The Latest — Steve Block

Category: Software

  • Quadro P2200 Transcoding

    I have a Dell R730 server running Windows Server 2019. It has a Debian Linux VM running Plex and Jellyfin servers, and I wanted to add hardware transcoding with a video card, as certain high resolution HDR videos were not easily converted in real time using the CPU only (which also burned a lot of…

  • Some Brief Linux Gaming Notes

    I recently built a new gaming computer, and though it runs Windows 11 I have been giving some serious time to setting up and testing a Linux gaming setup as well. I have Fedora 41 installed on a 2 TB NVME drive in the PC, secondary to the 4 TB main drive that is running…

  • MacBook Air Shenanigans

    I spent more hours than is reasonable getting Fedora updated on my old MacBook Air (2013). 4 gigs of ram, hilarious. The clock was set to February when this booted up, so it’s been at least 5 or 6 months since I ran the machine. The screen isn’t good but it’s overall a quality laptop.…

  • A New Site Generator

    Way back in 2011 I moved this site from wordpress to a static blog powered by jekyll. I haven’t changed much about the site since then. Writing posts in markdown and keeping them in a simple folder still feels like the right decision. I’ve been running this blog on an increasingly ancient Debian server. I…

  • Adding Additional Bluetooth Codec Support to Moode 7.1

    Moode 7.1 includes Bluetooth support and can act both as a receiver for playback and a player to Bluetooth headphones or speakers. By default it supports the standard SBC codec, which essentially everything supports. This is fine as a minimum, but we want to add support for more advanced or high quality codecs, including AAC…

  • Simple Modern Skin for Free42 HP 42s Calculator Simulator

    Over the last few years I’ve taken to using RPN for general calculations instead of the more common algebraic notation. I have an HP 35s which is supposed to be at my desk at the office, but is currently at home. I’ve taken to using the truly excellent PCalc for iOS for general calculation where…

  • Pedometer++ and developer trust

    Shortly after the introduction of the iPhone 5s with the M7 motion processor, David Smith released an extremely basic pedometer application that read and displayed this data. It was a free app that I considered almost more of a hobby project or proof of concept than a product. Over time the app added features, including…

  • Paste tables as MultiMarkdown in Editorial for iPad

    I purchased Editorial when it first came out last year, and I’ve used it to write a number of documents including several posts for this blog. Its Markdown support is great, and whatever dialect it uses aligns well with the features I need from MultiMarkdown and kramdown, the two variants of the language that I…

  • Lightroom and Fuji X-Trans sensor raw files

    Adobe, I need your help. I finally decided which of the new breed of mirrorless cameras to buy. I’ve been looking for almost a year, and since April I’ve rented and tested four of the most interesting mirrorless cameras on the market: the Sony NEX-7, Fujifilm X100, Fujifilm X-Pro1, and Olympus OM-D E-M5. The choice…

  • Markup languages for writing

    When I started writing for the web several years ago, content management systems didn’t commonly include WYSIWYG editors. Typically I wrote posts in standard HTML, and the editors at best had automatic insertion of paragraph tags and javascript buttons to insert text styling cues such as bold and italics. I was never a fan of…