I have to jot down this thought before it’s gone.
\nI’ve been using RSS feeds for a while. Most of the time I subscribed to tech stuff like HackerNews and Lobsters. A lot of the news are talking about AI, programming languages, hardware, and occasionally some debatable takes from random blogs. While this does cater to my interests, it’s far from perfect. Then I stumbled upon this blog post on HackerNews. In this blog post, he explained how he reflected upon himself and why he stopped following daily news through his RSS feeds. I found this part rather interesting:
\n\n\nOne thing I am still interested in is what is happening in my city. For that, I recently discovered a newsletter from Die Zeit called Elbvertiefung. Every weekday at 6 AM, they send a short newsletter about what happened in Hamburg, and sometimes they also recommend a book or a new restaurant or cafe. I start my day by reading it. Since it is in German, it also helps me improve my language skills.
\n
This kind of newsletter is really great if you want to live a slow and calm life. I was thinking to myself, why don’t we take a step further and build a simple world/city/town/whatever that is pleasant to live, then we can push the news through RSS feeds so anyone who subscribe can act like it’s real. The news can be every single day, or thrice a week to inform people what is happening around the (fake) town. The world building should be convincing and the people should feel like they are living in it.
\nTraditional, linear storytelling (i.e. novels, comic books, anime) and even interactive storytelling (i.e. visual novels, games) are cool, but in the world filled with trash contents, ragebaits, and terrible news all around, why don’t we take advantage and use a small part of the internet to create some sort of (fake) utopia that make use of the technology available at our disposal? This is probably just another storytelling technique, but I thought this might be interesting especially for people who are chronically online like me to indulge in some sort of fiction worlds aside of reading or watching traditional media.
\nI am not sure if there is anyone who already done something like this, but this could be a fun small creative project. If there are actually anything like this, I would like to subscribe to their feeds.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-28T18:20:34+08:00", "url": "https://blog.zerocchi.com/2026/01/28/storytelling-through-rss-feeds.html", "tags": ["Posts","Takes"] }, { "id": "http://zerocchi.micro.blog/2026/01/24/my-current-dilemma-with-gas.html", "title": "My current dilemma with GAS", "content_html": "I have this one annoying habit of mine and it made me spent a lot of money over the years. It’s called Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). It’s not a real medical syndrome, rather a compulsive desire to acquire as many equipment and plugins than necessary.
\nI’ve been trying to learn writing music on and off for more than 5 years, mostly off than on. The amount of money I’ve spent buying plugins and equipment was probably more than $1,500 already. I have two DAWs, several quite pricey plugins, a few MIDI keyboards, and some real instruments. Judging by my current skill, those are probably not really worth it. I don’t even remember some of the plugins I bought because I never actually used it. I think the one I actually used the most after buying is Bitwig Studio, just because it fits my workflow and I found it very interesting to use, especially their upcoming Bitwig Studio 6.
\nI remember the last time I bought something out of compulsion was Analog Lab Pro. Yes, you could say that this is a worthwhile purchase. But I already had KORG Gadget collections plugin for PC. That Analog Lab is totally unnecessary, because KORG Gadget probably took years for me to exhaust all their soundscape options. Speaking about KORG Gadget, I also have them on iPad and Nintendo Switch as well just for the sake of having them in all my devices. That alone took around $300 out of my pocket, excluding extra add-ons such as KORG iM1 which I also purchased because I “needed” that old school sounds. I also purchased several gadgets which amounted to around $100. Did I use them? Sparingly I guess, just like how much I actually sit down and write music.
\nThis year, I vow to stop this thing from happening again. Impulsive buying is going to hurt me in the long term if I don’t put an end to it. I have enough gears and plugins for me to actually start writing music. In fact, I tried writing a song using only one plugin (iM1) with KORG Gadget on my iPad and it was sufficient for the most part. That was the time I learnt I don’t need a lot to actually write stuff that I wanted. Hopefully this will work in the long run, plus I have to save money because life happened and I can’t afford to spend more anymore.
\nThat is, until I purchase the next gear.
\n![\"My](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/285193/2026/image.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-01-24T17:20:58+08:00",
"url": "https://blog.zerocchi.com/2026/01/24/my-current-dilemma-with-gas.html",
"tags": ["Posts","Music Production","Rants"]
},
{
"id": "http://zerocchi.micro.blog/2026/01/15/064831.html",
"title": "From zero to IRC server in just a day",
"content_html": "Whoops I almost slipped to the realm of not writing.
\nWhat can I say.. this past few days I was hyperfixating with IRC, and yesterday alone I spent the entire day setting up a small IRC server for my project circle just for the heck of it because I don’t think any sane, normal person will use IRC in this day and age, especially when Discord exist. I’m here not to discuss the technical aspect of it, but my experiences setting up these little gremlins.
\nThe first thing I need to do is to find an IRCd, or what people call IRC daemon. This thing is the one that responsible to implement IRC protocols so that people can talk over the internet. I was looking to install InspIRCd just because it look popular enough, but after a few while I decided against it and proceed to get ngIRCd instead. The reason being ngIRCd is pretty much a small and simple IRC daemon, unlike InspiIRCd and UnrealIRCd which is quite complex under the hood and are tailored to big servers. But even ngIRCd is pretty tricky to set up the first time. Making it run with Systemd is just very annoying, and it failed to spawn so many times it got me frustrated. Eventually after a few hours I managed to get it to spin together with additional settings like user cloak to hide the IP address attached as hostname. But still, it’s pretty lonely since the server is quite barebone. So I decided to install a collection of IRC services that provide you stuff like NickServ, ChanServ and all those server management stuff.
\nThere are two popular packages, Anope and Atheme. I decided to go with Atheme because it looks simple and modern enough, although not as popular as Anope. Atheme is even trickier not because it’s difficult to set up, it’s because I skipped reading docs and just DuckDuckGo-ing my way jumping across Github issues and forum posts to set the thing up. Had I sit down, sip some tea, and went through the docs properly, I’ll be done in few minutes. With some luck and patience, the services got through and connected to my server. I just need to attach a few modules afterwards and I already have a collection of Servs at my disposal.
\nAt the end of the day, after wrestling with all the configurations and seemingly hundreds of errors, I finally managed to own a complete small IRC server with all the bells and whistles. I finished them up by getting an IRC bot because what’s IRC without all those bots. After few searches I decided on using Limnoria, a successor to Supybot. I also set up The Lounge web client so anyone (my friends) without desktop client can join the server easily. The whole process was quite frustrating and fun at the same time and I learnt a lot along the way. Still feel like wanting to try writing IRC bot from scratch so I would have extra goodies for my small server.
\nWhere is the server, you ask? As this is for my own amusement, I will just keep it to myself and several friends for now. It’s public and part of a project I was in, but one needs to know the address to enter and I don’t think anyone else interested at this point of time. Maybe one day when the project become bigger, people will find out and join the server by themselves. That is if the server is still available at that point.
\n![](\"https://zerocchi.micro.blog/uploads/2026/6ce9024d41.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-01-15T06:48:31+08:00",
"url": "https://blog.zerocchi.com/2026/01/15/064831.html",
"tags": ["Posts","Tech","Indie Web"]
},
{
"id": "http://zerocchi.micro.blog/2026/01/09/phpfied-css.html",
"title": "PHPfied CSS?",
"content_html": "I was this years old to know aside of HTML, you can also convert CSS file to PHP in order to use some PHP shenanigans. Just add a header to indicate that it’s of type text/css:
<?php header("Content-Type: text/css"); ?>\n@import url('../styles.css?v=<?=filemtime('../styles.css')?>');\n\n.category-header {\n background-color: var(--color-bg-alt);\n backdrop-filter: blur(5px);\n ...\n}\nand inside the HTML file you can link the stylesheet like usual, except changing the .css to .php
<link rel="stylesheet" href="gallery.php">\nWild.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T09:21:57+08:00", "url": "https://blog.zerocchi.com/2026/01/09/phpfied-css.html", "tags": ["Posts","Programming"] }, { "id": "http://zerocchi.micro.blog/2026/01/08/all-aboard-the-microblog-train.html", "title": "All aboard the micro.blog train", "content_html": "2026 is probably the year I should start writing again, before this ability turning into dust due to English not being my first language and the last time I write long essays/stories was probably around 2016. That’s solid 10 years. I chose micro.blog because there is no pressure to get everything right and I can better articulate myself. Most importantly, there is no need to fight the mighty algorithms and followers count. It’s all freestyle writing here.
\nI recently got into Indie Web movement where people went back to the original web, the one that corporations played only small part of. Being someone who had a chance experiencing both Old and New webs, I would rather go back to the original web when everything actually have personality and identity. Many people don’t realize that their Internet life is dictated by algorithms set by the same five apps they used, as oppose to browsing with intention. I fell into the same trap; I used to mindlessly browsing Instagram reels for hours and sending memes to people. Granted, you get easy dopamine from those activities, but your life will stagnant faster than you thought.
\nThis year, I’m trying to reduce as much as possible my screen time on the platforms owned by corporations (i.e. Reddit, X/Twitter, Facebook) and start to actually surf with intentions and discover stuff without mighty al_god_rithms bestowed upon my life. I collected some RSS feeds and started a blog (this one!). I also have personal website at zerocchi.com just to stamp my presence on the small corner of the Internet. I gradually moved away from Google Mail and started using different mail providers. The more you decouple from platforms owned by corporations, the liberating you will feel.
\nYouTube and Discord are the only platforms I can’t move from yet. There are no solid replacements for YouTube so far, but you can always search videos with intent instead of depending on algorithms to feed content to you. For Discord, as much as I want to use something like IRC, it’s probably tricky to ask my buddies to move away as Discord is probably the better IRC. But, I believe the old web will stage a comeback so long the corporations continue to deteriorate their products and offerings.
\n![](\"https://zerocchi.micro.blog/uploads/2026/image.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-01-08T13:07:03+08:00",
"url": "https://blog.zerocchi.com/2026/01/08/all-aboard-the-microblog-train.html",
"tags": ["Posts","Takes"]
}
]
}