New Builds!

The amazing Sammi has been working tremendously hard on the Plover codebase recently! Lots of continuous builds of Plover 4 pre-release candidates coming out lately. And I feel like that means we might have even bigger and more exciting news soon, but in the mean time, it's still pretty great!! All thanks and credit to Sammi for being such a great shepherd of the project!

Community Anki Decks

If you like learning and reviewing steno using digital flashcards, this repository of Plover-themed Anki decks might come in handy. So far there are four decks: Learn Plover, Emily Symbols, Emily Modifiers, and Top N Words. According to Will, who built the repository:

The generated decks use the Steno-Font to display the steno layout for outlines. The font is embedded in the generated decks and does not need to be installed separately. This is done so the deck can be synced to the web or mobile apps and still display correctly.

Typey Type Lesson Builder

Check out this wonderful blog post by Di about her process to rebuild the lesson generator on her amazing and invaluable steno learning app to make her development of new Typey Type lessons vastly more efficient. Even for non-developers, there are some enlightening and useful ideas in there! As Di says...

What had previously been hours of headaches and wrangling was done in moments on a whim. Seriously, I cannot overstate the satisfaction I felt in that moment.

The entire steno community has been benefiting from Di's incredible work for years now, and I'm so grateful that she's continued to improve and perfect it. Three cheers for the magnificent Di!

The Starboard!

I just learned about The Starboard today, when I saw on the Plover Discord news channel that it now supports Javelin firmware. Wow! What a beautiful little hobbyist machine at a fantastic price! I might need to add one of these to my already ridiculous collection of tiny footprint steno machines. I don't really have the space, but it's just so dang cute! So happy to see all the new machines in the hobbyist steno space.

Paul's Steno GitHub Profile GIF

Paul has a cool GIF taken from one of his excellent steno coding videos on his GitHub profile, and he thought other people might like to do the same, so he offered some advice for making one:

When thinking about what I wanted to put on my GitHub profile README, I was just about to copy what I'd seen others do and write some "About Me" text, but then realised it could be way cooler to show off what writing with steno is like in a way that might resonate with developers.

GitHub doesn't allow embedded videos in the READMEs, so I had to resort to a classic looping animated GIF. After recording a video with OBS, I used the `ffmpeg` (https://ffmpeg.org/) and `gifsicle` (https://github.com/kohler/gifsicle) command-line tools to create a GIF that was not so big that it took ages to load, but also didn't sacrifice too much on image quality.

The command invocations are not easy to intuit, but in case someone wants to experiment with their own steno video LM and tweak the parameters, here is what got me my result:

`ffmpeg -i steno.mov -pix_fmt rgb8 -r 10 output.gif && gifsicle -O3 output.gif -o output.gif`

Abby's Left Hand Modifiers

There's a new left hand modifier dictionary that, according to Abby, its creator:

is inspired by and can essentially be seen as a combination of Emily's Modifiers and Achim Siebert's Left Hand Modifier Keys. Essentially, it allows every shortcut to be typed in two strokes and using only the left hand. As such, only the following keys are used:

Looks promising! If you're in the market for that sort of thing, you should definitely check it out!

Plover2CAT Updates!

Plover2CAT development seems to be proceeding extremely well! Some new features:

- SRT captioning files are now word wrapped to 42 chars max and each line gets accurate start/end times

- word-wrapped captions in separate window while writing into the editor, with customizable character buffer for undos and minimum display time for each line

- (untested) send captions to MS Teams and Zoom sessions if you have the api link/token

- keyboard editing: type freely in the transcript with a normal keyboard whenever plover output is disabled, not necessary to use the insert text dialog

Great work! I think I might wind up testing that Zoom and Teams API integration in my captioning work. Might wind up coming in pretty handy under certain circumstances.