Uni V4 Currently In Stock!

Get 'em while they're hot! Fantastic little machine.

Cantonese Steno!

Over on the Plover Discord, on our #multilingual channel, there's a very cool thread called 中文速錄（官／粵） (Chinese Steno - Mandarin/Cantonese), in which several Plover users (kaoffie, Jen, Samuel, KAEPBS, and others) have been developing MaaJik (which translates poetically to "a pair of wings"), their own Cantonese steno theory.

Check out Jen's fantastic diagram:

Most of the metadiscussion about the theory on the channel is in English, so it would probably be helpful to know both languages if you want to collaborate with the developers. Very exciting stuff!

A Steno Learning Card Game

Last year around this time, I blogged about a word game my kid got for his birthday that I thought I might be able to turn into a steno learning game. I'm afraid I never got very far with that. The kid has learned a little bit of steno since then, but not a huge amount. There's a card game called Stenophonatic, made by the people behind Dictionary Jumpstart, a venerable but rather expensive proprietary dictionary-building app (with a pay-per-word-list business model). I really like the idea of a steno learning card game, and I have to admit I'm a little bit tempted to get it, but I'm on the fence, primarily because it's $35. My realtime-all-the-time steno sensibilities sometimes conflict with my parental instincts to make stuff offline and analog for my kid whenever possible. He does have an Android tablet (that I keep meaning to install Dotterel on; haven't gotten around to it yet), but I often think it's helpful to make pedagogical tools physical and concrete. Anyone have any ideas about ways to bring steno off the screen? If I do wind up getting that card game to play with my kid, I'll certainly let y'all know how it goes.

Steno on an Xbox Controller?!

So I've vaguely been following the saga of a mysterious person known only as 🎮 over on the Plover Discord Server for a while now, who's been doing steno... On an Xbox controller! How the heck does that work? You might ask. So did I. Well, like this, apparently:

Still hard for me to imagine actually doing it, but apparently 🎮 does between 80 and 100 WPM this way and thinks it'll only get faster with practice. What do y'all think?