The Steno Grind

There's a new web app called The Steno Grind, designed to help users drill lessons from Ted's marvelous steno textbook The Art of Chording. It's slick, simple, and fun. Many thanks to Noah for this lovely resource!

Emily's Steno Symbol System

Check out this great Python dictionary for typing symbols in steno in a systematic way!

Emily says it allows for "consistent symbol input with specification of attachment and capitalisation in one stroke."

This dictionary was created with the following goals in mind:

* Have a consistent method to type (pretty much) every symbol
* Specify spacing and capitalisation of that symbol in 1 stroke
* Hackable and understandable to anyone who finds it useful :)

It's absolutely ingenious and beautifully documented. Fantastic work! Check it out!

A Whirlwind of Plover Activity!

After a well-earned hiatus, our dauntless developers Ted and Benoit-Pierre have immersed themselves once more in the Plover codebase, resolving issues, fixing bugs, thwarting security vulnerabilities, and implementing a new continuous release schedule! As of this blog post, the most recent continuous release was delivered to the Plover Github only four hours ago, but you should click back through their recent updates to get a sense of the tremendous quantity of work they've been doing lately. It's incredible! More to come, I'm sure, but I'm so impressed and grateful to see the amount of care and attention they've been giving our beloved software. All accolades to Ted and Benoit-Pierre, and the many other contributors who have submitted bug reports and code contributions over the years!

EcoSteno Prototype Review!

The lovely people at Nolltronics just sent me a prototype of their new EcoSteno, and it's a gorgeous machine!! Full disclosure: I'm extremely biased in favor of tented machines, and like the TinyMod (though with a somewhat bigger footprint and wider spacing between the hands), the EcoSteno is built on a flat platform, but aside from that personal idiosyncracy, it's hard to find any flaw at all with this beauty. It connects via USB-C and can switch between steno, qwerty, symbol, and NKRO steno layouts, which makes me hopeful that I might be able to get it working on my kid's Chromebook (which I've had a little trouble booting into dev mode so that I can install Dotterel on it, but I'll keep working on it). If so, this might be an ideal first machine for him! The EcoSteno uses featherlight (20gf) Kailh gChocs, which are low travel and extremely comfortable. I'm extremely impressed with this little number so far. It's still a prototype, of course, and probably won't be released until it undergoes a few more iterations in firmware and/or hardware, but it sure is close to being perfect, as far as I can tell. I expect great things!

Aerick's Complete Steno Learning Video Series

If you haven't yet checked out Aerick's Plover and Steno YouTube Playlist, you really should! It's a beautiful series of videos breaking down steno principles, with accurately edited English closed captions (woo!) and an engaging, polished production style. A fantastic introduction to the nuts and bolts of steno from a really talented new presence in the open steno community. Bravo, Aerick!!

Tool for Building Spanish Steno Dictionaries!

Eliseo writes:

Libero este repositorio que contiene un conjunto de scripts que ayudan a generar un diccionario para Plover, que se puede usar con el plugin plover-spanish-system-eo-variant. Una vez que lo refine, lo utilizaré para actualizar el diccionario principal del plugin, pero por el momento, lo libero para que quien quiera/necesite generar su propio diccionario especializado (por ejemplo uno con términos médicos), lo genere por cuenta propia. :D

Or, in English:

I worked on a series of tools/scripts that will eventually help me to generate the main dictionary for plover-spanish-system-eo-variant. The repository is Silabareo. There you can find a set of scripts and steps to create a dictionary that can be used within Plover with the Spanish System plugin. I hope this will be useful for those who have a large set of words that would like to add as a specialized dictionary (say, medical terms for example). If you like to know more, drop me a message here or Discord.

This is fantastic!! Thanks, Eliseo!

Nolltronics Has a Website!

Nolltronics, makers of the EcoSteno -- currently in the final stages of pre-production -- now has a website where you can subscribe for updates and follow their progress as they roll out the EcoSteno to the world. The design is gorgeous and I'm so excited to try it out when it finally makes its way into my hands!