Hobbies can be a sanity saver

I think it’s reasonable to say that a lot of us have found ourselves with nowhere to go in 2020! To keep the four walls from closing in, I’ve taken to serial hobbying. Where possible, I try to keep my hobbies creative, so that I have something to show for it at the end. ¹

I was glad to find make time to complete a little hardware job that I’d had on the back-burner for a while.

This is a Quefrency keyboard ², with wife-approved keycaps ³. Assembled from a kit. The green shift keys standing in for space bars were spares I had lying around - (they aren’t to help us SHOUT A LOT).

Lessons learnt

1. Making things is very calming,
2. The keyboard making hobby has come a long way in 10 years,
3. Lead-free solder is fine to work with,
4. Modern AA powered soldering irons ⁴ can be a vast improvement on 1990s-era cheap mains-powered irons. (So fast to warm up! Maintains heat well! …as long as the batteries are freshly charged), and
5. For most non-geeks, the colour of the keycaps are at least as important as the type of keyswitch (Gateron Browns in this case).

1. Okay, so online shopping also leaves tangible things. But there’s something about the delayed gratification of that form of entertainment that doesn’t help my state of mind. ↩

2. From keebio. This is the 65% version with macro keys, plate kit and PCB-mount MX stabilisers. ↩

3. From kbdfans ↩

4. I bought this one, but not from that link. ↩