Georgi Songvid and Preliminary Survey Results

Check out Jladd demonstrating some cool steno skills on his Georgi (and beautiful custom tripod mount) along to a soothing Cat Power song!

Also, the initial results of the Open Steno Project Community Survey are live, with a rather decent turnout of 103 responses as of this blog post, but it's still open, so if you want to contribute your own response, please feel free!

Homebrew Firmware for StenoMod

Hey, if you've ever wanted multichord repeat for your StenoMod, check out Paper Steno, Josh's custom firmware, now up on GitHub. I haven't used it myself, but I know several people who find it helpful (especially when using the steno machine to send arrow keystrokes and other often repeated actions), so if you think it'd come in handy, flash it to your StenoMod and give it a try!

Steno Zine!

A lot of it is about the technical details of how to get started with open-source steno, but I also get a bit into the history and culture around it, which is pretty interesting if you're into that kind of thing.

Ewen, a member of the Plover Discord, has made a lovely little 24-page zine, available for $2.50 (or anything above that if you'd like to kick in some additional cash) on Itch and Etsy. I find the whole phenomenon of zines incredibly charming, and I'm so tickled that there's now one on the subject of hobbyist stenography!

Beautiful Custom Tented Georgi Stand

Check out this amazing handmade tented Georgi stand from jladd! What an incredible piece of work!

2020 OSP Community Survey is Live!

Please take the survey here. Many many thanks to Ty for getting this all together, and to community members for adding their questions. I can't wait to see what we come up with!

Input Wanted for 2020 OSP Community Survey

I massively dropped the ball on the annual Community Survey in 2019 due to toddler parent brain and a host of other boring non-excuses, but the excellent Ty is helping me revive it for this year and is soliciting new questions on the Plover Discord. It'll probably be going live in the relatively near future, so if you've got a burning question you really want to see on there, now's your chance to submit it!

Jumping Into Steno

I just wanted to link to two really nice blog posts by OSP community member Jladd: Jumping Into Steno Part One and Part Two. I always love personal accounts of how people discover steno and what they're finding as they explore the system, and I really like the way Jladd puts things:

I got back to my hotel room with the nagging feeling that there must be a better way of capturing information in real-time. Away I went to the trusty internet to find the answer I knew had to be out there.

This is exactly how I found out about steno too! I was doing freelance transcription and I knew there had to be a better way. A quick trip to Wikipedia's article on stenotype, and the rest was history.

I had seen this before; I remembered watching Matlock, the detective, on television, presenting his case in the courtroom, and seeing the court reporter sitting up by the judge, quietly doing the impossible…capturing every single word in real-time. I remember puzzling about this when I was young and earnestly concluding that it must be impossible. (After all, they were hardly typing, and the machine they were using seemed to be missing an awful lot of keys.)

I was lucky enough to get to meet Jladd at PyCon 2019, as he notes in the second post, and I'm so happy that those few minutes of us chatting together have led him to give steno a try; he's been a valued contributor to the Plover Discord for just a few months shy of a year now, and we're very lucky to have him. I hope he continues this series! If you'd like to write down your own narrative of how you found out about steno or Plover and how you're finding the experience of learning it, please let me know! I'd like to link to as many of them as possible.