Stenosaurus on Slashdot

[Joshua Harlan Lifton]

Somewhat to my surprise (I knew it was coming, just didn't know when),
Stenosaurus has been featured on Slashdot:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/08/12/1812250/type-225-words-per-minute-with-a-stenographic-keyboard-video

As expected, the misinformation is flying in the comments. I added a
pointer back to Mirabai's excellent six-part series, "What is Steno
Good For?" and will try to address some of the other comments later.
In the meantime, I'd definitely appreciate anyone else taking a stab
at it and adding your thoughts to the thread.

Finally, I'm shooting to release the Stenosaurus before the end of
October. I'll hopefully have more on that soon.

Cheers,
Josh

[Ted Morin]

Wow, the device looks so good! I'm definitely one of those regular people that you're trying to get out to. I started learning steno just under six weeks ago. 

I'll be sure to purchase when ever you release. 

[Tony Wright]

From this I have just discovered that reading the comments on slashdot.org is my new least favorite thing to do, but I do hand it to you, Josh, for trying to respond to them.

--Tony 

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[Gabriel Holmes]

Posted, per request. Hope it helps.

I had some trouble with the formatting. The first guy who posted really p*ssed me off, with his sheer intellectual laziness.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2014 5:24:35 PM UTC-4, Joshua Lifton wrote:

[Joshua Lifton]

Thanks for the support!

[Mike Neale]

I loved watching the video. Really clearly explains what its purpose is and what the target audience is. Good stuff! I think the killer feature is that you don't need any software to run it, it's just a self-contained peripheral like any other keyboard.

There will always be negative comments from the masses who believe that stenography only has another 5 years before it's dead to magic computer solutions. I think while the claim of 225 is a great attention grabber, most people tend to focus on this as the only goal and therefore how much time they'd have to put in to get there. They're missing the point that they could very quickly get to beat their qwerty speed and from then on, get even faster just through using it.

It's hard to convince some people though. Even working in offices for the last 10 years I've only met about two other touch typists other than myself. Most people aren't even willing to put in the time to teach themselves that, let alone "that scary keyboard with no labels on it that only special court reporting people can use".

I think the product will be a hit though. By the way, I know the second one is just a keyboard prototype but it looks really cool like a lightspeed or something!

I think a good steno demo would really sell it and get people's imaginations working. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing someone knock out text faster than you can read it!

[Mirabai Knight]

I'm wondering if I should maybe make a more extensive coding video
than the 26-second "Coding Python with Plover" video that's up right
now. Could someone maybe give me a page-long block of code (with lots
of commands, variable names, punctuation, brackets, and symbols, since
that seems to be what a lot of people get hung up on; I don't know why
they think it's harder to write on a steno machine than regular text
is, but it's a very pervasive myth) that I can write on my steno
machine? I can open caption it with pseudosteno to show which steno
strokes correspond to which elements of code, and that might be more
useful as a demonstration than the very brief closed captioned Python
video, which is mostly common English words. I wish I had the
programming knowledge to write the code myself, but at least I can do
the steno half of it!

[Joshua Lifton]

How about something from:

https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/tree/master/plover

such as:

https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/blob/master/plover/formatting.py

Cheers,
Josh

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[Drew Neil]

Mirabai,

I’d love to see a longer demo of you using Plover to write code! To keep things topical, why not type out some code from Plover’s own codebase? I scanned the recent commits and found this patch, which adds about 70 lines of code. 

Drew

[Mirabai Knight]

Awesome. Thanks for this! I'll try to get to it in the next two weeks,
since I have a little time off from captioning dental school. :'D

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StenoKnight CART Services
917 576 4989
m...@stenoknight.com
http://stenoknight.com

[Bryan Bishop]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Mirabai Knight <askel...@gmail.com> wrote:

now. Could someone maybe give me a page-long block of code (with lots
of commands, variable names, punctuation, brackets, and symbols, since
that seems to be what a lot of people get hung up on; I don't know why
they think it's harder to write on a steno machine than regular text
is, but it's a very pervasive myth) that I can write on my steno
machine? I can open caption it with pseudosteno to show which steno

22nd International Obfuscated C Code Contest:

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/birken/birken.c

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/cable3.c

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable1/cable1.c

main(int riguing,char**acters){puts(1[acters-~!(*(int*)1[acters]%4796%275%riguing)]);}

glibc malloc

https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/malloc/malloc.c

libssl:

https://github.com/libressl-portable/openbsd/blob/master/src/lib/libssl/src/ssl/ssl_lib.c

bitcoin stuff:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/txmempool.cpp

- Bryan

http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[atkuilas]

> I'm wondering if I should maybe make a more extensive coding video 

> than the 26-second "Coding Python with Plover" video that's up right 

> now.

Some Vim editing demo should be nice as well!

btw, someone on Slashdot raised some concern about variables (CamelCase, snake_case, etc.) and dot operators.

I was thinking maybe some prefix stroke before the variable name / dot operator might do the job. Along with another

stroke after the variable name / dot operator to switch Plover back to normal mode.

Sort of like how this guy deal with variables and dot operators in voice recognition software:

http://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?t=11m7s

The idea of prefix stroke can be generalize to other contexts to make typing number, coding, etc. more efficient.

E.g. a prefix stroke to switch to "coding mode" so Plover won't automatically add spaces in between words, a stroke

to switch back to normal English input, "arrow keys mode" to navigate with R, B, P, or G alone, just to name a few.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:

22nd International Obfuscated C Code Contest:

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/cable3.c

Just for reference, I was able to type cable3.c in 23 minutes 28 seconds on qwerty. There are some caveats to this measurement though, for whenever it might get compared to a steno number (whether higher or lower). I am a somewhat fast qwerty typer (150-180 wpm top rates), so that might influence the results. I am a programmer, so some of this terrible code even made sense to me, which might influence the results compared to a steno typer who might try it and not know C, which might negatively impact their performance. Normally my key presses are 50-150 ms apart, but here it was obviously much slower because if it was really 150 ms between each keypress then it should have taken me at most 10 minutes. I suspect I or someone else could do better, because I was only really looking ahead 2-3 characters at a time instead of buffering like you ought to.

Show programmers that you can write obfuscated C at blazing fast speeds, and there's literally no argument left to be made against chording. Obfuscated C is the absolute worst case scenario for what you encounter day to day as a programmer. You literally can't get worse. Maybe brainfuck, but that's just a matter of counting symbols more than typing [[]] a million times. Spending 8 hours per day reading or writing code like cable3.c is just not something that anyone on this earth should want to be paid to do. Also, realistically, as a programmer you should never encounter or write source code that bad and there are strong arguments everywhere that you should stop everything immediately and refactor the source code into something more maintainable and legible (like that beautiful glibc malloc example link, comparatively a pleasure to read). At the same time, that obfuscation contest is an excellent torture test.

[Brent Nesbitt]

Plus one on a longer coding demo.
I'm a bit of a coder, but have to admit the thought of using plover to code has been daunting so far.

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