New Option for TinyMod!

The amazing Charley, inventor and craftsman behind the StenoMod and TinyMod, has done it again. He's now offering a new quiet model TinyMod:

The new option is the quiet version of TinyMod4. The only difference is that it has Durock "silent" switches and the springs have been changed to 20cN. Though they're called "silent" switches I would say rather that they're very quiet. They have a solid feel to them and a pretty light touch. It took me a long time to like the feel of 20cN, but now I'm very happy with them. You might find that you press a lot of keys by accident for awhile because of the light touch. Because the switches and replacement springs cost more and it's extra work swapping springs, I'll be charging $200 plus shipping for the quiet model.

The original TinyMod is still available for $160 plus shipping, and Charley's confided in me that there are even more surprises in the works, so stay tuned! Charley is an absolute paragon of the small batch steno hardware world, and I recommend his machines unreservedly!

The Most Metal DIY Stenoboard Ever

Sillyworld from the Plover Discord just posted pics of this incredible DIY steno board, with a custom printed circuit board and rad underlighting. I've recently been enjoying the Gideon the Ninth series, and let me just tell you, the steno pool AU fanfiction practically writes itself. I LOVE IT.

Better RTF Handling

If you've ever been frustrated by the less than perfect way that Plover handles RTF/CRE files (the court reporting dictionary format that's never quite been implemented as smoothly as Plover's native JSON format, but which is pretty useful if you're using Plover alongside commercial steno software), try this new plugin from sammdot: Plover-Better-RTF, a Plover plugin for better RTF dictionary handling that's powered by rtfcre.

rtfcre is a Python library for reading and writing steno dictionaries in the RTF/CRE (Rich Text Format with Court Reporting Extensions) format. The library provides an API similar to that of the json module for reading and writing dictionaries.

rtfcre also comes with a little command-line utility that you can use to convert your dictionaries between Plover's native JSON format and RTF.

Features:

Speed: The parsing logic is written in Rust using parser combinators, making it much faster than practically any pure-Python implementation.

Comments: Rather than just exposing translations, rtfcre also reads the comments embedded in each entry ({\*\cxcomment like this}).

Unicode: Full Unicode support -- while the dictionary files are not encoded in UTF-8, Unicode characters in translations are still fully supported. Translations can be in any language and they will seamlessly be converted to escapes when writing.

Plover support: Translations are converted automatically to Plover's native syntax (e.g. fingerspelling is represented with {&a} rather than {\cxfing a}) and converted back when writing.

Sneak Peak at EcoSteno

An official site is pending, but if you're interested in a new steno machine in the works that's focused on affordability, you might want to look through the EcoSteno's Github page. It's a cool and promising new project, and I can't wait to see more!