QMK macropads and honey badgers. That's it that's my newsletter

Adorable and/or dank macropads I’m trying really hard not to buy

I’m so sorry in advance, but my keyboardy quest to eliminate my hand tendonitis took me on an accidental side dip into a related consumerism kiddie pool, albeit a maker-aligned one.

The DIY mechanical keyboard community is also home to a thriving hub of macropad designs which are either open-sourced, or PCB printed in small batches and sold as solder-it-yourself bundles. Because if you’re at the point where you’re designing your own keyboard, you might as well use all those errant PCB layout skills and spare keyboard components in your stash pile to craft a few extra bonus gadgets.

The Milk 2% keyboard is the king of whimsical micro-macropads. It’s a play on the keyboard community’s tendency to group keyboards by the rough percentage of physical keys they have compared to a “full” standard keyboard.

(Most industry-produced keyboards are in the 80% category and, occasionally, 60%. However, many enthusiast-designed split ergo(nomic)mech(anical) keyboards are heavily optimized for hand injuries, and whittle it down to 40% or even 30% so you never have to reposition your hands. So…why not go down to 2%?)

I’ll take two teaspoons of tiny milk to-go with my 58-key entree, please.

The Spacepad Micro Macropad is another tiny design that takes a 5-way switch in one position, and can take either a key or a rotary encoder in the other position.

I might actually build this one: not to use alongside another keyboard, but for my tablet. I’ve been reading textbook PDFs on my tablet a lot, and it starts hurting pretty fast; repetitive thumb-scrolling is one of the fastest surefire ways I know of to get tendonitis. A lower-actuation physical scroller would be really handy.

Thanks to the magic of QMK, 1% keyboards are real too. The Uno keyboard accepts either a single key or an encoder, and the USB contacts are part of the PCB so you can jack it directly into your computer if you’re thirsty for that sweet rotary action.

BlueMicro’s 2x4 wireless macropad was designed for use with Artsey.io, a heavily chorded pocket keyboard layout designed for people who are only able to type with one hand, or who are recovering from a hand injury.

The BDN9 3x3 macropad is an extremely practical one that looks well suited to specialized workflows that involve lots of scrubbing, such as video editing. The top row can accept either rotary encoders or keys.

The Spacemouse Wireless Macropad looks ideal for CAD users. It’s a 7-key macropad design that splays along the periphery of a holonomic (6-axis) mouse. Despite the form factor, it doesn’t have any communication with the holonomic mouse; it’s electronically just a totally separate 7-key keyboard.

Delving firmly back into whimsical territory, the Banana Keyboard is a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche joke (or is it serious???) keyboard: a 7-key macropad “perfectly shaped to fit the human hand. Checkmate, ortho gang.”

Honey badgers are pretty OP

Still riding the high of the Honey Heist TTRPG one-shot that Balt GM’d a while back. My randomly assigned character was a honey badger who wore two hats and was the heist driver, whom I played as a level-headed chill boi who drove with one paw while chugging honey with the other and blasting Queen at heist-deadening levels.

I later looked up several videos about honey badgers and realized that while I had terrifically misjudged their chillness, I had unintentionally gotten their IDGAFitude spot on.

Honey badgers are fantastic improvisational tool users, and can probably escape from just about anything that isn’t welded shut.

This TierZoo video describes honey badgers and a couple of other mustelids as potentially OP character builds in the in-game universe of Life itself.

Last but not least, honey badgers have nearly-impenetrable skin and give so few fucks that they have been observed casually strutting up to packs of lions and deliberately antagonizing them with no clear material gain from the situation.

That’s all for now! Enjoy your dense dose of distractions.