Nolltronics Restock

Review of the newly released Uni by Steno Keyboards is coming soon! But in the mean time, the already (very favorably) reviewed EcoSteno by Nolltronics is gonna be back in stock soon.

Information on ordering the EcoSteno can be found here, along with some updates about the current status of the machine.

I feel so lucky to be living in a world with so many low cost, high quality hobbyist steno machines in it!

New Gutenberg Sentences in Stenojig!

The marvelous Josh writes: "I grabbed a new selection of 400 Project Gutenberg books and extracted nearly 200k shortish sentences (12 words or less) with unrestricted vocabulary: ask for top "0" words on the Gutenberg sentence form to use them."

Go check out the new sentences!

Asterisk Keycaps for Sale

These have been available for quite a while, it turns out, but I only just found out about them: A keytopper with the distinctive Plover steno key and asterisk icon. They're 3D printed by Ewen, a longtime OSP community member, who suggests "Set up a dedicated Steno Key on e.g. a Planck, or just have a cool steno-themed key on your regular keyboard!" They look really nice and would suit a hybrid qwerty/steno rig really well. Great conversation piece, too!

New Open Steno Community Wiki

There's a new Open Steno Wiki on Miraheze, though with the following disclaimer: "This wiki is a work in progress and is not yet ready to replace the GitHub wiki."

The community members who set it up explained that they chose Miraheze for the following reasons:

• We can easily export the data
• We can easily import it somewhere else if we decide this isn't the right place (lots of converters to e.g. markdown exist)
• It's free and open source (no need to fiddle around with hosting when we are experimenting)

Why not a GitHub-backed markdown wiki (not completely ruled out for the future)?

• PRs can take a while (could be solved by more people with PR approval permission and/or automating approvals)
• Many people are not familiar with GitHub who would be more familiar with wikis
• Going through "official open steno" limits the kind of content that is appropriate
• Would need to decide what technology to use, who would implement it, etc. which would take a while

Why not the existing GitHub wiki?

• SEO is terrible
• No easy way to search page contents
• Attached to the Plover GitHub rather than open steno as a whole

The old Wiki has definitely gotten a bit old and musty, so I'm excited to see this new one spring up, and I'm looking forward to watching it take shape!

WORD/*L

As you're probably aware, Wordle is an extremely popular and trendy word game and novel clones keep popping up. Not to let steno be left behind, Plover Discord community member Abby#5422 has created WORD/*L.

A new puzzle every day, you need to enter valid strokes from Plover's dictionary that have 4 or 5 keys in them (because hyphen is included). Then, the app will tell you whether the letter used in the chord is in the solution and whether it's in the right place. The hint keyboard below doesn't differentiate between letters that appear on both sides of the board, so that adds a little challenge.

 

A lovely game of WORD/*L

I (Ted) will certainly be adding this special version of Wordle to my morning coffee routine. Thank you Abby! Try to solve today's puzzle.

Video of the Open Steno Meetup

I had the honor to caption a three-hour meeting with both Open Steno community members and stenographic professionals last Saturday. Our friend Christopher at Stenonymous made a detailed breakdown of everything that was discussed, or you can also just read the transcript, if you'd prefer text to video. It was an inspiring and productive meeting, and I'm so proud of everyone who contributed to make it what it was! Here's to many more great Open Steno meetups, both online and in person, going forward!

2022 Open Steno Community Survey!

With help from the excellent Jen, the 2022 Open Steno Community Survey is now out! Jen writes:

I know we got a massive influx of new Plover users in the past few months, thanks in part to YouTube content by Aerick and Tokaku and the Uni v3 Kickstarter. Please fill this out when you have the chance -- this way we know where to put effort in in terms of new hardware, Plover features, and learning materials.

Can't wait to see the answers! If you're interested, you can also read the responses from the 2021 Open Steno Community Survey.