A few months ago, I started renting a small office space because working at home (a small apartment in Japan) with a toddler is very difficult. When I used to work from home, I had a pretty high end headphone listening setup on my desk.

• RME ADI-2 FS DAC/Amp
• Focal Utopia Headphones
• Shure KSE1200 Electrostatic IEMs

This is a pricey setup, so I didn’t want to bring it to my office space. In reality, it’d probably be fine because Japan is a very safe country. However, I don’t think I could sleep at night without my gear safe and sound at home.

Anyway, I finally got around to figuring out what to do with the RME ADI-2 FS and Focal Utopia headphones (the Shure KSE1200 IEMs are usally in my backpack). Since I no longer have a desk at home, I decided to set everything up next to my bed. That was quick and easy, but then I realized I needed a source to play music. My bedside table is very small, so there was no way I could comfortably put my iPad Pro or 16" MacBook Pro on it.

After some reseach, I decided to go with my iPhone 11 Max. I figured it was the best candidate for the job because it’s small and I keep it on the bedside table at night anyway. To connect my iPhone to the RME ADI-2 FS, I purchased an Apple Lightning to USB 3 adapter. This adapter is great because it has a Lightning port in addition to the USB port. This means it’s possible to charge while listening to music at the same time – something that was impossible with Apple’s original Lightning to USB adapter for whatever reason.

Right now, I’m just using Apple Music (I have an Apple One family plan) for playback. I used to have TIDAL, but it’s hard to justify the $29/month just for music. To be honest, I don’t have any complaints regarding the sound quality. Perhaps I’d be able to hear a difference if I did an A/B test between Apple Music and TIDAl, but I don’t want to pay up for that potential revelation because both outcomes would be equally disappointing.

• If TIDAL sounds better than Apple Music, I have to live with knowing the music I’m listening to every night can sound better. Again, I can’t justify paying $29/month for TIDAL when a month’s subscription is the same price as a pack of diapers for J.
• If TIDAL doesn’t sound better, then that’s a waste of money (I’m not sure what their refund policy is, but I’m not eligible for the free trial anymore).

In any case, I’m very happy with the new setup. In fact, I’m going to go listen to some Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 right now.

Good night!

Chromium Core Team:

Remove the ability to receive, keep in memory, and use HTTP/2 and gQUIC push streams sent by the server. Send SETTINGS_ENABLE_PUSH = 0 at the beginning of every HTTP/2 and gQUIC connection to request that servers not send them. Chrome currently supports handling push streams over HTTP/2 and gQUIC, and this intent is about removing support over both protocols. Chrome does not support push over HTTP/3 and adding support is not on the roadmap.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I use HTTP/2 Server Push on BrianLi.com for the main CSS and JS files, and it definitely does have a positive impact on performance, especially for first-time visitors to my site. Before deciding to use Server Push, I benchmarked a few different configurations for my CSS and JS including inlining and preloading. In the end, HTTP/2 Server Push won out, albeit my a small margin, every time. Practically speaking, I guess this won’t affect me too much. Even though I do make use of HTTP/2 Server Push, this site still loads very quickly without it.

Firefox and Safari both support HTTP/2 push and we are not aware of any plans for removal.

For some reason I have a feeling HTTP/2 Server Push will be removed in Firefox and Safari if Chrome pushes ahead with the removal.

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We recently got annual passes to Shinjuku Gyoen, so we’ve been going there almost every weekend. Last week, we were there for a family photo shoot, and I was able to snap this photo in between shots. Very beautiful, and colorful.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I ordered an M1 MacBook Air for my wife to replace her broken 12" MacBook. The good news is that her MacBook Air arrived last week. The bad news is that I mistakenly ordered the wrong keyboard layout. She wanted the English (USA) layout, and I apparently ordered the Japanese (JIS) model – oops. So, we returned that one, and Apple’s sending us a new one with the correct keyboard layout. It’ll arrive sometime in mid-December.

Beyond that, I also ordered a Space Gray M1 MacBook Air for myself. After watching pretty much every YouTube review on it, I could no longer resist. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly an impulsive buy – at least I don’t think so – because I think it’ll have a positive impact on my workflow and efficiency.

Right now, I’m using a tricked out 2019 16" MacBook Pro.

• 2.4 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9 CPU
• 64 GB RAM
• AMD Radeon Pro 5500M CGPU
• 4 TB SSD

The M1 MacBook Air I ordered has the following specs.

• Apple M1 Chip (8-core CPU/8-core GPU)
• 16 GB RAM
• 2 TB SSD

According to the various benchmarks floating around the Internet, the M1 chip in the new MacBook Air outperforms or matches the Intel Core i9 chip in my 16" MacBook Pro. I can’t get over how absurd that is!

The two other notable differences between the two configuration are 64 GB vs. 16 GB of RAM, and 4 TB SSD vs. 2 TB SSD. The music production work I do, or used to do, does often consume a considerable amount of RAM. However, Apple’s new unified memory seems to be a new take on RAM, so I’m not sure if it can be compared to traditional RAM in Intel MacBooks at a 1:1 ratio. In other words, I thik I’ll be fine with the 16 GB of RAM in the M1 MacBook Air.

At the moment, I’m using ~2.2 TB of storage on my MacBook Pro. I think about 500 GB of that is from old Final Cut Pro projects that I can consolidate or delete. I’ll probably move a bunch of my music production samples to an external SSD as well since I don’t do much of that stuff anymore. After that, the 2 TB of disk space in the new M1 MacBook Air should be plenty.

My MacBook Air should arrive sometime between 12/20 and 12/27.

Looking forward to sharing my thoughts and experiences!

Earlier this month, Google published an official blog post detailing how “page experience signals” will start factoring into SEO page rankings in May 2021. In the past, Google has been notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to how its search algorithm functions. Thus, this announcement is great news for WordPress users who care about SEO. In this post, you’ll learn how to optimize your WordPress site for “page experience” and Core Web Vitals!

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In 2023, there are dozens of web analytics services to choose from. All of these services help you track, to different extents and in different ways, the activity of visitors to your site. In this post, you’ll learn about the similarities and differences between Google Analytics, Fathom Analytics, and Cloudflare Analytics, so you can decide which analytics solution to use for your site.

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In 2023, most websites rely on some external services for certain features. For example, if you’re a podcaster, you may want to add your latest episode to a blog post using the embed player from Transistor.fm (my favorite podcast host). Similarly, if you’re loading static assets from a CDN, that CDN may have its own domain name (cdn.brianli.com on this site). In this post, you’ll learn how to configure HTTP Preconnect for a static site hosted on Cloudflare Workers Sites!

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One of my favorite Cloudflare Workers Sites features is the ability to use HTTP/2 server push to push and preload static assets like CSS, JS, images, and fonts. HTTP/2 Server Push is a feature that Netlify and Vercel don’t support at this time, so it really makes Cloudflare Workers Sites stand out for static site hosting.

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I had some time last weekend, so I went for a walk with J around Higashinakano. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m using the Leica Q2 as my everyday-carry camera. On this day, I was feeling particularly moody (maybe I forgot to drink coffee in the morning) so I decided to shoot everything in monochrome.

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A few months ago, our 18 month old baby smashed the screen on my wife’s 12" MacBook. Since then, she’s been using my iPad Pro for her daily computing tasks (web browsing, blogging, editing photos, and watching movies).

At the end of the day, she still prefers a traditional laptop (and I want my iPad Pro back), so we’ve been holding out for a MacBook Air that’s powerful enough to do light photo and video editing. From the looks of it, the new M1-powered MacBook Air is exactly what she needs, so I ordered one today.

It’ll arrive in a week or so, and I’m very excited to do some testing with Logic Pro X and MainStage for music-related tasks as well.