Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Steno Typer - New Online Steno Trainer

Many people enjoy Thomas Thurman's steno practice page, which consist of 21 sentences using the 100 most common English words, but if you've like some more practice with single words (and you don't have Linux, so you can't use Pragma Nolint's fantastic Plover trainer Fly), give Steno Typer a try:



It was written by Kitlei RĂ³bert, a computer science professor in Budapest. It draws on Plover's admittedly patchy dictionary for words, so if you see a steno translation that you don't like, feel free to skip it, or, if you prefer, download the source here and modify it to your heart's content. Eventually, I think I'll probably swap it out with the "canonical" list of words I made for Fly, which contain only steno strokes that make logical sense to people who know the theory, and don't include potentially confusing definitions like misstrokes and briefs that popped randomly out of my head without any mnemonic justification.

Oh, and I've posted about it to Twitter, but I haven't yet mentioned on this blog: Plover's going to PyCon!



My talk, Thought To Text at 240 WPM (an expansion of the one I originally gave at PyGotham in 2011) has been accepted at PyCon 2013, in Santa Clara, CA, this March. I'm really excited. So that I don't sound like a total poser, I've started going through the Python lessons at Codecademy. I'm right at the beginning, and still covering stuff I'm pretty familiar with (I've been sporadically trying to learn Python for over five years now, and each new false start leaves me with a little more knowledge than the last), but I'm hoping that by the time I reach the end of the course I'll be confident to move up to the next level, either by getting a Python tutor or by working through another self-study course. (I had fairly good luck with CodeLesson a while back, but had to quit partway through Python II due to time constraints). My brain doesn't seem to absorb this sort of thing very readily, but I'm not giving up, even if it takes another five years to figure out how to use @#&% classes.

No comments: