MAR.15.2025 - #15

Hi all 👋, it's the 15th issue of clicks 'n clacks, dropping on the 15th!!

This week, while writing this issue, I've been watching the 10-minute long trailer for Death Stranding 2, reading James' blog post about 100 things you can do on your personal website (many of which I have ideas and plans for clicksnclacks.com), buying my switches/stabilizers/tools for my Dymium65 build (coming soon), watching the Invincible Season 3 finale (holy heck was it good), and using Pippin Barr's new project to pretend I'm tip-tapping away on my phone when I need a distraction (mobile only link).

I am also a little concerned about the recent news regarding Pokemon Go parent company, Niantic, who recently sold off the entirety of its gaming division to Scopely, another player in the mobile gaming space. This raises a lot of questions about user location data and potential major changes to Pokemon Go. I don't personally see this going over well, especially considering some of Scopely's largest games (Monopoly Go and Marvel Strike Force) are riddled with micro-transactions, anti-consumer practices, and dark UX patterns. However, the lead devs and team from Niantic will be staying and joining the Scopely team, so there is hope the product will remain mostly the same.

Let's get into the rest of the issue!

clicks 🔗

Copy—right or wrong?

→ Here's an interesting article I discovered thanks to Anh and her blog, weeknotes. Written by graphic designer Elizabeth Goodspeed, it discusses the complicated and often arbitrary matter of borrowing/using copyrighted material in new digital works. Elizabeth briefly outlines some complicated history surrounding copyright law and how it is often controlled and policed by corporate power. Often this corporate power is misused and I particularly found the comparison she drew between Meta and Aaron Swartz profound—Meta illegally used over 80TB of copyrighted material to train its AI, and Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70GB of academic articles to share publicly. In this comparison, the massive corporate entity known as Meta faced no repercussions (and in the future it may be even easier for companies to legally mine AI training data), while Swartz was indicted on multiple felony charges. Goodspeed also writes "working with archival content – public domain or not – takes precision, intention, and care"—I believe this is the important takeaway from this article, to remember that context of where the borrowed is being used and giving credit where credit is due, matters. Since we are on the topic (and I think it's relevant), this newsletter itself is very much inspired by and pays homage to past works, most notably the logo, which comes from the classic Commodore 64 created by Jack Tramiel, and uses the beautiful Microgramma typeface by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti. Making sure this is always known and acknowledged is important to me and I think makes a huge difference when respecting the work of the past.

Monochrome magic app

→ I've been waiting on the release of this app for quite a while now—it was teased way back in September of last year and I've been hyped since. Built by Héliographe and Nuevo Tokyo, AgBr is a black and white film emulator/editor to turn any of your photos into beautiful monochromatic art. You can find the link to download the app here, and explore their informational and aesthetic website here. I've been exploring more and more B&W photography recently and have been attempting to apply it more on my X100V—specifically emulating the Ilford HP5 film stock, which AgBr also includes as a stock preset. Additionally, I love Héliographe's other app, 65x24, which brings amazing panoramic style photography (like the famous Hasselblad XPan) right to your phone. Both apps are intuitive, beautifully designed, and have incredible amounts of polish—I'm excited to continue playing with them both some more.

That's no moon

→ From the creators of the Sunlitt app comes their nighttime sister, Moonlitt!! This nifty tool allows you to track the moon's phases/path in realtime, and it uses your phone's gyroscope and AR functionality to track your position relative to the Moon, just like the Sunlitt app (but with the Sun). I've been a user of the Sunlitt app for a bit now, I find it useful (even just the free version) to track sunrise/set times and to preview how shadows will look according to my location (very useful for photography around the golden hour). Moonlitt's free version is quite generous and fully-featured, the only thing I noticed missing was access to homepage widgets, which isn't a dealbreaker for me. Check it out and download it here.

clacks ⌨️

Aether-infused keycaps

→ Straight from the realm of Eorzea, this FINAL FANTASY XIV inspired collection from NovelKeys is perfect for any brave Warriors of Light (or just fans of the series). The collection includes a themed NovelKeys Classic TKL keyboard, a separate custom keycap set, and a matching "Scions of the Seventh Dawn" deskpad. I especially enjoy all the customizability the keyboard has—you can swap out the coloured keycaps to match your class (Tank, DPS, or Healer) and even change the colour of the gasket mount (which is visible thanks to the semi-transparent top case) to match as well. Another detail is the typeface used on the keycap set, which resemble the text used in-game and even has "Eorzean" language character sub-legends on the alphanumeric keys. This collection is now available for pre-order and runs until April 14th—visit the NovelKeys website here to view and purchase this fantastical set.

Frankenstein-ed TouchID

→ Next up is a DIY board from the r/MechKeys Reddit community where user u/Hot_Frame_5511 built a mechanical keyboard that has TouchID (usually a feature exclusive to the Apple Magic Keyboard) built right in. This is to address the issue of wanting to use TouchID on your Mac, but not use the Magic Keyboard. I myself bought and kept a Magic keyboard on my desk for a while, but eventually I got tired of it collecting dust waiting for one little use case. It's also the first time I have seen this approach—usually I see separate devices or something like a desk enclosure to solve this issue. This user even went so far as to save the logic circuit board of the Apple keyboard so they didn't have to scrap a huge part of the original Magic keyboard it came from, another first. Overall very impressive, and it's intriguing to see other users in the comments of this post very heavily implying they'd pay a pretty penny to see this manufactured at scale. It's a niche issue but definitely worth it for those who want a fix to this problem.

Circuit board caps

→ Shoutout to kbd.news for leading me to this feature—these are custom artisan keycaps made by Reddit user u/MiserableMi1nimum3033. Their storefront has a variety of handmade resin-molded keycaps all with different circuit board or chipset fragments embedded inside of the cap. The caps give off a unique and tech-y vibe that I've haven't yet seen in custom caps. Bonus points for the caps being quite affordable!

That’s all for this week! I hope you enjoyed it, and now it’s time to hear from YOU 🫵. I want to know your opinion—what you liked, what you loved, what you didn’t like, what you skipped. Reach out at mail.clicksnclacks.com (or reply to this email!) and have a great weekend!!