Survey for a Proposed New Steno Machine

Fill out this survey from brookieoz on the Discord if you have need of a new independent steno machine that might solve certain problems for you that the current machines can't. There's also a prototype spreadsheet of some preliminary ideas in the #general channel, if you're interested. I always love it when new ideas like this floated, and I'm looking forward to seeing what shakes out of it!

Hacktoberfest 2020!

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source, and anyone who makes four or more pull requests to an open source repo hosted on Github will receive a free T-shirt from Digital Ocean.

Some Open Steno Project repos to contribute to:

Plover
Stenodict
Stenojig
Stenomancer
Stenocomplete

If you have your own steno-related open source projects hosted on Github, feel free to add them to this post in the comments.

Happy hacking!

Splitography is Back!

Ecca, one of our original open source steno hardware pioneers, writes:

I am back, splito is back, supplier issues resolved again, steno keebs will be shipping November 29th. Yay!

The Splitography is a beautiful machine, with custom-designed keycaps and a really cool circuitboard-under-glass look. The springs are a bit heavy for my own personal taste, but it's an impeccably designed machine with many fans, and now's your chance to get one again, after a long while being out of stock.

Check it out!!

New Steno-Friendly Multiplayer Typing Site

Typeracer has gotten increasingly hostile to steno users lately, which is a shame, because we've found some good community there in the past, but a new site called Typination has stepped up. It's still somewhat early days, but it's explicitly steno friendly, and its owner has been really responsive to fixing steno-specific bug reports given by users on the Plover Discord, which is much appreciated. If you want a competitive multiplayer typing experience but Typeracer isn't serving your needs anymore, feel free to give it a try! The founder writes:

Hello stenographers.

TypiNation is a multiplayer community typing game where you can compete & improve your typing speed along with other players all around the world.

The game is available both for mobile and computers. Google play store link and Browser Link

If you're a using a stenography keyboard, to enable this option you need to go in settings and make sure this is ticked, you must sign in to get to settings. (Image attached below).

This setting might be removed if you clear "website cookies", etc.. so make sure it's ticked before you start playing if you use steno.

Happy typing!

Gergoplex: A Dual Mode Option

Picture of steno-ready Gergoplex by Cadey on the Plover Discord

I've sung the praises of the Georgi, Germ's dedicated steno rig, but I'm not sure I've mentioned the Gergoplex, another of his offerings, which is intended as a non-chorded qwerty/dvorak/colemak/whatever keyboard, but which can also work with a steno layer if you've got a hankering to switch back and forth between chorded and non-chorded input on the same machine. It's certainly very handsome, and worth a try if you're not ready to go Full Steno just yet!

Typey Type Now Has a Metronome!

Some awesome new Typey Type updates from Di!

Typey Type now has a metronome! You can use a metronome to improve your rhythm for each stroke in finger drills. By drilling difficult transitions between pairs of strokes that slow you down or cause you hesitation using a metronome, you may improve your slowest pairs. Set your BPM (beats per minute) to something a little slower than your typical words per minute, press “Start”, then revise your tricky transitions carefully. Boop boop!

New lessons:

- Queen Elizabeth I’s speech, the Speech to the Troops at Tilbury: https://didoesdigital.com/typey-type/lessons/stories/queen-elizabeth-i/speech-to-the-troops-at-tilbury/

- 21 Proverbs lessons, such as Proverbs starting with S: https://didoesdigital.com/typey-type/lessons/stories/proverbs/proverbs-starting-with-s/

And I've updated the layout

- The amount of settings is getting out of hand, so they now live in a tidy drawer on the right-hand side. The most-used settings are at the top for your convenience, and there's room to grow.

- The lesson layout is more responsive to different screen sizes and shows more words and hints at a time. If you have some phrase that requires 8 strokes, the many steno diagrams will wrap and fit on screen.

- The Lookup page also fits more steno diagrams before adding a vertical scrollbar (whereas the previous horizontal scrollbar was invisible to some people and hard to use).

- The radio button labels are no longer crooked!

- I also made some accessibility improvements about the place.

Thai Steno!

Parnikkapore on the Plover Discord is working on implementing a steno layout for Thai!

More-or-less-full specs for my 1st gen Thai steno layout.

The layout is phonetically arranged (to an extent) and heavily depends on multi-key letters, so it's not very brief friendly. Also: Someone's gonna nickname this the "อีแมว layout" because that phrase means something like "you/that [expletive] cat", but very socially unacceptable (though if you actually stroke อีแมว you'll get เอ็บ, which is not a word). The 5 tones are encoded on the vowel bar, and the 40-or-so vowels are on the U key and the third quarter from the left.

Seriously, how freaking cool is that?! I hope this is the start of a thriving open source Thai steno community!