods… back when they were cutting edge and had nice glowy buttons and scroll wheels and that nostalgic clicky sound. After a bit of Googling it seemed like it would be easy enough to pick up an old iPod and stick a new hard-drive and battery in – so that’s what I decided to do. However, things didn’t go especially smoothly. Below is my overly long account of my journey to repair the damn thing which nobody needs or wants, but since we are all currently locked inside thanks to the Coronavirus, it seems like as good a time as any.

The Restoration Journey

I didn’t want just any old iPod. I wanted the 3rd Generation iPod specifically. Why? Because that was arguably the best design – with a nice, smooth scrollwheel, and separate touch sensitive buttons. Looking around eBay, there were a few that were listed as ‘just needing a new hard drive’ for under twenty quid, but I decided to play it safe and get one that was fully working in the first place, to avoid other unseen problems cropping up. In the end, I went for a 20GB model for about £40 which seemed in decent enough nick. I picked up a battery with much larger capacity than the original (£9), and an 80GB hard drive (£28) – supposedly the maximum size that would work with this model. Along with the special tools to open the iPod without breaking it, the total cost so far is at: £90.

When the iPod arrived, everything worked as expected, but it was a lot more beaten up than I had expected. I always took really good care of my old one, so was a bit miffed that this one was rough. I hummed and hawwed for a while, before deciding to buy a whole new front plate, as I knew I wouldn’t be happy having upgraded all the other bits and then having a scratched up screen. I managed to track one down at a spare parts site, which cost about £20. It turned out I also needed a very particular size of Torx screw to get the logic board off and transferred over, so that brings the total cost at this point to £115.

The front plate and screwdriver finally arrived, and I was pretty pleased. It was brand new and shiny. The battery and hard drive were a breeze to install, and things seemed to be going well… though not for long. It turns out the front plate also has a whole set of electronics attached, which did not come included. That meant I had to transfer them from the old case into the new one, and there were no instructions online for how to do this. Luckily, I managed to slowly pry them off with a spudger (what a great word) without destroying anything. I left the iPod case open, so if anything went wrong restoring things, I could easily get back into the innards.

The next big issue that became apparent pretty quickly was that this particular model of iPod was originally designed only to work with Macs, and so requires a FireWire connection to restore. I had vague memories of this changing with later revisions, so didn’t think much of it – and assumed there must be some workaround – but after some further research online, that turned out not to be the case. If I wanted to restore the iPod, I was going to have to get a special Y cable that had both a FireWire and USB connection. What’s more, it would apparently not even charge over USB – which meant that not only were the cables I had bought already useless, but I needed to get a hold of an old FireWire mains adaptor as well. Since they are so hard to find, I decided to pick up a couple so I had a spare for the future. Total cost so far including the cables (£21) and chargers (£18): £154.

The dual headed cable arrived, and I thought I was in the final stretch. Apparently you should be able to plug in the USB cable into the laptop on one end, and the FireWire cable into an AC adaptor on the other, and then the iPod will restore just fine. That turned out not to be the case, with iTunes point blank refusing to restore the iPod without it being connected over FireWire. Pish. I thought it must be the third party cable that I had bought, so I hunted down an official Apple cable, in the hope that it might make a difference. Total cost: £164. At this point I was getting pretty despondent about the whole thing. Why did I have to drag up this antiquated piece of junk that was crippled by ties to obsolete technology when I could have gotten an iPod classic for less money? Either way, I was determined to get the damn thing to work.

Luckily, I realised that my Apple Cinema Display screen had a FireWire port – since Apple ditched the connection from its laptops years ago. Of course, the connection I needed was a FireWire 400 port, and this was FireWire 800. I ordered a convertor, which brings the running total spent on this miserable project to £168.

The FireWire adaptor arrived, and I was convinced that this would do the trick. Wrong. When I hooked the iPod up to the Mac with USB, the hard drive purred nicely and was recognised fine – it just wouldn’t restore. When I tried FireWire, the drive just clicked and clicked – refusing to spin up properly. I let it charge up for a bit, but no dice. I tried a different Y cable – but that didn’t work either. I tried a dedicated FireWire cable – but nope. I thought maybe it was some USB-C weirdness with my laptop, so I used my wife’s connected up to the Display Screen to see if that made a difference. After about ten minutes the hard drive seemed to mount, and it got halfway through the restore process before returning an obscure error that just said the iPod could not be restored. Great.

I spun up a Windows 7 Virtual Machine in the hopes that I might have better luck that way – but no dice. The iPod wasn’t recognised at all. I did all sorts of troubleshooting to correct the drivers, but nothing helped. Getting desperate, I spent hours researching online to see if there was some way to restore the iPod without using iTunes, but most of them involved flashing the firmware on Windows – which already wasn’t working. I was beginning to think that I might be stuck with a very expensive paper weight, since nobody was going to want to buy the damn thing when it was in bits. Why did I insist on pursuing these insane projects that cost so much money for so little reward?!

Finally, in one last hail mary, I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine – battling with the weird config to get it working. When I finally had iTunes installed, I connected the iPod up using USB only, and lo and behold – it actually restored. I let it complete the setup, switched back to OSX, and there it was in all of its vintage glory. I loaded it up with 40GB odd of music to test it out, and everything seemed to be coming up roses.

Well, almost. I went to close up the iPod for good, and realised that it didn’t seem to want to. I compared the sizes of the hard-drives, and realised that the 80GB drive was considerably thicker than the 20GB one that I had pulled from the original one. I was sure this model should work though, and that I had confirmed it online – but after angrily Googling, I realised that the 30GB and 40GB models had a slightly thicker backplate in order to allow for the bigger sized disks, and that was the kind I should have gotten in the first place. I begrudgingly found a broken 40GB model on eBay from Sweden for £17.50, which brings us to the grand total of £185.5 – just under double what an iPod Classic 160GB is going for second hand.

Despite installing everything on the old hard drive fine, I then had to go through the whole process to try and get it to work again. For some reason, the process kept failing. At this stage, I gave up documenting everything that had gone wrong, and my mind has clouded over on exactly what I had to do to get it to work – probably out of some kind of self protection mechanism. However, finally… I got everything to fall into place.

Behold, my beautiful, revamped 3rd Gen iPod:

I was so pleased with the outcome and the throwback to my youth that I bought a nice leather case, and a charging dock (unfortunately I couldn’t find a silicone green case like I had as a teenager).

However, the iPod had one last trick up its sleeve… for when I had finally gotten it all together and working successfully, I realised that the nice clean new front plate I had bought actually had a plastic screen protector sheet on the inside, which had a mark on it.

To remove this, I would have to take the whole thing apart again, which I can’t really face doing – especially since knowing me I would end up breaking the damn thing somehow. Of course, when the backlight is on you can’t really see it, but I know it’s there. Watching. Taunting me.

Maybe one day I’ll fix it.

Build Notes

This ended up being a far fiddlier and more expensive project than I expected it to be initially. In hindsight, I could have saved money by not buying as many cables; buying a 40GB model in the first place; and getting a model that was more bashed up from the get-go since I ended up replacing the front plate anyway. If I had known the FireWire connection was never going to work, that would have saved me another tenner. In total, I could probably have done this for about £70 cheaper.
It is ludicrous that I had to rely on Windows XP to restore an iPod. I had read that the reason these couldn’t be restored over USB on OSX was down to some architectural limitations – but if that was the case, why did it work on Windows?

Practicalities

Having owned the restored iPod for a few years now, here’s some of my thoughts and observations:

I hadn’t quite appreciated just how much of a pain it would be to charge the iPod. You can’t just plug it in to a regular USB port, as it needs the dedicated Firewire charger. This means it’s not especially practical for travelling, but at some point the chargers are going to fail and become impossible to replace – which is a bit of a concern.
Similarly, putting new music on to the device is a bit of a pain. For that to work (at least on the Mac), you need to use the Firewire/USB/power Y Cable plugged into both the wall outlet and the computer at once. There’s also no real guarantee that iTunes will continue to recognise the iPod, and at some point I suspect I’ll end up having to use a Virtual Machine to get software old enough to be compatible.
There is no reliable way to scrobble the tunes you listen to on the iPod to Last.fm. This seems like a fairly minor and inconsequential detail, but I use Last.fm fairly religiously – and I can even track what vinyl I listen to – so it’s a bit of a bummer that the iPod support no longer functions.

ipod charger — Not the most practical of travel charging arrangements.

When all is said and done, was it worth it, and would I do it all over again?

Hell no.

I’m pleased that I managed to get the iPod up and working, and recapture a bit of my youth through nostalgia – but in practical terms it was a fairly expensive experiment, for a device that has a bunch of real impracticalities. Since restoring it, I have switched to Android, and can store as much music on my phone as I want… and I’ve finally moved into the modern world of bluetooth noise cancelling headphones – both of which means the iPod’s usefulness has ended up reduced.

It does get use though. I have the iPod loaded up with my favourite bands, and it is connected up to my hifi for whenever I just want to whack on a bunch of great music and not think much about it.

New Keeb – Planck Rev 6

07/01/202016/06/2020 Clicky Stevemechanical keyboard, mk, otemu sky5 Comments

Behold my newest keyboard, the Planck Rev 6:

I have had this project in the works for a while now, but only just got around to finishing it when I realised that all of my other mechanical keyboards had the loud-as-hell clicky style key switches. This was always fine when I worked from home in a tiny cupboard and could disturb nobody, but lately I’ve been sharing an office with my wife who is on video calls pretty constantly, and my delightfully clickety clackety Ergodox keyboard with Cherry MX Blues suddenly weren’t as charming as they once were (Well, they were for me, but probably nobody else.

Rather than bore you with all the geeky build details, here are the salient points:

1. What are the colours all about?

I had originally wanted to do one of these cool blue to pink gradients for the keycaps… but realised that the set I ordered didn’t have enough single squares to cover the full grid required – and I didn’t fancy having to get a full new set just for a few extra keys. The other problem is that while gradients look cool, they also make it a bit of a nightmare to find specific keys that you need at a glance. In the end, I decided to go with something a bit more practical. The yellow keys are modifiers like Escape, Enter, space, etc. The pink and blue rows are the letters, and the green keys are reminders of where specific keys I need for work shortcuts are.

2. Wait, why are all the keys square?

Aesthetic, innit.

This kind of grid layout is known as an ‘ortho-linear’ keyboard. There are a bunch of reasons people like this system… with the theory being that it keeps your fingers in a more natural typing position than the standard setup. To be honest though, I just think they look cool, and wanted to try out something a bit different (though this isn’t my first grid rodeo…)

3. But there’s only four rows! How does that work?

Err, yes. There is. In the mechanical keyboard world there is often a bit of an obsession to see how many keys you can strip out and still type just as fast as you would on a full size board. The Planck is the smallest board I have tried so far, with just 48 keys in total. The sharp eyed amongst you will probably have worked out that this means there isn’t enough room for a number row… and there isn’t. So how do you get access to all those keys that are missing?

The idea is pretty straightforward: Rather than have just one ‘shift’ layer which gives you capital letters and exclamation marks and all that good stuff, you have multiple ones. The blue keys to either side of the yellow space bar(s) on the bottom row let you ‘shift’ into completely different layers which have all the other keys – which you can program however you want.

For reference, here is my top layer, and then a couple of my additional ‘shifted’ layers.

So if I want to get to the number row, I press and hold down the blue key to the right of the space bar. Simple.

I am still figuring out what the perfect layout for me is (ignore that rogue right arrow on the top layer… I’m not sure what is going to end up in that space just yet) – but I already really like this board. It’s neat, and I have space for all of my weird custom modifier shortcut keys I have set up for work. The keys I use most are on the top layer, and anything I use less is just an extra press away. Of course it takes a bit of getting used to, but then all keyboard changes do – and I’ve adapted to the Planck far quicker than I have others in the past.

4. What kind of switches are in that bad boy?

Those would be the Outemu Sky 68g switches. They are ultra-tactile without being too loud to use around other folks.

5. What’s with this obsession with weird keyboards?

When you spend most of your life using one specific device, it’s good to explore different ways of interacting with it. Plus, the MacBook Pro keyboards are now so shockingly bad, that I will do almost anything to avoid having to use one. If you know, you know.

6. Nice USB cable.

Why thanks for asking. It’s a custom made one from CoolCable.co.uk.

Commodore 64 Mechanical Keyboard Project

19/09/201824/03/2020 Clicky SteveC64, cherry mx, Commodore, Commodore 64, DIY, mechanical keyboard, preonic, project, switches15 Comments

The Commodore 64 is a classic, and it has played an especially important role for me. It was the first computer I ever owned; given to me by my parents as a fifth birthday president, and my granda used to spend hours showing me how to program it from a big purple book he had gotten from a magazine. I credit this introduction with piquing my interest in technology early on. Staring at the rainbow loading screen, waiting for games to load from the cassette deck is also probably to blame for my terrible eyesight. I rediscovered the C64 as a teenager when I learned of its coveted SID sound chip, and I’ve been making music with it ever since under the guise of unexpected bowtie.

One of the things that always stood out in my mind was the C64’s keyboard, with its thick brown keys and symbols that I never really understood. If I could, I would use it all the time, but that was never really practical. Recently though, I fell down the rabbit hole of ‘mechanical keyboards’ online, where people build and use special keyboards with custom switches, sizes, and layouts. One of the projects I found included a re-working of the C64’s keyboard which brought it into the modern world, and I felt inspired to do something similar.

Sourcing a C64

I originally planned to source a broken Commodore online and use the keys from it, rather than defiling my beloved console. Truth be told though, mine was in a bit of a shabby state, and even broken C64s go for a pretty penny in the UK. I decided to just make use of what I had, with the belief that I could always pop the keycaps back on if I changed my mind later.

Purists, look away now.

Removing the keys

Removing the keys initially proved a bit trickier than I had anticipated… partly because I was trying to get them off while the thing was fully assembled. What you need to do is open up the breadbin itself, and then detach the keyboard from the chassis by taking out some screws. It was pretty easily done once I realised this was what was required – especially since my case had already been taken apart a fair few times to get at the SID.

Popping the keys off can be tricky, as they are far stiffer than one would expect from a more modern device. Keycap removers didn’t really work, and so I resorted to using a set of pliers, being careful to pull straight up to avoid damaging the posts underneath. Each key has a large spring underneath which can ping off easily if you move too quickly, so watch out for that.

Underneath was filthy, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give things a clean even if I didn’t end up building anything. I left both the spacebar and the Shift Lock keys in place, as I suspected they would be a bit more fiddly to deal with, and I wasn’t planning on using them anyway.

Finally, I gave the keycaps a clean with some soapy water and left them to dry.

The new board

There are lots of mechanical keyboard designs to choose from. For this project, I went with the Preonic, and got a partially built kit as part of a group buy from Massdrop, which came with a fetching orange aluminium case. It is a compact, ‘ortho-linear’ keyboard – which means the keys are arranged in a grid like pattern, rather than staggered as you would see more commonly. The idea is that your fingers have to move less, and in a more natural way when typing – which reduces strain. I opted for the Preonic (rather than the Planck, which has less keys), as I wanted to make the most of the C64 keycaps.

The switches

One of the main reasons people like mechanical keyboards is the quality and range of switches available. The switches are the bits underneath the plastic caps with the letters on them (or not, depending on what you prefer). Unlike the squishy keys you find on laptops and other modern computers that are so unsatisfying to use, mechanical keyboards feel great. They can either be smooth (linear), have a bump (tactile), or have a bump and an audible noise (clicky). Most people probably mentally associate typing experiences from yester-year with the clicky type – personified by the Cherry MX Blue switch, though the Commodore 64 actually had smooth keys. For this build I opted for the Cherry MX white (aka milky). They are clicky keys, but with a far less sharp and pronounced click than the Cherry MX blues. This means it’s a bit more socially acceptable when typing around other people (!).

Fitting the keycaps

The biggest issue with this project was that the keycaps from the Commodore 64 aren’t compatible with any of the switches that are commonly used today, and so wouldn’t just snap on. However, some wonderful person has designed a C64 to Cherry MX adaptor that can be 3d printed and shared it for free (open source is wonderful).

Commodore to Cherry MX Adaptor — Preview of the adaptor showing the Cherry MX side

I don’t have a 3d printer, so obviously had to outsource this. Getting a decent price in the UK was tricky at first, as nobody would take up an order that small, but eventually I got 80 caps for £22.98 including delivery from 3DPrintDirect.co.uk. That would be more than enough to cover the 60 keys on the Preonic. The material was SLS – carbon reinforced plastic.

It took about two weeks for the adaptors to arrive. I had read that some people had trouble with their adaptors, especially if the finish on the 3d printing was rough, but mine worked out pretty well. At first I thought I might have to disassemble the switches to install them as they were very tight, but in the end I could just press them against a flat surface and push hard with the keycaps on. My fingers hurt after doing a bunch, so I did them in batches. When the board arrived, I realised that it actually made much more sense to put the adaptors into the caps first, and hit them gently with a small hammer, before pressing the whole thing onto the switch. Getting them at the right angle could be tricky, but they all turned out fine in the end.

It’s worth noting that I did also discover that removing an adaptor from a keycap isn’t really possible without destroying the soft plastic and leaving the inside of the cap gunked up, so that means that these caps are now committed to the project, and won’t be reusable on the C64 itself like I had hoped.

Building the Preonic

The Preonic kit I got came from Massdrop in a bundle, and it was packed and presented beautifully. The instructions however, weren’t exactly n00b friendly, and it took me a bit to work out exactly where the spacers and screws were meant to go; it seemed like there were extra unnecessary holes in different places, which threw me. Eventually it came together though, and things began to take shape.

I’ve done a fair amount of soldering in my time modifying Game Boys etc, so it wasn’t a difficult task to deal with the through-hole switches. I did discover that one of them was bust after putting it all together though, which meant I had to de-solder and replace it, which was a bit of a pain.

The layout

When I started looking at the actual layout of the board, I ran into a couple of issues with my plan to use the Preonic. Firstly, I had overlooked the fact that the board is built around a grid of single keys, and doesn’t really support anything larger except in the middle of the bottom row. That meant that I didn’t have enough keys from my C64 to cover the full thing, and no perfect option for the space bar.

Secondly, my choice was further restricted by the design of the C64’s keys, as the caps are ‘sculpted’ depending on where they sit, so I couldn’t just take one from the top row and put it on the bottom, even if it would work better for my purposes.

In the end, I managed to source some extra single keys online, and did the best with what I had. I had feared that it would be wildly off, or that I would need to use really inappropriate keys, but it actually worked out not too bad at all.

Some folks have commented that the layout doesn’t make much sense, and I should say that I am not religiously sticking to what is printed on the keycaps. For example, I am using the ‘Return’ key in the place of a space bar, as that was the only key from the original board which seemed appropriate and fit the slot on the PCB. I’m using an equals key for Enter. The @ key brings up a list of my bookmarks with Shiori; The £ key activates my Alfred snippets; RUN STOP is my Hyper Key; < and > activate the ‘Lower’ and ‘Raise’ layers of the Preonic, and so forth. The beauty of the software which powers these keyboards (QMK) is that you can map and re-map the layout to whatever makes sense for your own needs.

You can find details of my layout over on GitHub.

The finished article

As a finishing touch, I got a special rainbow coloured USB cable made up from coolcable.co.uk as a nod to Commodore. Special thanks to them who put up my last minute changes to the connectors as I ordered the wrong thing.

I still need to set up the Preonic’s layers to suit my own custom layout, but I really like the board. It’s nice, solid and relatively compact, and now I have a personal homage to my granda and first computer. The keys feel pretty great to type on, though they could potentially have done with some heavier switches as the cap and adaptor combo mean that you end up putting more force on the keys than you usually would.

Edit: This was featured on Hackaday, which is awesome.