Ploverizing a Mechanical Steno Machine!

Check out this amazing GitHub repo, detailing the process of turning an old non-electronic steno machine into one that's compatible with Plover! Extremely, extremely cool!!

Shrimple: A Python Dictionary for Orthospelling

Another in my series of cool Plover tricks that I don't (yet?) use personally, but that have become rather popular in the Open Steno Community. If traditional fingerspelling feels too slow, clunky, or laborious to you, you might want to try StenoHarri's Shrimple, a Python dictionary that allows you to fingerspell orthographically using chords. As helpful Plover Discord denizen Hellochap explains:

Basically it allows you to temporarily make your whole keyboard type literally, so like everything just goes to its corresponding letter. usually you have either a starter stroke to activate it, or you combine your first letter with a key like + or 🦐. and then to exit the mode you press S-P or punctuation or a Jeff’s phrase etc. Typically now we just notate whatever you use to enter shrimple with just the shrimp 🦐, regardless of if you use a shrimp key or not, just for funsies.

so in example: 🦐AB/RA/KRA/TKAB/RA/S-P -> abracadabra

And we also have other starter strokes for starting with a capital, or all caps etc.

Ingenious!

Open Steno Community Survey Results 2024

Sorry I'm rather late to the game with this one! I didn't notice that the survey results were posted back in June. But better late than never, eh?

Here are the results!

I also found this nice blog post highlighting a few of the responses. I'm so proud of the way the Open Steno community has grown and deepened over the years. It's beautiful to see.

Javelin Updates!

The amazing Tharelia (aka Jeffrey Lim, creator of Javelin and the Jarne) writes:

Hi all, there’s been a couple of scattered updates on Javelin, but here’s a summary of the key things that have changed since the last summary update in May.

Firmware
Added support for orthospelling, including an example configuration for Shrimple.
Added mouse controls; mouse button presses can be configured in the visual editor. (requires firmware dated August 3 or later)
Added layouts for Corne v3 and Kyria rev3 so they can use the visual editor under the Script web tool
Added templates, using commands =set_value and =transform
Added commands: :stitch, :stitch_last_word
Added detection of incomplete firmware dictionary uploads
Lots of performance improvements and fixes, including a JIT for the regex engine on the Jarne.

Firmware Builder
Added support for orthospelling dictionaries
The layout or script is now built into the firmware to allow easier modification later.
The download size of the base image when building a firmware has been reduced by 80%
Added new expert option to enable the firmware to send button press events.
This enables the key layout tool to show which keys are being pressed

Firmware Tools
Added Bootloader tool
Added Key Layout tool, to show the layout of the active layer.
Button presses will be shown if enabled when building the firmware.
Added Template Values tool
Lots of visual tweaks/spacing tidy ups across the tools
The Visual Editor has had a lot of upgrades to support the Jarne, including script options/templating.
Documentation for this is pending.