Shift Happens book updates
Low-traffic (once every 50 days) newsletter with keyboard stories and updates on the progress of the book about the history of keyboards. Subscribe and get instant access to cool secret stuff! Posts by Marcin Wichary.
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Moiré no more
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 recognit...
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 – and I really wanted you to know about the livestream that’s happening this Saturday.But this also pres...
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 me this is doable. (I still have to go to to a museum in Spain, but hoping this becomes possible.)Let...
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 inside, and the buzzing of the blinking neon that’s trying very hard to spell “Lefty’s.” I take ...
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 respond to a few that need responding, poke a few people I haven’t heard from in months, archive em...
A tale of three skeuomorphs
You’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...
Dear Cynthia
Sometime in 2019, I fell in love with a photo in a way I’ve never known before:
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 doesn’t chip away at your attention, Twitter creates – and then supercharges – your outrage.But also: Twi...
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 typewriters, what you saw was never not, with the paper output being both the first and the last step in the p...
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 steps.The first one was being a greeter – saying hello to visitors, explaining the museum’s layout an...
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 story here – just a stroll through two folders in my database: “Built into desks” and “Tech posed in na...
To save a keyboard, pt. 2
This is that rare story where a Twitter disagreement led to something amazing.In May last year, someone tweeted a photo of a rare, specialized, 50-key keyboard:
To save a keyboard, pt. 1
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, arriving just before personal computers with Word took over.
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 from scratch, he continued, “it would doubtless be possible to design a more convenient keyboard th...
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 vilest of keyboards, a truly cursed idea that I almost don’t want to talk about – since that will m...
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 art, emoji, etc.), and focus on the lesser-known in-betweeners: typewriter mysteries, overtyping, PLATO...
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 visited what felt like its equally astonishing computer counterpart, and my recent trip to Japan also b...
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 when I realized that a) the “keyboard humour” folder in my database has 250 items, and b) precisely no...
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 corner of a room in a small panelák apartment, partitioned away to be “Marcin’s area,” could hardly ...
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 to me asking for a certain file, and so I went to my computer’s terminal, keyed in three simple char...