Monday, April 26, 2010

Finally, high-rez pictures!

A friend came to my coworking space today and brought a camera, so I finally have good pictures of my kepadified Sidewinder X4. Here it is alongside my $2,395 Revolution Grand:



And here's a closeup of the keypads, making a more or less steno keyboard shape out of the crooked qwerty keys:



Many thanks to Sumana for the pictures.

In other news, I had my Python lesson today, and we got a stopgap file output system working, but I don't want to upload it to the github yet, because while the asterisk is still deleting strokes properly in the GUI display, it's not deleting them in the file, which makes for confusing reading (unless you're one of those people who are 100% accurate at all times, in which case just say the word and I'll upload it with all speed.) But if all goes as planned we'll fix the problem next week and I'll be able to give you guys a way to save the text you're stenoing with your awesome $60 keyboards. And maybe I'll try to do a little hacking on my own until then, so stay tuned.

8 comments:

Abby Bayne said...

Great news Mirabai, thanks so much for your diligent efforts! This project has kept my self-study momentum going too. It was starting to peter out a bit when I thought I would have to sink big money into software/hardware to get transcribing. Now I'm back full swing!

Tony said...

Mirabai, I seem to be having a little problem. I can't seem to access the ploverbd.py file. I found tktest.py and stenowinder.py, but when I click on the link for ploverbd.py, I don't see anything there. It just looks like a screen with line numbers like you would see in a text editor for coding. My browser also complains about a Javascript that is taking too long. I've tried it from two different internet connections on two different computers. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks!

Mirabai Knight said...

Hi, Tony. Sorry about that; I'm having a similar problem. My guess is that the length of the file and the number of changes overwhelms the web version of the file. For now, the best solution might be just downloading the whole package. You can ignore any of the files you don't want; they're all pretty tiny. Go to the main Plover Github page and click the "download source" button. It shouldn't take long, and then you'll have all the files you need.

Tony said...

Thanks, Mirabai! Ok, well now it's working, and that's pretty exciting. I got my new SideWinder in the mail, hooked it up, and I just wrote in steno, my first full sentence with Plover:

"I request Queen Latifah."

And it came out perfectly except "Latifah" came out phonetically, of course (I'm not especially a Queen Latifah fan; I just got to playing around with the keys and noticed that you have KW defined as "request" and, well . . . the mind goes where it goes).

Ok, off to play some more!

Mirabai Knight said...

Woo-hoo! I'm actually surprised Latifah didn't translate; I could have sworn I had to write her name several times back in my captioning days. I guess I must have fingerspelled it. Shame on me. But feel free to add Latifah manually to ploverbd.py. Just write:

'HRA/TEU/TPA': 'Latifah',

or something like that on a separate line in the middle of ploverbd.py. (i.e., somewhere after the 'exportDic = {' and before the last }). Don't forget to add the comma at the end of the line. In the absence of an actual dictionary manager (which I'll definitely put in somewhere down the line), you can still customize your dictionary manually. It's better than nothing, right?

Tony said...

I just went into ploverbd.py and defined 'TEPLGS' as "temporal location," a term which I will be using hundreds of times in my dissertation. It works great!

Now to think of a brief for "non aspectually-marked clause" . . .

Mirabai Knight said...

Awesome! You make the third linguistics geek that I know of who reads this blog. Yay, linguists!

How about TPHRA*US?

Unknown said...

Hi, Mirabai

I would like to ask a question about which model of Steno machine support. I have a client try to use Mira Steno machine, here is the web site: http://www.acculaw.com/elan-mira.aspx
but they do not offer driver for Linux system.

Thanks.