Not learning steno: Day Five

Sorry - deadlines.

I was struck by the fact that stenography makes transcription a lot more lucrative than QWERTY typing. Here are a brief list of links to transcription job services I found with fifteen minutes' research a couple of days ago.

• http://transcriptdivas.com/transcription-rate/
• http://www.productiontranscripts.com/jobs.php
• http://www.transcriptionstar.com/services.html
• http://www.verbalink.com/
• http://www.gmrtranscription.com/faqApplicant.aspx

Learning steno: Day Three

Still just chugging along in blind letter mode on Fly. I do a short warmup with the input chord and key highlighting displayed, then turn it off and see how many chords I can remember without looking. I'm getting better.

Interesting article in Wired on learning: recall is the best reinforcement, but it's most effective if you just barely recall the thing you're learning. Practice again too soon, and you're not learning as effectively as if you've nearly forgotten everything. I'm running Fly for ten minutes or so, twice a day, and I think it's probably about as effective as it could get.

Fly: chord memorization drill

I think the first thing I need to do is chord memorization. I'm finding that if the chord is displayed anywhere on the screen, I simply type the chord, without actually really thinking about the letter it represents - this is bad.

So what I can do is turn off the input chord display and letter highlighting; I keep the steno key display on because I'm still memorizing the key positions (although I have to admit I've nearly got them down after only about fifteen minutes' total practice). I can then re-enable input chord display when I get stuck, which at this point is essentially for any chord that's more than one letter, except Q = KW, which is easy.

The problem with this is I have to take my hands off the keyboard and click the mouse. It would be way better to hit a key combination and have a chord hint displayed for half a second, after which it would automatically disappear again. That shouldn't be too hard.

Learning steno, Day One

Right now I'm just going through the Fly letter mode to get a feel for where the keys are. I did about ten minutes earlier, and my goal is to spend maybe half an hour each day, which I will deduct from my Reddit time, so no freaking harm done.

As a note - I thought I was a fast typist. In fact, I know I'm a fast typist. I'm just ... not as fast as I thought. 75-85 wpm. In fact:

There's the two badges I just earned at the first response on Google if you want to try it as well. Let's just say my typical typing speed, when focused, is about 80 wpm.

Here's the thing. My income as a technical translator depends almost entirely on my typing speed. I translate about 4000 words per nominal day. At 80 wpm, that's 50 minutes of typing, but of course I can't actually maintain that speed (I felt as though my speed on the test was faster than usual, more fluid - and I spend a lot of time correcting mistakes, which I didn't bother with on the test; steno is reportedly more accurate due to its built-in understanding that you're typing English). 4000 words takes me four to five hours, mostly due to fatigue and boredom; depending on the source text, surprisingly little of that time is spent looking up terminology.

My feeling (and my hope) is that faster typing will increase my throughput and comfort, allowing me to handle more words per day comfortably. Because if it's day in and day out, comfort is paramount.

The only thing I've done during my translation career to improve throughput is a typing accelerator, which I use for words I see often. What "often" means varies. I hope to replace the typing accelerator with Plover, actually (which means I'll be subverting Plover to a certain extent), and we'll see just how difficult that ends up being. But when I started to use the typing accelerator, my output increased sharply, by about 20%. Hence my great hope for steno.

So, Day One. 80 wpm on qwerty, and that's my goal for steno, as quickly as possible.

Fly on Windows working

Plover itself (which is embedded in Fly) uses a thread to listen for keyboard events. This is entirely appropriate for Plover, but not good for Pygame, so I disabled it; I think we're going to want to redesign Plover/Windows a bit to move that thread out where it won't bother us.

But this marks the day I start learning steno. Note: it's freaking hard. I might want to tweak Fly a little; I'm not sure I like its lesson setup - but I think that's doable.

Fly on Windows: debugging Pygame/SDL

I've been spending a little too much time mystified by Pygame's inexplicable refusal to see any SDL events under Windows. Today, I discovered an incompatibility with the central StoppableThread architecture of the application, so I think maybe I'm on the track to getting this thing running.

Do you have any idea how long it's been since I tried to debug somebody else's code? In a language I'm rusty with, and using libraries I've only read about? Makes me feel like a teenager again.

Anyway, I just wanted to count coup here on the blog.

Update: Indeed, here's a StackOverflow thread describing substantially the same problem under OSX. There, too, the code seemed fine under Linux, and no events fired on OSX. Moral of the story seems to be: don't put Pygame in a thread.

Update 2: I put all the commented-out code back and sure enough, the window gets its messages - and then if I enable Plover I see the same behavior. So it's going to be off into Ploverland to see what's going on there. Weirdness on all sides.

Typing English

Actually, a certain amount of stenography's power is monitoring the typing stream and fixing things up based on the assumption that you're typing English.

Think about that a minute.

If I could do that all the time (well, when I'm typing English), then a lot of typing errors could be autocorrected as I type. I could also already put in some shortcuts - non-steno shortcuts of some kind - that could examine the text stream and act correctly, pluralizing words, adding -ly, that kind of thing.

And another thing - if I'm replacing AHK with Plover in a QWERTY mode, then I also get to define my own stop keys. That's going to be pretty damned convenient when using CAT tools! No more funky mistypes at the start of translation segments.

This is gonna be so cool!

The Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard

Since stenography consists of mashing a large number of keys at once (up to 20, actually, although that's not actually too common), normal keyboards can't actually support it. You need a keyboard specifically designed not to get confused when multiple keys are pressed at once. A gaming keyboard. The Microsoft Sidewinder X4 is the cheapest such keyboard.

Mine came today.

It's got a nice feel, although it's louder than the cheap HP keyboard I've been using - audible clicks for each keystroke. I'm hoping it will be a bit sturdier than most keyboards; I wear them out in about a year (a million words typed will do that).

One very interesting feature is the bank of six macro keys at the far left of the keyboard. These can be programmed to do anything - like start programs. I'm going to use them to switch modes between vanilla, AHK mode, and steno mode.

That's the plan.

Musing on generalization

I've been using AutoHotKey as a typing accelerator for a few years now; I credit it with increasing my working capacity (and thus my income) by about 20%. It's been four years since I started using it, so that's maybe $80,000 due to my use of AutoHotKey - and you wondered why I want to learn steno?

Anyway, AutoHotKey and Plover work in very similar ways, leading me to think it might be a good idea to explore the continuum between them, especially as a transitional phase.

For example, just the fact that Plover knows it's typing English and can therefore add spaces appropriately and tack on common endings such as -er, -ing, -s, -ly could really save me a lot of typing in an intermediate mode.

Second thing I thought might be nice - a keyboard-based mode switcher, maybe using one of the special Sidewinder keys, or just a hotkey shortcut on the normal QWERTY board. Maybe a double Ctrl or something easily captured. This would allow me to switch between QWERTY and steno very quickly and fluently in mid-word.

Learning steno

The entire philosophy of stenography is fundamentally different from typing; it is phonetic and based on situational awareness of each phonetic chunk in the sentence as a whole. The stenography translator capitalizes sentences for you.

It's said that it takes six months to a year of practice to get to speed, but that speed is truly impressive. Words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard top out at around 120; on Dvorak, around 140. Voice to speech runs at about 180 wpm. Stenography permits the entry of English text at speeds between 240 and 300 words per minute!

So. You learn with:

• The Practice page on the Wiki
• Mirabai's steno lesson series (still short)
• Using Fly, if you're on Linux, and God willing, soon if you're on Windows
• Stenotypy, published in 1915. Things have, in fact, changed a lot since then.
• Hover Plover games, once they're written.

Fly on Windows

The first task I've undertaken is to get Fly working on Windows. As of this evening, I managed to get the graphical window to appear, but the application locks up as soon as a key is pressed.

To get anything working at all - some of these are used by Plover in general, and some just by Fly - these are the modules I needed to track down and install. (Yeah, I do miss CPAN when I leave the Perliverse.)

• Pyhook is a module for hooking Windows events.
• Pywin32 includes pythoncom (a COM library for Python)
• pyserial
• And of course Pygame.

Project hosting, parts, and documentation

The Plover project uses Launchpad as its primary source control and collaboration system. In addition to the main Plover application itself (in the main and Windows experimental versions), it also includes the "Fly" tutorial application and there are plans for other game-based tutorials, still on the drawing boards.

• The main Plover Launchpad page
• The Windows experimental branch
• Fly is still unhosted
• There is a Wiki for the project here
• Mirabai's project blog is here
• The Google group (ploversteno) is here

Bazaar and Launchpad

Launchpad appears to be popular among the Python crowd; it's a Github for "Bazaar", which is a Python VCS. Fortunately, there's a TortoiseBZR so my previous work with TortoiseSVN has prepared me somewhat for this.

I'm going through the usual conniptions getting everything set up with yet another VCS. I swear - a universal VCS configurator wouldn't be amiss! One nice thing is that Bazaar uses Putty under Windows for its ssh, so it's pretty easy to work with. Of course, it also means the keypair generated for git or SVN won't work; you've got to generate another with Putty's tools. Sigh.

Ah, no, after some wrestling, I found out that if you have both Putty and Cygwin's OpenSSH, Bazaar uses the Cygwin one. So you should ignore the instructions at Launchpad and just use your RSA key from c:\cygwin\home\.ssh (or wherever Cygwin put your home directory). Works like a charm; it just takes a little pushing and swearing.

A note on stenographs

They are freaking expensive. Even "cheap" ones that are just a keyboard and nothing else (the discontinued Gemini writer) start at $750 used. New normal ones that include a bunch of stuff you don't need are $4000 or so.

This is a market greatly in need of disruption.

Here's a forum post from September of last year by a guy thinking along these lines. I've dropped him a note. Let's see if we can't get that ball rolling a little faster.

Python

It's been a long time since I last used Python to any extent, and Plover is written in Python. So this post will bookmark a few important bits.

PyPI is the Python Package Index (Python's CPAN). "pip" is the command, as in "pip install pyserial". Works like a charm.

Pygame is the basis for the Fly tutorial program.

Blog #19

What an embarrassing proliferation - but this is an inevitable consequence of my desire to make each significant project a separate blog.

This one is about stenography. Specifically, stenography to be used to support my main business of translation, and using open-source tools - Plover and friends. I learned of Plover yesterday on (as always) HNN; today I am attempting to get its chief tutorial/teaching tool working on Windows. I have things to link to so they won't get lost, and so ... a new blog.

Currently using the Travel template with a bus, because ... I'm running out of visually distinct templates I can use without a lot of effort.