thock weekly — issue 07
ZMK's wireless case, foam sealed inside a switch housing, a closed GMK buy's honest cooldown, a five-region launch that doesn't stagger, and the 60% layout's improbable origin — plus GMK CYL OG Extensions closes its Geekhack buy today as attention fully rotates away from TA Neo.
thock reads the hobby switch by switch, layout by layout, group buy by group buy. This issue rounds up five pieces worth the read, one per pillar, then closes with the tracker's clearest signals from the week of August 10, 2026.
Guides — the fork wired firmware doesn't prepare you for
ZMK for wireless and split builds: a practical guide
ZMK was built on Zephyr from its first commit with Bluetooth and split pairing as day-one assumptions, unlike QMK's later-grafted wireless support. The piece also draws the honest line around ZMK Studio's GUI — key reassignment and layer renaming work today, but combos and conditional layers still mean opening a devicetree file by hand.
Read it if you're speccing a split or wireless board and were about to default to QMK-plus-VIA out of habit.
Ideas — the mod priced per switch, not per board
The Holee mod: what foam inside the switch actually buys you
Small polyurethane pads seated inside the switch housing damp an internal resonance no PE foam or tape mod can reach, at a cost of three to five minutes per switch — three to six hours for a 65% board. The piece is upfront that it only pencils out when the switches are already open on the bench for a lube pass.
Read it if you've heard the term thrown around forum threads and want to know exactly which foam layer it means before opening a single switch.
Trends — what a closed group buy's cooldown actually means
GMK CYL TA Neo's group buy is closed — here's what a November 2026 ship estimate actually means
GMK CYL TA Neo closed its buy July 17, 2026, and its tracker score has now fallen four straight snapshots — 62, then 50, then 40, then 32. The piece argues that reads worse than it is: once ordering locks, the chatter that feeds a tracker score dries up by design, and TA Neo's numbers are also getting crowded out week over week by GMK CYL OG Extensions, a still-open buy pulling the community's attention while it lasts — the same dynamic this issue's tracker section closes with.
Read it if you've ever watched a set you already bought into lose tracker ground and wondered whether that meant something.
News — a five-region launch that doesn't stagger
GMK Just Beachy's group buy opens August 18 across five vendors on five regions
GMK Just Beachy opens for orders August 18, 2026 at Keebz N Cables, Divinikey, Prototypist, KBDfans, and Unikeys — five vendors covering five regions, all on the same calendar day instead of a staggered rollout. It caps an eight-week tracker climb with zero down weeks, from 8 up to 40 heading into the open.
Read it if you've ever lost a group buy's higher MOQ tiers to a region that opened days before yours.
Deep dive — the geekhack thread behind a decade of vocabulary
How the 60% became the default custom-keyboard layout
Every buyer's guide opens with the same four-term taxonomy — 60%, 65%, 75%, TKL — as though it always existed. The piece traces it to GH60, one open-source PCB out of a 2013 geekhack thread, and works through why that single case-and-plate tooling decision still shapes every compact layout built since.
Read it if the 60%/65%/75% vocabulary has always felt assumed rather than explained.
W33 tracker snapshot
GMK CYL OG Extensions closes its Geekhack group buy today, Wednesday, August 12, 2026, and the tracker's read on it climbed to 80 this week, up from 70 — its sharpest single-week move yet, with Prototypist and NovelKeys kittings pushing toward higher MOQ tiers in the final days. That climb is the flip side of this issue's trends pick: GMK CYL TA Neo, closed since mid-July, dropped again to 32 as community attention fully rotated to the OG Extensions close, per the tracker's own note for the week.
Elsewhere, Split/Ergo layout kept climbing, up to 87 from 85, still 2026's dominant keyboard search trend per continuing ergo-roundup coverage of the Glove80, ZSA Voyager, and Kinesis Advantage360 Pro. And Hall Effect/Rapid Trigger held its plateau at 97, flat this week after climbing from 95 the week before, as the Keychron V6 Ultra HE Kickstarter enters its third week near its funding ceiling.
The subscribe form is below — no account needed, just an inbox. thock also publishes the full scored table at /trends/tracker if a single week's snapshot isn't enough.