Open Steno Featured on Hackaday

Hackaday: Stenography (Yes, With Arduinos)

Kevin emailed me a few days ago with his awesome USB hack for Stentura 200 (which he says would almost certainly work for Stentura 400s as well), and I was just about to blog about it when I got tipped off to this article on Hackaday mentioning both Kevin's hack and a great write-up on the principles of Open Steno in general. Some of the comments are a bit wearying (to reply in brief: steno is not obsolete; courtroom reporters have not been replaced by speech recognition but by lower-paid qwerty typists; Siri is not going to be able to handle subpar audio, technical syntax and markup, or non-standard accents any time soon if ever), but the article itself is top notch! Highly recommended.

Also, Josh and I are going to be manning the Open Steno Project table at the 2015 National Court Reporters Association Convention here in NYC at the end of the month. I printed up a brochure for it:



And we're hoping to have a functional prototype of the Stenosaurus to show off while we're there. Fingers crossed! I'm also going to be using Plover to compete in the National Realtime Competition, but don't expect too much from me; I have a habit of choking during speed tests, so it's entirely possible I'll crash and burn in the first 30 seconds.

Lastly, if you haven't read Lars's Steno Diary in a while, it's really heating up! After just four months of studying/practicing for 20 minutes a day, he's able to write just about anything he can think of in steno, and he's currently working on putting together a robust dictionary for the purposes of writing, editing, and navigating code. Pretty dang badass.