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!