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!

A Heroine of Fictional Stenography

I'm not sure how many of you are participating in Dracula Daily, a free service that sends chapters of the classic novel Dracula to your inbox on the dates corresponding to each letter, newspaper clipping, or diary entry comprising the novel. One thing I definitely didn't notice when I read Dracula for the first time many years ago is that Bram Stoker is a giant nerd for the newest technology of his day, constantly namedropping Kodak cameras, dictation gramophones, aerated bread, blood transfusions (spoiler?), and of course pen shorthand. You might know that Charles Dickens was a shorthand reporter in the courts before he became a novelist, and that Dostoyevsky once dictated an entire novel at high speed to his wife, a proficient pen stenographer, in order to get money to pay off his gambling debts as expeditiously as possible, but when it comes to dashingly competent and heroic stenographers of fiction, Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker has got to be right up there. Her skills prove invaluable to the hunt for the wicked count more than once, and at one point she even plays a prank on Professor Van Helsing by offering to let him read her diary and handing it to him, smirking when he realizes that the whole thing is in shorthand. Classic steno jape right there. Anyway, I recommend the Dracula Daily social readalong experience highly, and welcome additional recommendations of heroic stenographers in fiction.