Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the Zn conjecture

    This problem fascinates me as a dungeon master. I'm not talking about the Riemann Z, but rather about the orientational sense of the players (and the DM ability to drive them off).

    This conjecture started when visiting the university with my mother. We went around the campus, visiting my faculty and other nice places around. I found that my mother was totally disoriented and was trusting me for getting everywhere. From that day I started wondering: What makes someone orientation drive off?

  • Setting up

    So hello. This is my first report.

    I'm not meaning to use my space for rambling about stuff and opinions. I was thinking to make this a place to share nerdy discoveries and tricks.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Ban autonomous systems

    More people have been working on blocking whole ranges of IP numbers, since that catches hosting providers that give bots access to the whole range they control. The bots switch IP numbers all the time so a filter based on IP numbers won't catch them. But if we can determine their autonomous system number (ASN), we can not only block an IP number range, we can block all the IP number rangers the ASN controls.

    Now, since these hosting providers also host nice things like other fediverse instances, I don't want to block them forever. I want to block them for 10min, and if they continue after a few of these shorter blocks, I want to block them for a week. Hopefully, their clients have ended their Internet slurping and things are back to normal. This is how fail2ban works, but only for individual IP numbers.

  • Consistency

    I struggle with sticking to my goals. There are a lot of ways in which I want to improve myself, but whenever I start to do it, I always fall off the wagon after a few weeks. The reason why varies, but the result is always the same.

    I reached my highest-ever weight in 2018 at about 256 pounds (116 kg). I weighed only 175 lbs in my sophomore year of college, and for the last seven years, I've had the goal of getting under 200 lbs again. Since 2020, I have managed to keep my average weight between 220 to 230 lbs, but i can't seem to crack that last few pounds to reach my goal.

    Hand-in-hand with that is the goal of pursuing more offline hobbies and staying off the Internet more. I got rid of most of my social media, but I'm still addicted to YouTube, and other online distractions often take me down a rabbit hole far more than I'd like. I want to engage in more analog activities, from swimming to gardening to cycling to reading, but I always find myself gravitating back towards my PC or my game consoles.

  • How CBZ (and CBT) are made?

    I worked on this project earlier this year (Anni Domini 2025) to understand cbz files. If you have a collection of legally purchased digital comics you may have the option to download them in two main formats: PDF and CBZ.

  • Notes about NixOS

    I started using NixOS on bare metal from like a month or so. In my opinion it is a fascinating system with a lot of interesting ideas which are two sided swords: The things that makes this system are also the one that make it infuriating.

    In my opinion it makes worth for a try, but that's the opinion of somebody with mathematical background who likes functional programming languages and esoteric paradigms. I'll try to fill these notes with what exactly makes NixOS, beside opinions. This is the second time I write this gemlog and I found out that I was transforming my notes into a formal introduction to the system. While writing it i was confused by certain aspects and then I realised: I'm not competent enought to explain well how this system works. So I decided that notes will be good enough for now and I can write more about later on.