We're hiring; also, cool Navigator Printable inside

Hi |FNAME|,

Earlier this month I got to go to Japan and have a meetup with some of our users there in a funky little cafe in Shibuya, Tokyo. It was awesome. We gave away two Navigators and a Voyager and I learned lots and met great people. I'd love to have more of these. If you want to put together a user meetup in your city where I get to hang out with you and a bunch of keyboard-loving friends, just reply and let's chat.

As noted in the subject line, we're hiring! Looking for a C and Rust developer who enjoys keyboards, small teams, and lots of trust and autonomy. Fully remote, of course. Job listing here.

Below you'll find two Navigator-related updates: An official ZSA printable by Robin that lets you use it with your thumb (which I brought along to the meetup and people enjoyed) and a firmware feature that makes auto-mouse layer so much better.

Next, some typ.ing news: This month we launched a new training mode, and it's my favorite one so far. Details below. As for our Daily Challenge, here are last month's top 3:

#1: Jegger, with 73wpm but an impressive 98% accuracy across 30 completed challenges (so, every single day).
#2: prime.space.beef with 85wpm, 96% accuracy, and 28 challenges completed. Great username.
#3: rmku, 69wpm, 97% accuracy, 30 challenges completed.

These are new names! Quite a dynamic leaderboard. Curious to see the results for October.

Finally, this month I wrote a love letter to an amazing outdoor toy which is surprisingly affordable for how well made and fun it is.

As always, thanks so much for reading. Please share our Wanted ad far and wide with all of your nerdy friends, and please do reply to share any of your thoughts from this issue. I promise to answer. :)

All the best,
Erez

Practice typing with your favorite book excerpts

Readwise and typ.ing, together at last

This new training mode lets you type your favorite excerpts from books you've read. Or, if you don't use Readwise yourself, you can type my favorite excerpts from the books I've read (I promise they're interesting). We've put a lot into this one — extensive thought and testing. A great way to spend more time with books you love and stimulate your thinking while becoming better at typing. Also good for exam prep. I wrote about it and made a video demo, and you can try it out yourself.

Introducing the Navigator Thumb Module

It's a flexible system

This free official "printable" allows you to easily move the Navigator trackball to your thumb. The blog post shows you how, videos included. This requires no soldering and will not void your warranty. Here's to hardware designed to be modded, and the mods that follow!

Press to Exit Auto-Mouse

And other Navigator firmware updates

The Navigator has been embraced by quite a few people with lots of enthusiasm and feedback. In this post we share a new advanced setting that we've been daily-driving and enjoying. It keeps your mouse layer active when you move your Navigator, so you never time out before sending a click. What do you think, should this be the new default?

Featured User Interview

Maciej Lech

Game developer

Maciej was able to arrange his life so he can care for his family as a single parent while working as an indie game developer within Roblox's not-always-friendly ecosystem. Inspiring.

"While I have nothing against collaborations and big studios, I think some of the most unique games out there are made by one person."

Layout of the month

combo mods - linux [i3]

My main layout is in three flavours - Linux, Mac and Windows. The main idea is the same - a lot of combos to trigger common punctuation and modifier keys, with layer switching by tap-holds on the thumb keys to get to symbols, numbers and function keys.

Things we liked

NetNewsWire →

The RSS reader I didn’t know I needed

After Google Reader died, I switched to Inoreader and used it for years. It didn’t support offline downloads and recently became slower— leading me to discover NetNewsWire. This 100% free and open-source RSS reader is available for iOS and macOS, and it just rocks. It’s fast, clean, modern, and generally a joy to use. By far my best software discovery this month; I switched and am not looking back.

Godchecker →

Your Guide To The Gods

A fun little non-fiction website for fans of pantheons. It’s a big list of gods from all over the world, each with a little blurb. There’s also a search feature, and a ranked list of “top gods”. Did you know Shango, the Yoruba God of Storms? Apparently, he likes to party and is “quite approachable”.

First Person Tetris →

Mind-bending

It’s Tetris, but what if the whole world spun around rather than the brick? Very nicely done. Free, browser-based, and worked better for me on my phone than on my computer. Great soundtrack, too.

tooooools.app →

Minimalist and lo-fi effects for images and video

This browser-based app is free for personal and commercial use, no attribution required. It comes with a bunch of interesting effect presets like displacement, dithering, scattering, gradients, and more. Most allow you to export PNGs, but some allow SVG exports, too. The effects are great.