The worst keyboard ever made
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 –...
How I learned to hate InDesign
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...
In the land of the lounge lizards
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 last interview
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...
A tale of three skeuomorphs
The 1983 Apple Lisa wastebasket – the first trashcan in GUI history You’ve always been a bit suspicious of the trashcan on your computer’s imaginary desk...
Dear Cynthia
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...
Greatest hits 2016–2019
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...
As close as possible to real surfing
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...
To save a keyboard, pt. 3
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...
When keyboards were desks
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...
To save a keyboard, pt. 2
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,...
To save a keyboard, pt. 1
What am I typing this on I’m writing this on a TA Adler-Royal Satellite 40. It’s among the last typewriters ever made, the final breath of a dying species,...
The Italian senate survival manual
“The major, fundamental drawback of the keyboard still consists in its irregular and illogical layout,” wrote one critic a few decades ago. If we could start...
The worst keyboard ever made
During my research I encountered many keyboards that felt awful, looked bad, or were conceptually bankrupt. But it was only a few months ago that I found the...
To walk among keyboard magicians
I recently gave a talk at a Berlin conference Beyond Tellerrand about keyboards used for fun and for art. I tried to breeze past the obvious stops (ASCII...
A time machine behind the cypress trees
I’ve had, so far, a lot of luck with keyboard-related adventures. Two years ago I stumbled upon a magical typewriter museum in Spain, just a week later I...
Stop me if you’ve seen this one before
That the tech industry is not particularly funny becomes cruelly obvious every April Fools’ Day, when perusing books like these — or, in my world, the day...
Four hands on one keyboard
It was four of us, four teenage boys sitting down to a computer to spend hours playing a videogame known to no one else. It was four of us because the little...
Shift + Shift
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...
A love letter to the in-betweeners
What am I typing this issue on? Here’s one thing that’s been bringing me a surprising amount of joy when writing the book. No, it wasn’t figuring out final...
