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I realized that 7 years have passed since we started working on MT3 and many might not know the story behind this profile. Also information is scattered on this blog and various forums and it’s not easy to find, so I think it’s time to refresh our memory and put everything together.
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The Tolkien keycaps are being produced as I write and I think this is the right time to talk about the lore behind this keycap set.
I’d like to stress on the fact that this is more than just a fancy LoTR set to dress your 5th keyboard; if you want to you can actually write in Elvish and Dwarvish with these keycaps. They are not just nice, they are functional. Not to mention they are officially licensed!
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By now you should know that I’m a retro-junkie. Signature Plastics SA keycaps are the closest we can ask to a vintage looking set but I’ve always seen it as an “hack”, not to mention that it is mostly an ABS set.
Few years ago Topre released the Hi-Pro keyboard which featured a wonderful set of high profile keycaps in a retrolucious beige colorway. I knew it had to be mine!
The keyboard was indeed sexy but the keycaps seemed still wrong, too high, too sharp and anyway still limited to topre switches. That got my maker-sense tickling and it is basically how the MT3 profile idea was born.
Granite Round 4 has finally started shipping to its final destinations, I’ve already seen some nice pictures and I’m glad people are enjoying it.
During the last few years we had quite some iterations of this set and I never took the time to catalog all the keycaps that have been produced. So, it took me some digging into the many backups but I can ultimately show you all the Granite keys that left the Signature Plastics factory lane (excluding blanks) with a good 99% approximation.
Beware! Lots of pictures inside.
The WhiteFox is the first A-grade mechanical keyboard I designed to be commercially available to the public.
In the last few years I worked on many iterations of the same compact layout and the WhiteFox is the result of the experience grown during a journey that actually started in 2013.
My first experiment was the SteelBeauty: a lovingly hand wired solid piece of steel powered by a Teensy development board.
Granite Round 4 includes a geeky new kit called “Elven Tongue“. It was gestating in my head since a couple of years now and today finally comes to life thanks to the Granite keycaps set success.
First of all a quick note about the terminology. Is it Elfish, Elvish, Elven, Elfic or what? This –I’m sure– is one of those topics fantasy-fans love to argue about.
Of course the Granite kit is based on Tolkien’s work. Tolkien references to the languages of elves as “Elvish” (with a “v”) but uses Elven in every other occasion. I didn’t want to use a term that directly connected to the Middle Earth (eg: Sindarin) so “Elven Tongue” seemed a good idea.
Now to the nerd talk.
All you wanted to know about the WhiteFox and you actually dared asking.
Below I’m trying to reply to the recurring questions that came out on Deskthority, Geekhack and MassDrop. during the keyboard pre-order. If you feel something is still unsolved please drop a comment to this post or keep the discussion on the aforementioned communities.