I’m addicted to working. During the week, I work on content-related things for Kinsta. In the evenings, I work on improving this website. Weekends are more relaxed, but I still try to find some time to learn about new things and write content. Right now, I’m going through a JavaScript boot camp, so hopefully I’ll be able to add some dynamic functionality to this site later this year.

Occasionally, it’s important to just drop everything and take a break. I decided to do just that this weekend because of the beautiful weather forecast. Restaurants started opening back up again in Massachusetts, so we decided to go get Mexican food at El Pelon in Boston. During my time at Northeastern University, I probably ate at El Pelon over fifty times. Initially, we were going to get takeout. When we arrived, no one was sitting outside on the terrace, so we decided to eat there before going home. I never knew eating a burrito could feel so nostalgic.

I have to say that eating at a restaurant felt extremely weird. It’s crazy to think it’s been almost half a year since I last ate at a restaurant. Like I said in a post a few weeks ago, the COVID-19 pandemic has really put things into perspective – a reminder to appreciate the simple things in life.

I added “X min read” (a la Medium), functionality to my Hugo-generated blog today. If you’re not sure what that means, just take a look under the title of this post – it says “1 min read” next to the post date.

Adding this feature was pretty easy. The Golang snippet below can be used to display the read time in minutes. It reads the number of words in .Content, which is the post body, divides it by 250, and rounds it to the nearest integer.

(math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)

With the snippet above, I integrated it into my Hugo template. I ended up with two conditionals. The first one checks for the post type because I only want “X min read” to show on posts, links, and notes. The second conditional forces the minimum read time to one minute.

{{ if or (eq .Section "post") (eq .Section "link") (eq .Section "note") }}
 &middot; <span class="read-time">{{ if lt (math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)) 1 }}1{{ else }}{{ (math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)) }}{{ end }} min read</span>{{ end }}

I know what you’re thinking. No, I am not trying to make a Medium clone.

Earlier tonight, I woke up my MacBook Pro from sleep mode. I was then greeted with a completely washed out display followed by a drop in blood pressure. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but I was quite concerned because I just bought my 16" MacBook Pro two months ago. After some experimenting, I was able to resolve the issue without restarting. In this post, I’ll share how I was able to fix washed out display colors in macOS.

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Last weekend, I hosted a webinar on how to host an online concert with Zoom. During the Q&A portion, I received a lot of good questions about MainStage and music technology in general. One question that came up had to do with the best sample rate for MainStage. In this article, we’ll discuss which sample rate is best for performing live with MainStage.

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I can’t believe it’s only 39 days into my 100 Day Blogging Challenge. Between work, taking care of J, and trying to absorb the gravity of world events, keeping my head up and charging ahead with one post per day has been exceedingly difficult. I guess what I’m trying to say is that something as trivial as a blogging challenge seems pointless during these protest-fueled times. Dave Mark from The Loop summed up my feelings in a tweet.

I am really struggling to find meaning in writing about tech the past few days. Such small beans with all that’s going on around me.

I just want to scream and rant about this dumpster fire we’re all living in.

Doing my best to compartmentalize. Bear with.

That’s the tweet.🤬😢

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog posts over the last month and a half, you’ve probably a noticed a trend. I started off strong and event wrote a few pretty detailed posts like this one. Things have definitely slowed down over the past few weeks, and I’ve resorted to shorter posts and providing commentary on linked content. I think the most important lesson I’ve learned so far from this challenge is that my writing style and ambitions do not vibe well with the “one post per day” mentality. My natural blogging style is “longform and detailed”, which makes this blogging challenge particularly frustrating.

With that said, I’m not going to back down from this challenge now. Don’t get me wrong… I can’t wait for this challenge to be over, but giving up is out of the question. I guess I’ll try to make the best out it in the meantime. My plan is to continue with shorter commentary-style posts, and publish a longer tutorial or analysis piece every two to three weeks.

Before my brother and I moved away from home, my family used to have barbecues pretty regularly during the summer months. With the COVID-19 pandemic, that routine has been shaken up a bit until today. Since things pandemic-wise are getting a bit calmer where we live, we decided to have a barbecue today to celebrate my cousins’ birthdays. I have to say it was actually really nice to reconnect with aunts, uncles, and cousins. I used to always take gatherings like these for granted. It’s amazing (in a good way) how much the pandemic has put things into perspective for me.

Even though I worked for most of the weekend, it was nice to unwind for a few hours to eat, drink, talk, and laugh with my family. I’m looking forward to starting another week of WordPress domination with Kinsta tomorrow!

I’m always looking for new ways to make this blog faster. Today, I added instant.page to prefetch links before they’re clicked. The concept is pretty interesting. It turns out there’s a “significant” amount of time between a user hovering over and clicking on a link – around 300 ms. Thus it makes sense to use the extra time to preload and cache the linked page.

Adding instant.page was very easy. All I had to do was add the JavaScript below before my closing body tag.

<script src="/js/instantpage.js" type="module" defer></script>

Check out the GIF to see how instant.page works. As you can see, hovering over the “Contact” page link in my navigation menu causes the page to be preloaded.

Yesterday, I tested the Shure KSE1200 electrostatic in-ear monitors. Today, I was back in headphone-land with the Utopia, Focal’s top of the line model. The Focal Utopia is regarded by some people as the best pair of headphones in the world, so I was very excited to try it out. I’ll write a more complete review in a few months. For now, there are my first impressions of the Focal Utopia headphones.

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I’ve been a huge fan of Shure in-ear monitors since my first pair of single-driver E2s back in high school. Since then, I’ve owned the E5, SE535, and SE846 IEMs. Today, I added another Shure IEM to the list – the KSE1200. I’ve had my eyes on the KSE1200 IEMs for a while, so I was very excited to receive them today – shout out to the folks over at Moon Audio.

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The new 13-inch MacBook Pro looks like a solid machine, but I’m surprised Apple didn’t bump up the screen size to 14 inches. To me, the larger bezel when compared to the 16-inch model makes the new 13-inch model look a little dated. Moving to a 14-inch screen would aso differentiate the new 13-inch MacBook Pro from the 13-inch MacBook Air even further.

It’ll be interesting to see some benchmarks over the next few weeks. The $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro ships with 8th generation processors, while the $1,099 MacBook Air ships with 10th generation processors. I’m looking to purchase a 13" MacBook for my wife soon, so I look forward to seeing whether the new 13-inch MacBook Pro has a significant advantage when it comes to photo editing.

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