Low-traffic (once every 50 days) newsletter with keyboard stories and updates on the progress of the book about the history of keyboards. Posts by Marcin Wichary.| newsletter.shifthappens.site
Since the book will soon be delivered to about half the people who ordered it, with many to follow in the next weeks, I thought I’ll start sharing a few of the “making of” posts I had been thinking of. These will go deeper than before. Please, please let me know if this is interesting since they take a while to prepare. If you are looking for cool keyboards instead, I shared photos and a video of a fascinating “typewriter” in this November Kickstarter update and strange Australian n...| Shift Happens newsletter
A few sentences of dialogue from a 1968 sci-fi book changed the way I look at writing. The book is called Tales of Pirx the Pilot and written by someone who’d become my favourite author – Stanisław Lem. Lem was a masterful literary world builder, and Pirx stories were no exception. The opening paragraphs weren’t wasted on clunky exposition or establishing shots. No, you were thrown straight into Pirx’s universe, without an onramp and without a warning. The explanations would come in...| Shift Happens newsletter
As the book is nearing its delivery, please check out the cute mini game I made out of the book’s slipcase. Click or tap to open Shift Happens Cover StoriesAlso, the book got a nice write-up in Ars Technica and I was on a short and sweet public-radio podcast. ⌘ The booklet cover story was cute and nostalgia-filled. In contrast, designing the rest of the book covers ended up among the hardest design task of the entire project. I am not a cover design expert. It feels like a very specific ...| Shift Happens newsletter
The book will start shipping soon! If you have lost track of Kickstarter updates, please supply or verify your address by following these instructions. If you are not a Kickstarter backer or later pre-orderer, I opened up a bunch of recent updates to everyone, and they might be interesting to read if you want to see more of the process of bringing a book to life: July update, photos fromthe printer visit and the sequel, August update, and September update. ⌘ Many years ago, I received desig...| Shift Happens newsletter
The dream state of writing a book is the flow state. It’s romantic, this idea that the skies part and perfect words and metaphors and connections flow straight into your fingertips at the pace ideal for measured writing and satisfied reflection. The good news is that this actually happens. There were moments in the last few years where my brain stumbled upon a phrase I felt so happy about, I had to sit down to a keyboard to write, right then and there. But this state can also delude. In 201...| Shift Happens newsletter
Hello, friends! I’m finding Kickstarter kind of funny, because it separates milestones in strange ways. A successful Kickstarter is better than a failed one, of course, but a Kickstarter being finished doesn’t mean the books are in people’s hands quite yet. Stretch goals and initial funding muddle things even further. Are you supposed to quarter-celebrate each time around? Just wait until everything is shipped? I don’t actually know. But in the meantime, here we are, close to yet anot...| Shift Happens newsletter
The Kickstarter for Shift Happens still has 10 days to go. Please help us get to $700,000 and unlock a free nice colorful third-volume for everyone by backing and spreading the word! And now for something completely different… ⌘ At first, Dana Sibera’s explorations might feel like just strange hypotheticals, visual madlibs, bored evenings in Photoshop. Here’s one example. A Mac IIsi made of marble. Why not? Macintosh IIsi in marble · Source · This and the following captions come fr...| Shift Happens newsletter
If you backed the book, you have seen some – but not nearly all – of this in my first (!) backer update. The campaign update The Kickstarter campaign was funded within the first two hours, and at this time it’s very close to being 300% funded, which is incredible. This means the book will definitely get printed – as a matter of fact, the printer is excited, too – and if more people back, the book could automatically become nicer for everybody owing to economies of scale! At the sa...| Shift Happens newsletter
Kickstarter I just pressed the Enter key at the right place, and the Kickstarter for my book went live. I hope you find it valuable and entertaining, and enticing enough to click on one of the tiers and then, too, press Enter at the right place. (Or use your mouse or finger, I guess, if you’re like that.) Please note: The early bird tier will only be there for 48 hours, and I wouldn’t want you to miss it! Also: If you are comfortable, please share the link to the campaign anywhere you can...| Shift Happens newsletter
The Kickstarter for the book will launch on Tuesday, February 7, at 9am Pacific! I will send another email before so you won’t miss it, but you can also bookmark the Kickstarter page (although at this moment it is not particularly exciting). There will also be a livestream at 11am Pacific (2pm east coast time, 7pm London time) the same day. I will be joined by Robin Rendle – a designer, typographer, and one of my favourite design thinkers – to talk about the book, the stories within, th...| Shift Happens newsletter
Happy New Year! The website for the book is ready at shifthappens.site. I’m really excited about it: you can see what the book is going to look like exactly you can learn so much more about what’s inside if you were wondering what the chapter names were all about, wonder no more! there are a few small games at the bottom (with more to come) you can learn more about what this book means to me and a few other things! I’m very happy with how this turned out. Please, check it out, send me y...| Shift Happens newsletter
I’ve printed many versions of the book before using print on demand, but what arrived last week feels so much more important. It’s the first test from the actual printer in Maine I’m going to employ. Okay, this is really a test’s test. I wanted to print a sample chapter first to check out various tricky situations – dark backgrounds, small details, saturated colours – and pick between two almost-identical types of paper. There will be a few more “real” tests, and very lik...| Shift Happens newsletter
In the chronology of my Spanish trip going haywire, the hard drive dying came on May 5, after me getting COVID and after the cat sitter locked herself out of my apartment, but before an airline kicked me out of the airport despite following all the recovery rules, and before the second airline lost my luggage. The drive was a relatively new four-terabyte SSD, and 75% of its contents were the 100,000+ files that encompass the book: the writing, the high-resolution photos, the typesetting, the ...| Shift Happens newsletter
I finally have some good news to share. We† found the right paper and the printer that knows what to do with it, and have all the verbal agreements we need. Things can go haywire still, but this is the current plan: crowdsourcing (likely Kickstarter) in February 2023 printing over the summer book publication in the late summer/fall 2023 I’ll tell you the complex story of the paper search later, but what’s exciting about this moment is also that I finally can start sharing some aspects o...| Shift Happens newsletter
There are some exciting new developments on the printer/paper front. If things go well, I’ll have something to announce next time! Please keep your fingers crossed. Have you ever seen a pinball machine being scared? Pinballs, already fascinating during their mechanical era, accelerated in complexity with the advent of microprocessors. Like many other things in the 1980s, pinballs too became computers, and this allowed them to reach new heights: music and digitized sound effects, small and t...| Shift Happens newsletter
All of the linked photos are compressed, but they come in the original 42-megapixel resolution from my current camera. Yes, megapixel wars were and are stupid. But trust me, these are the *good* megapixels.The famous saying goes “the best camera is the one you have on you,” but I keep changing my mind about what it means. In the early days of my interest in photography, this felt simple. “The best camera is the one you have on you” meant “don’t forget to bring your camera.” Then...| Shift Happens newsletter
Throughout the history of keyboards, a battle has been fought by two opposing camps. On one side, there were keyboards with the modifier keys – the Shifts, the Controls, the Commands. They appeared in QWERTY’s suburbia the moment typewriters needed uppercase and lowercase characters, and never went away. Typical layouts of 1880s and 1890s typewritersEarly typewriters experimented with two, or even three separate shifts, and while eventually we standardized on just one Shift key (cloned ...| Shift Happens newsletter
What’s going on with the book There’s no easy way to put this. The book is ready to go. The writing, proofreading, typesetting are completely done, and photography’s incredibly close. The campaign video is 100% ready. The cool little site I made for the occasion needs just a few extra days of polish. But the book also needs to be delayed. All of this – regrettably, sadly, frustratingly – is owing to the supply chain problems. The printers are either unavailable or overloaded, the r...| Shift Happens newsletter
I learned a thing long time ago, and it was: Once you print something, you can’t get it back. On the surface, this statement doesn’t make any sense. Scanners are cheap, and in 2021 some digital cameras are as good as scanners, too. Optical character recognition is so fast that it can happen in real time, leaving enough processor power for simultaneous translation to a different language. And I myself bragged about scanning almost 400 printed items and putting them up on the Internet Archi...| Shift Happens newsletter
I’m writing this newsletter under duress. The last issue, one I sent just a week ago, arrived in spam folders for most people owing to a glitch in Revue – and I really wanted you to know about the livestream that’s happening this Saturday. But this also presents a fun opportunity. The many recent issues of the newsletter were complex mini essays, and it might be fun to do something much simpler. So let’s just talk about three bad keyboards I’ve gotten recently! Keyboard №1 I watc...| Shift Happens newsletter
Quick updates first: I am aiming to release the book in 2022. There are still many unknowns, but people who know the printing process better than I am tell me this is doable. (I still have to go to to a museum in Spain, but hoping this becomes possible.) Let’s meet! I will be hosting a very informal livestream if you want to come: see some of my keyboards, and let’s just chat! This will be happening on Saturday, July 17, at 10am San Francisco time (5pm GMT). More livestream details and ...| Shift Happens newsletter
I open the door, exit the bar, and walk outside onto the sidewalk in a surprisingly straight line. It’s a nice, warm night. I hear muffled music coming from the inside, and the buzzing of the blinking neon that’s trying very hard to spell “Lefty’s.” I take a deep whiff and immediately regret it, being reminded of a large trash bin nearby. And then, it hits me: I’m a loser. I’m balding, fat, and on the more cruel side of forty. I came to this town searching for love, but I haven...| Shift Happens newsletter
Every Saturday at 8am, a certain ritual takes place. All my snoozed book-related emails resurface that time, my inbox lighting up with dozens of reminders. I respond to a few that need responding, poke a few people I haven’t heard from in months, archive emails that feel complete, and snooze the rest once more so that they reappear in a week. I learned to love this part of the process, that flywheel of sorts that gives the book some momentum. Some of the emails are eBay purchases in transit...| Shift Happens newsletter
The 1983 Apple Lisa wastebasket – the first trashcan in GUI historyYou’ve always been a bit suspicious of the trashcan on your computer’s imaginary desk top, and I’m here to tell you why. I know what you’re thinking – I figured it out already, in real life no one keeps a trashcan on top of their desk. Yes, this adds to the tension. But the real reason is, I think, far more interesting. The trashcan is an example of a skeuomorph – an intentional borrowing from a prior time tha...| Shift Happens newsletter
Sometime in 2019, I fell in love with a photo in a way I’ve never known before: What grasped me here? Many things. The grittiness. The composition. The angular shapes of the key punch machine juxtaposed with the person typing. The stains on the wall. The sideburns and the glasses placing the action, I thought, some time in the 1970s. And that sign, that sign! “EXPRESS KEYPUNCH: 3 minutes or 6 cards (or until asked to leave!)” Six cards means a mere 480 bytes; you don’t expect a keyboa...| Shift Happens newsletter
It’s hard for me to explain how I feel about Twitter. On one hand, there is the abuse, the Nazis, and Jack Dorsey’s almost legendary indolence. When it doesn’t chip away at your attention, Twitter creates – and then supercharges – your outrage. But also: Twitter has been helpful and, as cheesy as it sounds, made me a better person. Yes, I sometimes become snarky and (very occasionally) even cruel, but I also try hard to follow activists, pay attention to thoughtful people, and liste...| Shift Happens newsletter
It makes perfect sense that the awkward term WYSIWYG – “what you see is what you get” – came into prominence only during the era of computers. For typewriters, what you saw was never not, with the paper output being both the first and the last step in the process, and the typebars matching the keys one to one. Even the non-printing keys (Tab, Return, Margin Release…) only had to be learned once, and afterwards never changed their purpose. Computers complicated things. Suddenly, ke...| Shift Happens newsletter
I don’t know how this works in other museums, but at the Computer History Museum in California, a decade ago, the front-of-house volunteer ladder had three steps. The first one was being a greeter – saying hello to visitors, explaining the museum’s layout and activities, and handling purchases. After getting some experience doing that, you could graduate to a docent, and sign up to give one of the few pre-arranged public tours. CHM volunteers at work: greeters (upper row) and docents (l...| Shift Happens newsletter
I felt a little bad for the few weeks of delay in sending the previous newsletter, so here’s an extra edition. Just like with the jokes issue, there’s no story here – just a stroll through two folders in my database: “Built into desks”and “Tech posed in nature.” I hope you enjoy. If you’re reading this in Gmail, it will cut it off in the middle. You might consider opening it right now as a page for uninterrupted reading. ⌘ Computers were once so big that in order for keyboar...| Shift Happens newsletter
What am I typing this on This is that rare story where a Twitter disagreement led to something amazing. In May last year, someone tweeted a photo of a rare,...| newsletter.shifthappens.site
Low-traffic (once every 50 days) newsletter with keyboard stories and updates on the progress of the book about the history of keyboards. Posts by Marcin Wichary.| newsletter.shifthappens.site
This happened about two years ago. It was close to the end of a workday. I was a little stressed out, more than a little tired, a coworker was standing next...| newsletter.shifthappens.site