The Steko: A new $85 Hobbyist Board

The Steko, a new keyboard from Quanicboards, is now available for $85.

Steko currently does NOT come with any backplate. It will come with small rubber feet on the bottom of the pcb. A backplate may be introduced in the future, and previous buyers will then be shipped standoffs, screws, and the backplate, free of charge.

The Steko Keyboard is a revolutionary new hobbyist stenography keyboard designed to make steno as affordable as possible! The keyboard uses a very compact layout (only 25 keys!) and a simple unibody design to reduce cost, and get stenography into the hands of as many people as possible.

The keyboard is 200x65mm, and uses an RP2040 MCU with 16MB (128Mb) of flash storage. This means it will be compatible with embedded steno.

It looks like a great affordable starter option for new steno hobbyists!

Infinite Gratitude to Benoit Pierre

An announcement from Ted, via the Plover Discord:

I learned today that @Benoit Pierre has decided to move on from the Open Steno Project. I'd like to thank him for his years of service. No other dev has had as much impact on Plover as Benoit Pierre. He is responsible for the conversion from python 2 to 3, the introduction of the plugins manager, the QT GUI, adding multilingual support, and so, so much more. Thank you Benoit Pierre for your many years supporting Plover and the community. It's been an honor to learn from you and it was always a pleasure to work with you.

We are so incredibly lucky to have received his time, care, labor, and expertise for all these years. I'm grateful beyond words for all that he's done for Open Steno, and wish him every happiness in the future.

The Polyglot Kickstarter is Live!

The Polyglot, a new qwerty-steno combo board that switched modalities with a single keytap by the excellent Peter at StenoKeyboards, is currently running a Kickstarter campaign. It was funded almost instantly, but supporting the campaign is a great way to reserve yourself a board, plus secure a Kickstarter discount -- $110 per unit rather than $125. A steal! I love the design and quality of these machines, and this seems like another very strong contender, especially for those who are worried about taking a productivity hit from having to go full steno too early.

Paul's Twitter Clone Steno Coding Demo

Longtime Open Steno friend Paul writes:

I used @plover stenography and @SirVerII's Ultisnips to recreate @chris_mccord's @elixirphoenix Twitter-style timeline application.

Seriously cool. And, shall we say, timely!

Derek's Journey Into Stenography

There's some extremely exciting stuff happening in Open Steno at the moment, including embedded steno on the Uni (!!!), but I'm not ready to blog about that just yet. Instead I want to link to an excellent blog post by Derek, a relative newcomer to our community, called My Journey Into Stenography. It's beautifully written and quite comprehensive, so if you're interested in one person's story about why steno proved to be a fun and useful text input method, you should definitely check it out!

Beautiful Hobbyist Machine Collection

Check out this beautiful collection of hobbyist steno machines, posted on the Plover Discord by user TerraOccipital! What a glorious thing to see them all laid out like that! I have most of these machines as well, but they're scattered around my office and in the hands of various friends at the moment, so I don't have a picture of them all together like that. It makes me so happy to see them. So much respect to all the makers who have brought steno to the masses in such variety and style!

from top to bottom, left to right:

Planck, Uni v4, Ecosteno, Tinymod, Splitography, Uni v3, Georgi

EcoSteno Back in Stock!

I missed this bit of news somehow, so forgive the late update, but the Nolltronics Ecosteno is once more available to order. Great little machine! If you're in the market for an affordable and reliable hobbyist steno machine, I definitely recommend it!