Thumbs Up Machines!

Look at these beautiful machines I just received as free review models from SashaK! They're available in Sasha's Thumbs Up Shop. The design is quite striking! I'm gonna give my fingers a little time to get used to them, and then I'll post here with a full report! Many thanks to Sasha for these innovative new designs. I can't wait to try them out!

Practice Plover Updated

Practice Plover, according to its creator, plants, has just received ome updates!

Practice Plover has been updated with new sections on common prefixes/suffixes and even more practice text, and some more brief additions from yannc.

Always great to see more practice resources out there!

No News Today

Heya! No particular Open Steno news today, partly because I spent some time this evening talking up Open Steno to a group of a dozen or so student and professional stenographers online. It's gotten kind of late and I still need to do the dishes. But least I spent some time trying to get the word out! I don't have a huge amount of faith that the professional steno establishment (specifically the one embodied by the National Court Reporters Association) will ever choose to be much of a friend to Open Steno, but you never know, right? It's always worth a try.

The Picosteno, New From Nolltronics!

Introducing the Picosteno, a new low cost steno DIY kit from Nolltronics!

Nathan from Nolltronics says:

We’ve heard people ask for an even cheaper entry-level stenography keyboard, so we went ahead and made the Picosteno! We were able to cut costs by avoiding paying for PCB assembly, and replacing the aluminum backplate with a PCB backplate. The keyswitches and keycaps are still the best you can buy for hobbyist stenography at 20g actuation force, though if you want us to stock 15g springs (or have other suggestions), let us know! This is a DIY kit, meaning you will have to assemble the keyboard yourself! This includes soldering keyswitches and microcontroller, mounting the backplate, and flashing the firmware. All kits include two PCBs since one is used for the backplate.

TinyMod Saved My Bacon Again

I bought an Infinity Ergonomic in 2019, but it became more and more unreliable over time and finally became unusable last spring. A court reporter friend of mine had decided to become a software engineer and no longer wanted her steno machine (I tried to convince her to use it for coding, but she politely demurred), so she very generously gave her Infinity Ergonomic to me. Unfortunately that one failed yesterday. The company that makes them appears, unfortunately, to be defunct. I managed to find someone with a used one to sell and sent them the money for it today; it should be arriving by Wednesday if all goes well. But in the mean time, I've got a full week of captioning work to do. Before Plover, I would have panicked, screamed, freaked out, called all the steno colleagues I knew in the city to see if I could borrow one of their backup machines. But now I just threw my TinyMod, my Uni, and my Alienware n-key rollover laptop in my work bag and had three steno machines on hand for the day. I wound up doing all of today on the TinyMod, and it served me excellently well. It was a little clackier than my Infinity, and not as ergonomic, but I got through the day with no issues, and I can't express how grateful I am to have these backup machines on hand when I need them. It provides tremendous peace of mind and flexibility. Inexpressible thanks to Charley and Peter for making such excellent portable and affordable machines!

Erland's Beautiful Uni

Look at this lovely customized Uni v2, taken from the StenoKeyboards Discord. Striking and whimsical. A work of art!

New Plover2CAT version released

plants from the Plover Discord says:

plover2CAT has a new version 1.4.2. It can do rtf export (thanks, Elizabeth), translating from tape, and ability to set custom shortcuts for menu items.

Download the new version from GitHub!

Big Javelin Firmware Update

From the Discord:

Javelin's online tools have been revamped over the last week. Newly added tools include add translation, writing speed, layout display, and console access, and most existing tools have been upgraded in some way. The full range of tools requires new firmware, but even older builds should have access to most of what's there.

You can find these all at: https://lim.au/#/software/javelin-steno-tools

Paul's Steno Elixir Demo!

Paul Fioravanti, a longtime friend of The Open Steno Project, gave a presentation at the Sydney Elixir Meetup last week, demonstrating his steno workflow when coding in Elixir. He even realtime captions himself for some of it! Great stuff.

Cool Stuff Brewing

I haven't yet been given permission to post photos or videos of the very promising prototype under development in the #HobbyistLeverMachine thread in the #hardware-dev channel in the Plover Discord, but let me just say it's super impressive, and progressing at astounding speed. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you should totally go check it out!!

Aerick and His Multipurpose Multisteno

Aerick describes in this lovely video how he's replaced the bulky standard default keyboard with just a Multisteno for everything but gaming, using movement modifiers, symbol and command dictionaries, and the Multisteno's qwerty layer. So cool to see!

Embedded Steno on My Uni!

The amazing Peter of StenoKeyboards gave me a free Uni v4 after I mentioned wanting one to teach my kid on! I flashed Javelin firmware on it really easily. The hardest part was cleaning up my dictionary file, which had some malformed entries in it that Plover doesn't seem to notice but which Javelin doesn't approve of. A few rounds of regular expressions were sufficient to zap them, though, and then the firmware builder gave me a file that I was able to flash to the Uni with zero problems. Totally smooth and simple. The Uni now writes English into any text field without having to install Plover, including on my kid's Chromebook! We spent some time going over the basics of the layout and drilling a few easy lessons on Typey Type today, and he's really excited to learn more. Thanks so much to Peter for the free Uni and to Jeffrey for the Javelin firmware!