Posts on Ravi's Blog

Budapest Travel

Fri, 29 May 2026 19:56:28 +0530

In September 2025, I attended the annual LibreOffice conference in Budapest, Hungary. This gave me an opportunity to explore the city, which I will cover in this post.

Let’s start with the currency. Although Hungary is a part of the European Union (EU), it doesn’t use the euro as its currency. Instead, it uses Hungarian forints (denoted by “Ft”). During my time in Hungary, 1 Indian rupee was equal to 4 Hungarian forints.

After reaching the Budapest airport, I bought a 15-day public transport pass. The public transport counter is after you pass customs and immigration. The pass allows unlimited use of public transport in the city. I had to show my passport and pay 5950 Ft to get the pass. The pass had my passport number mentioned on it. The public transport passes can also be bought at any of the tram stations as well.

This is the counter from where I bought my public transport pass.

My unlimited public transport pass for Budapest. I have redacted my passport number from it.

An automatic ticket machine at a tram station in Budapest.

Budapest is a union of two cities—Buda and Pest—lying on opposite sides of the Danube River. My hotel—Corvin Hotel—was on the Pest side.

Budapest had good public transport. The buses, metros, and trams complemented each other. For example, the airport didn’t have metro or tram connectivity, but it was served by the bus. Most of the metro was on the Pest side, with only a couple of stations falling in Buda. However, both sides had an extensive network of trams.

Furthermore, the information about the public transport was easily accessible. For instance, the map of tram stops inside the trams also included the bus routes one could get after alighting at those stops.

From the airport, I took a bus followed by taking a metro on the M3 line to reach within walking distance of my hotel.

An M3 line metro in Budapest.

During the conference I would take the tram to the conference venue. The trams were modern and fast. They also had a smiley face at the front, which gave them a friendly look. It seemed like the trams were happily doing their job. The city also had a good pedestrian infrastructure along with separate cycling tracks.

A tram in Budapest having a smiley face at the front.

Budapest’s tap water is officially safe to drink, which was mentioned on a sticker posted on the wall of the bathroom of my hotel room. So, I did not need to buy any water bottles while I was there.

On the 6th of September, I went on a sightseeing tour of Budapest with my Dione. Our friend Attila, who was a local (from Hungary), joined us. We went to the central market from our hotel by metro.

If you read my post on Vienna, I mentioned that the metro stations don’t have AFC gates but ticket validators instead. Budapest’s metro also has the same system. If you buy individual tickets, you need to validate them using the validators on the station before boarding the metro. If you are using a public transport pass like I was, then you do not need to validate, and you can board the metro directly.

A ticket validator at a metro station in Budapest.

In 10-15 minutes, we reached the central market. Attila showed us around. I bought a fridge magnet and paprika powder as souvenirs. Paprika powder is a signature spice of Hungary. It is mainly available in two forms—one is sweet and the other being spicy. I wanted the spicy one, but I didn’t get that in that market. Therefore, I had to contend with buying the sweet version. The sweet version isn’t sweet though, it is just not spicy. After bringing that paprika powder home, it is mainly used for food coloring. I like it though and use it frequently in my omelets and other dishes.

Central market.

The building right behind the tram is the central market building.

At some point, Atilla had to join the The Document Foundation (TDF) sightseeing group, so we parted ways at the central market. Dione and I continued our sightseeing and decided to start with visiting the Hungarian parliament, which is a tourist attraction. It was because we were on the Pest side and the parliament was also on the same side, while other tourist attractions were on the Buda side.

So, Dione and I hopped on a tram and went to the parliament. We got off at a tram station just outside the parliament. The parliament is the icon of Budapest. The building has a gothic architecture and colored brown and white. One can buy tickets and take an inside tour. However, we didn’t have a lot of time, so we stayed outside the building.

Hungarian Parliament building.

After spending some time outside the parliament building, we took a tram to the Chain Bridge. As I mentioned earlier, Budapest has two parts—Buda and Pest—separated by the Danube River. To go from one of the sides to the other requires crossing a bridge. Although Budapest has many bridges linking the two sides, the main one is the Chain Bridge.

We walked on the chain bridge to get to the other side. The bridge gave a good view of the Danube River. It also had a statue of a lion. The Buda Castle (another major landmark of Budapest) was visible from the bridge.

A shot of Chain Bridge.

The lion statue on the Chain Bridge.

After reaching the other side of the bridge (the Buda side), we sat on a bench for some time and then planned on where to go next. We decided to go to Fisherman’s Bastion, which is another tourist attraction.

We used the OSMAnd~ app to figure out which bus to take and hopped on one. Soon we reached Fisherman’s Bastion, where we found a flight of stairs that led upwards. Upon climbing the stairs, we got a panoramic view of the city. It also gave us a good view of the Hungarian parliament across the river. Going further upstairs, we found a statue of Stephen I of Hungary. He was the first king of Hungary, getting the crown in the year 1900.

A view of Hungarian parliament from Fisherman’s bastion.

I found Fisherman’s Bastion to be the best tourist attraction in the city. As mentioned earlier, it offers a panoramic view of the city, which I liked. I liked the arhitecture and open space there. If you find yourself in Budapest, I would highly recommend that you visit Fisherman’s Bastion.

Fisherman’s Bastion.

Statue of Stephen I of Hungary at Fisherman’s Bastion.

Next, we went downstairs and returned to where the bus dropped us. From here on, we walked in random streets to see the residential and non-touristy side of Budapest. It was not so random as we walked towards Batthyány tér metro station. Upon reaching the metro station, we found a café where we stopped for a while for some coffee. After injecting some caffeine into our blood, we proceeded to find a place to have lunch.

Batthyány tér metro station.

For lunch, we decided to go to Rákóczi tér metro station after reading on the internet about the food options there. Upon exiting the metro station, we found a market inside a building that had a lot of shops, but most of them were closed.

After roaming around inside a bit, we found an Italian place open and decided to eat there. The name of this place was Matteos. We ordered an eggplant parmigiana, a lasagna artichoke, and a classic tiramisu. It wasn’t very tasty but filled us up for the day.

A picture of Matteos, where we had our lunch.

Budapest has four metro lines, and we had been to three of them, so we decided to try the remaining line, which was the M1 line. It is the oldest line in the city and has a different vibe than the modern lines. This line was opened in 1896, one of the oldest subway systems in the world.

The coaches were much smaller than the other metro lines, and the seating arrangement was something you would expect from a bus than a typical metro train. We rode all the way to the last stop, Mexikói út. Upon going outside, we found out there wasn’t much to do here.

At this point, I checked the map and realized that Heroes’ Square is just a couple of metro stations away. Heroes’ Square is a tourist attraction in Budapest. It is located in Zuglóa and is a historically significant place in Budapest. It has a monument which features the Seven chieftains of the Magyars.

M1 line station and tracks. It is the oldest metro transit of Budapest and one of the oldest in the world. It started operations in 1896.

Here, our unlimited public transport pass was handy because if it was paid per trip, we would think of the stop as a “wasted” one because we would have to buy a ticket again, but in this case we could just hop on again without any regrets.

An M1 line metro train entering the station.

So we took the M1 line again and deboarded at Hősök tere station, followed by walking to the square. After roaming around for a while, we saw a trolleybus and decided to ride on that.

Heroes’ Square.

This is the trolleybus we took in Budapest.

A trolleybus is an electric bus that is powered by overhead electric cables. It is like a tram but runs on roads instead of tracks. We got down at Dózsa György út metro station. Then we took a metro to our hotel.

Before going to the hotel, we went to a place to eat something. We had coffee and lángos. Lángos is a deep-fried Hungarian dish, which looks exactly like the Indian flatbread bhatura. I found it tasty, but since it was deep-fried, that was almost a given.

Lángos — a dish which looks like the Indian flatbread bhatura.

The next day we went to Vienna—the capital of Austria—which I have already posted about. Check it out here.

I had a good time in Budapest, and it is a beautiful city with good public transport and some amazing sites to visit. That’s it for now, and see you next time!

Credits: Thanks Dione and Badri for proofreading.

A Day in Vienna

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:59:23 +0530

On the 7th of September 2025, my friend Dione and I had a day trip to Vienna—the capital of Austria. We were attending a conference in Budapest, Hungary, which is 250 km from Vienna. So, it was a good opportunity to visit Vienna.

We took a morning train from Budapest to Vienna and got back to Budapest by night. However, booking these tickets turned out to be a bit complicated. There were many websites to book the train ticket—Hungarian Railways, Austrian Railways, and third-party sites such as Omio. All these websites had different prices for the same ticket.

I booked the tickets from the Hungarian Railways website as it was the cheapest. The train from Budapest to Vienna was €13, operated by Eurocity. Also, I had to pay €2 for the seat reservation on top. The train from Vienna to Budapest—operated by Railjet—was €21, along with €2 extra for reservation again—making it €23. The tickets for the two-way journey added up to €38.

The cost of these tickets varied depending on when one purchses them: the sooner you purchase, the lower the price. I bought my tickets 15 days ahead of the date of journey and paid just €38. In contrast, Dione booked just one day before her trip and paid around €100 for her tickets.

As for the seat reservation, long-distance trains in Europe usually require paying extra for the seat reservation. This ensures that you get your preferred seat, such as a window seat or an aisle seat. Nevertheless, you will get a seat on long-distance trains because they do not sell more tickets than there are seats. Therefore, you will get a seat without reservation as well. However, we reserved our seats so that we can sit together. This helped us more in the return part of the journey—from Vienna to Budapest—which was more crowded than the train we took from Budapest to Vienna in the morning.

On another note, reservation is mandatory on some trains in Europe, but ours wasn’t one of them. In addition, people also use rail passes, so an extra charge is required on top for reserving the seats for pass holders. On the other hand, local trains do not require seat reservations in general.

Our train’s scheduled departure was at 08:55 from the Budapest Kelenfold station. We reached the train station 40 minutes before the train’s scheduled departure. The Kelenfold station had free Wi-Fi, which was handy because I didn’t have a local SIM.

A departures board at Budapest Kelenfold station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

This is platform number 15 of Budapest Kelenfold station where we boarded our train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Our train arrived on time. I tried to find our coach number but could not find the numbers written anywhere on the side of the coach. Luckily, we were helped by a fellow passenger who directed me to look at the doors, where the numbers were mentioned clearly!

Then we got into our compartment and took our respective seats. Our tickets were checked twice - once while the train was in Hungary and the other when in Austria. Showing the PDF of the train ticket on our mobile to the ticket inspector was good enough for the purpose. Austria and Hungary are a part of the open transit Schengen area, which means this was the extent of the border control checks we had to go through.

Interior of our Budapest to Vienna train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The train also had free Wi-Fi, albeit with poor connection at times. There were no eatery options inside the train.

We deboarded at the Wien Hauptbahnhof station in Vienna. The journey was 250 km and took 2.5 hours, reaching Vienna at 11:25, which was the scheduled time.

This blue colored train was the one we took for our Budapest to Vienna journey. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

An ÖBB train standing at a platform of Vienna train station. ÖBB is the national carrier of Austria. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Wien Hauptbahnhof train station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

At the station, we bought a 24-hour public transport pass from a ticket machine for €8. The pass includes unlimited access to all the public transport in Vienna for 24 hours. My pass was valid from the 7th of September at 11:34 to the 8th of September at 11:33. A single public transport ticket (from anywhere to anywhere) costs €2.4. A single ticket of €2.4 can be used once on any public transport in Vienna—trams, metros, and buses.

Therefore, the pass is a good deal if you are going to take at least four public transport trips in a day. Unlike the public transport pass I got in Budapest, the pass in Vienna was anonymous and not tied to the rider’s name.

My public transport pass in Vienna.

We wanted to visit the Schönbrunn Palace. The palace was reachable by subway. In order to get to the subway station, we started by going outside the station. But it was not outside. So we came back inside the station building and realized that the subway was underground.

We took the subway and deboarded at the Schönbrunn subway station—the closest one to the palace. The ride was smooth; the train was pretty silent.

By the way, like Budapest, there were no AFC gates for boarding the subway in Vienna. The stations had ticket validators instead, where you are supposed to validate your tickets before getting into the subway.

Instead of AFC gates, Vienna has ticket validators as in the picture. You need to tap your ticket in the validator before boarding the subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

These validators are in place to ensure that you use your ticket only once. Unlike AFC gates, which are present in metros of most of the countries I have been to, the ticket validators don’t act as a physical barrier to enter the boarding area.

If you board the metro without validating your ticket, you will be facing hefty fines upon getting caught. I have heard that the fine is around €100. On the other hand, if you have a public transport pass like we did, then you don’t need to validate it before boarding.

In addition, there were no annoying security checks either, unlike in Indian cities. In the Delhi metro, for example, you would need to scan your bags and pass through a security check before getting to the AFC gates.

Vienna subway. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Now back to the story, after alighting at the Schönbrunn subway station, we walked to the Schönbrunn Palace. One can roam around outside the palace and click pictures for free. To go inside, however, requires buying tickets. The tickets for the palace can be booked in advance on the internet. We didn’t take the tickets in advance, as we decided to visit the palace at the last moment.

So we went to the ticket counter and found out that we needed to wait for 1 hour 40 minutes before going inside if we took the tickets at that moment. In addition, one ticket costs €44 (around 4000 Indian rupees). Since we had to return to Budapest in the evening and only had a few hours in the city, we decided not to go inside the palace. Instead, we clicked a few pictures outside the palace.

Schönbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The Schönbrunn Palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is a historically significant place. It served as one of the residences of the powerful Habsburg dynasty. The palace looked so good that my friend Dione said, “It seemed like the palace was built yesterday”. This remark applied to other parts of Vienna we went to. For example, the subway stations also seemed like they were built yesterday.

A street near Schönbrunn Palace. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Now, we wanted to go someplace to grab a bite. I asked my friend Urbec for suggestions on where to go. They suggested we visit the steps named Strudlhofstiege, which had the added benefit of being in a neighborhood with good bakeries and buildings.

So, we took the subway and deboarded at the Roßauer Lände station, followed by walking around a kilometer to reach the stairs.

Roßauer Lände subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Platform of the Roßauer Lände subway station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The The Strudlhofstiege steps. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On the way, we were also looking for a place to eat. Unfortunately, it was Sunday, and Vienna closes on Sunday. That means most of the shops—including bakeries and cafés—are closed. Only places like railway stations have shops open on Sundays.

By the way, walking around in the streets of Vienna was a treat. The streets were not crowded (as it was not exactly a touristy neighborhood) and had good pedestrian infrastructure, with clean streets and separate cycling tracks. The buildings were also beautiful.

A random street in Vienna.

Another street in Vienna.

After some walking, we found a restaurant open. I grabbed the menu to check the prices. A lady at the shop asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I was browsing the menu. She said that the menu was in German. I don’t know how she knew that we didn’t know German, but it seemed like a racist thing to be told.

We roamed around further and found a café by the name of Blue Orange, where we ordered coffee and croissants. When we got our order, the waiter told us that they were having some issues, so they wouldn’t charge us for the croissant if it wasn’t good.

A picture of Blue Orange café. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

My friend and I took a bite, and both of us didn’t like the croissant. After some time, the waiter came to us and asked whether the croissant was okay, to which we said no. Therefore, they didn’t charge us for the croissant. This was the first time something like this happened to me. It felt like I was in a different world. I added a small tip at the end for this gesture, which I had to put in a jar at the counter.

The cappuccino I ordered was €4.50, while the espresso that Dione ordered was €3.60. The croissant would have been €3.60. I remember Paris having cheaper croissants!

Then when the waiter brought our drinks out, they automatically gave me the espresso and Dione the cappuccino. Dione found this funny because there is a stereotype in her country (Australia) that men drink strong black coffee, and women drink milky drinks like cappuccinos. She found it interesting that this stereotype seems to exist in Austrian culture too.

We hopped on a tram to reach the nearest subway station and went to the Wien Hauptbahnhof station to have something before we caught our return train to Budapest.

Trams in Vienna. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

At the station, I had Esterhazyschnitten and Punschkrapfen (thanks, Urbec, for the suggestion). The lady at the shop warned me that punschkrapfen had alcohol in it, to which I said okay.

Esterhazyschnitten was a cake made of almonds, while punschkrapfen was a jam-filled sponge cake, soaked in rum. Esterhazyschnitten was my favorite out of the two. The punschkrapfen was too sweet for my taste.

Punschkrapfen. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Esterhazyschnitten. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

While the station was well-built, there were a couple of things about the Wien Hauptbahnhof station that we didn’t like. There were no seats inside the station, so we had to eat outside the building. Also, the toilets needed to be paid for. It costs 50 cents to use the toilets at this station.

The Vienna train station had departure boards all over the place. So, we went to the platform our train was to arrive on.

Departure boards in Vienna displaying information about the trains. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Platform and tracks at Wien Hauptbahnhof station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

When our train arrived, we had some difficulty locating our compartment. This train was operated by a different company (Railjet) than the one we took in the morning (Eurocity) from Budapest to Vienna, and we were able to locate the coach numbers using the digital board at the station. Each compartment had a digital board next to it on the station displaying the coach number. However, that wasn’t the problem. Even after reading the coach numbers and trying to find ours, it didn’t appear where we expected in the sequence.

When we were not able to find our coach for a while, we asked a ticket inspector of the train who was standing on the platform. He directed us towards the front side of the train. So we started running to the front side as we didn’t know how long the train stops.

As we ran toward our coach, we found out that the engine of the back train was connected with the last compartment of the train at the front. At that point, we realized that the train was a combination of two trains. At a later station, the train on the back side parted ways and went towards Vienna Airport.

Interior of the train we took from Vienna to Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

This is the train we took for our return journey from Vienna to Budapest. It is standing on a platform in Budapest Kelenfold station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

We had a smooth journey and reached Budapest a couple of hours later.

Vienna is a beautiful city; we enjoyed being there, and we would like to visit the city again!

That’s it for now. Signing off. See you in the next one!

Credits: Thanks to Dione and Badri for proofreading.

LibreOffice Conference Budapest 2025

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:24:16 +0530

In September 2025, I attended the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, Hungary, on the 4th and the 5th, and a community meeting on the 3rd. Thanks to The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring my travel and accommodation costs. The conference venue was Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).

The conference was planned to be held from the 4th to the 6th, but the program for the 6th of September had to be canceled due to the venue being unavailable because of a marathon in Budapest. So, all the talks got squeezed into just two days, making the schedule a bit hectic.

The TDF had booked my room at the Corvin Hotel. It was a double bedroom with a window. The breakfast was included in the hotel booking. The hotel was walking distance from the conference venue. One could also take a tram from the hotel to reach the venue.

A shot of my room. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A tram in Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

3rd of September

On the 3rd of September, we had a community meeting at the above-mentioned venue. I walked with my friend Dione to the venue. Upon reaching there, I noticed that the university had no boundaries and gates. This reminded me of the previous year’s conference venue in Luxembourg, which also had no boundaries or gates.

In contrast, Indian universities and institutes typically have walls and gates serving as boundaries to separate them from the rest of the city. Many of these institutes also have security guards at the entrance, who may ask attendees to present proof of admission before allowing them inside. I was surprised to find that institutes in Europe, like the one where the conference was held, did not have such boundaries.

The building where the conference was held was red, which happened to be the same color as the building for the previous year’s conference venue. I remember joking with Dione that the criteria for the conference venue might have been the color of the building.

The red building in the picture served as the conference venue. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

During the community meeting, we shared ideas on how to spread the word about LibreOffice. The meeting lasted for a couple of hours.

After the community meeting, we went to the hotel for dinner sponsored by the TDF.

These Esterházy cake bites were really yummy. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Raspberry Currant cake slices. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

4th of September

On the first day of the conference, attendees were given swag bags containing a pad, sticky notes, a pen, a conference T-shirt, and a bottle.

Conference swag. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The talks started early in the morning with Eliane Domingos, Chairperson of TDF’s Board of Directors, giving the inauguration talk. As always, I found Italo Vignoli’s talk on the importance of document freedom interesting.

During the snack break, I noticed that there were three types of milk available for coffee: cow’s milk, lactose-free milk, and almond milk. Almond milk is rare in India, but I have managed to get it, but I have never seen lactose-free milk in India.

Since I run fundraisers in my projects, such as Prav, I could relate to Lothar K. Becker’s talk. He discussed the issue that certain implementations in LibreOffice require a budget that is too large for any single interested entity to fund independently. Furthermore, The Document Foundation (TDF) cannot legally receive funds from government entities. Therefore, there is no organization or entity to pool resources from all the interested entities to finance the implementation.

Lothar giving his presentation. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Another talk was by the Austrian Armed Forces on their migration to LibreOffice. I wanted to know why they migrated, and I found out that they did it for their digital sovereignty, and not for saving on the license costs. Another point presented in the talk was that LibreOffice is available on all the operating systems, while the Microsoft Office suite is not that widely available. The migration was systematic and was performed over a few years. They started working on it in 2021, and the migration was finished recently. In addition, it also required training their staff in using LibreOffice.

Presentation on migration to LibreOffice by Austrian Armed Forces. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The lunch was inside the university canteen. We were provided lunch coupons by the TDF. I got a vegan coupon with 4000 Ft written on it, which meant I could take lunch for up to 4000 Hungarian forints.

My lunch ticket for the conference. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The lunch I had on the first day. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

During the evening, it was my turn for the presentation. I was done with preparing my slides ten days before my talk. I also got my slides reviewed by friends.

My talk was finished in 20 minutes, while I was given a 30-minute slot. This helped us catch up on the schedule. Furthermore, I made my talk interactive by asking questions and making sure that the audience was not asleep. During my talk, my friend Dione took my pictures with my camera.

My talk was on how free software projects could give users a say in freedom to modify the software. I illustrated this using the Prav project that I am a part of.

After the talks were over, we were treated to a conference dinner at Trofea Grill. It had a great selection of desserts, which helped me sample some Hungarian desserts. The sponge cake was especially good.

Desserts at Tofea Grill. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

5th of September

The next day—the 5th of September—I went with Dione to the venue early in the morning, as her talk was the first one of the day. Her talk was titled Managing Tasks with Nextcloud Deck. Later that day, I also attended a talk on Collabora. At lunch, I found the egg white salad quite tasty.

Dione giving her presentation. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Egg white salad. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

After the lunch break, we had the conference group photo. I had a Nikon camera, which we used to take the group photo. I requested a university student to take our group photo and also taught her how to operate the camera.

Group photo

By the evening, the conference ended, after which we went to a pub, which was again sponsored by TDF. I had beer, but that one really tasted bad, so I couldn’t finish it. The only vegetarian option was goat cheeseburger, which my friend Manish and I opted for. The burger tasted awful. Apparently, I don’t like goat cheese.

The next day I went sightseeing with Dione in Budapest. Stay tuned for our adventures!

Credits: Thanks to Dione and Richard for proofreading.

Hungary Visa

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:20:25 +0530

The annual LibreOffice conference 2025 was held in Budapest, Hungary, from the 3rd to the 6th of September 2025. Thanks to the The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

As Hungary is a part of the Schengen area, I needed a Schengen visa to attend the conference. In order to apply for a Schengen visa, one needs to get an appointment at VFS Global and submit all the required documents there, which are then forwarded to the embassy.

I got an appointment for a Hungary visa at VFS Global in New Delhi for the 24th of July. There were many appointment slots available for the Hungary visa. One could easily get an appointment for the next day at the Delhi center. There were some technical problems on the VFS website, though, as I was unable to upload a scanned copy of my passport while booking the appointment. I got an error saying, “Unfortunately, you have exceeded the maximum upload limit.”

The problem didn’t get fixed even after contacting the VFS helpline. They asked me to try in the Firefox browser and deleting all the cache, which I already did.

So I created another account with a different email address and phone number, after which I was able to upload my passport and book an appointment. Other conference attendees from India also reported facing some technical issues on the VFS Hungary website.

Anyway, I went to the VFS Hungary application center as per my appointment on the 24th of July. Going inside, I located the Hungary visa application counter. There were two applicants ahead of me.

When it was my turn, the VFS staff warned me that my passport was damaged. The “damage” was on the bio-data page. All the details could be seen, but the lamination of the details page wore off a bit. They asked me to write an application to the Embassy of Hungary in New Delhi stating that I insist VFS to submit my application along with describing the “damage” on my passport.

I got a bit worried about my application getting rejected due to the “damage.” But I decided to gamble my money on this one, as I didn’t have time (and energy) to apply for a new passport before this trip.

Moreover, I had struck down a couple of fields in my visa application form which were not applicable to me, due to which the VFS staff asked me to fill out another visa application.

After this, the application got submitted, and it was 11,000 INR (including the fee to book the appointment at VFS). Here is the list of documents I submitted:

My passport
Photocopy of my passport
Two photographs of myself
Duly filled visa application form
Return flight ticket reservations
Payslips for the last three months
Invitation letter from the conference organizer (in Hungarian)
Proof of hotel bookings during my stay in Hungary
Cover letter stating my itinerary
Income tax returns filed by me
Bank account statement, signed and sealed by the bank
Travel insurance valid for the period of the entire trip

It took 2 hours for me to submit my visa application, even though there were only two applicants before me. This was by far the longest time to submit a Schengen visa application for me.

Fast-forward to the 30th of July, and I received an email from the Embassy of Hungary asking me to submit an additional document - paid air ticket - for my application. I had only submitted dummy flight tickets, and they were enough for the Schengen visas I applied for until now. This was the first time a country was asking me to submit a confirmed flight ticket during the visa process.

I consulted my travel agent on this, and they were fairly confident that I will get the visa if the embassy is asking me to submit confirmed flight tickets. So I asked the travel agent to book the flight tickets. These tickets were ₹78,000, and the airline was Emirates. Then, I sent the flight tickets to the embassy by email.

The embassy sent the visa results on the 6th of August, which I received the next day.

My visa had been approved! It took 14 days for me to get the Hungary visa after submitting the application.

See you in the next one!

Thanks to Badri for proofreading.

Vietnam Trip

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:00:37 +0530

Before reaching Vietnam

Continuing from the last post, Badri and I took a flight from the Brunei International Airport to Kuala Lumpur on the 12th of December 2024. We reached Kuala Lumpur in the evening.

After arriving at the airport, we went through immigration. In a previous post, I mentioned that we had put our stuff in lockers at the TBS bus terminal in Kuala Lumpur. Therefore, we had to go there.

The locker was automated and required us to enter the PIN we had set. Upon entering the PIN, the locker wasn’t getting unlocked. After trying this for 10-15 minutes without any luck, we tried getting some help as there the lockers weren’t under supervision.

So, I roamed around and found a staff member, reporting that our lockers weren’t getting unlocked. They called the person who was in-charge of the lockers. He came to us in a few minutes and used their admin access to open the locker. We were supposed to pay for using the lockers by putting the banknotes inside through a slot. However, as the machine wasn’t working, we gave the amount for the use of our locker service to that person instead.

We soon went back to the KL airport to catch our morning flight to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. At the flight counter, we were afraid we would have to pay extra as our luggage surpassed the allowed weight limit. This one was also a budget airline—AirAsia—and our tickets didn’t include a check-in bag.

Generally, passengers from countries requiring a visa to visit Vietnam (such as India) require going to the airline and showing their visa to get the boarding pass. However, when we went to the AirAsia counter at the Kuala Lumpur airport, they didn’t weigh our bags and asked us to get our boarding passes from an automated kiosk. So, we got our boarding passes printed and proceeded to the airport security.

While clearing the airport security, a lotion I bought from Singapore was confiscated because it was 200 mL, exceeding the limit of 100 mL per bottle. Had that 200 mL liquid been in two different bottles of 100 mL each, I would have been allowed to take it in my carry-on bag, but a single 200 mL bottle wasn’t! I was allowed to keep it in the check-in bag, but I didn’t have it included in my ticket. Huh, airports and their weird rules :( The lotion was an expensive one, so having it thrown away did ruin my mood.

Overview

We started our Vietnam trip from Ho Chi Minh City in the south on the 13th of December 2024 and finished it in Hanoi in the north on the 20th of December. We traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi mostly by train, except for a hundred or so kilometers by bus, in chunks. On the way, we visited Nha Trang, Hoi An, and Hue. The distance between Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi is 1700 km.

For your reference, here are those places labeled on Vietnam’s map.

A labeled map of Vietnam with points of places we went to labeled. ©CARTO ©MAPTILER ©OPENSTREETMAP

Ho Chi Minh City

We landed in Ho Chi Minh City early morning on the 13th of December 2024. I was tired and sleepy as I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep. After going through immigration, we went to a currency exchange counter to get Vietnamese Dong. Unlike other countries on this trip, money exchange counters in Vietnam didn’t accept Indian rupees. Therefore, we exchanged euros to get Vietnamese dong at the airport.

After getting out of the airport, we took a bus to the city center. It was 15,000 dongs—approximately 50 Indian rupees. Our plan was to meet Badri’s friend and stay the night at his apartment.

So we went to a café nearby and bought a coffee for each of us for 75,000 dongs. We went upstairs and sat for a while. The Wi-Fi password was mentioned on our bill. During the trip, I found out about the café culture of Vietnam. They have their own coffee brands (such as Highlands Coffee), and you can sit down at any of the cafés for work or wait for the rain to stop. It rained a lot while we were there, so we did use these cafés for that purpose.

Badri’s friend met us there, and we roamed around the area a bit, which included roaming inside a beautiful park. Then Badri’s friend took us to a restaurant. Because I do not eat meat, he took us to a vegan restaurant. Having been to four Southeast Asian countries at this point (excluding Vietnam), I was under the impression that there wouldn’t be a lot of things for my diet in Vietnam.

A picture of the park we roamed around in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at the restaurant. I found all the dishes to be tasty, especially their signature noodles called Pho. I liked another dish so much that I tracked down the restaurant again with Badri using the geotagged image of the bill I had taken earler to have it again. As a tip for vegans coming to Vietnam, the places having the letters “Chay” (without any accented letters) in their name are vegan only.

This is the restaurant Badri’s friend took us to. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

One of the dishes we had in the restaurant. This one was especially tasty. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

One of the dishes we had in the restaurant. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

These noodles are called Pho and are very popular in Vietnam. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

In the night, we went to a supermarket where I got myself some oranges and guavas. Then, we went to a Japanese restaurant where I didn’t have anything, as there was no vegetarian option available for me. Then we took a free bus to the place to Badri’s friend’s apartment. The construction company that built the apartment also runs this free bus service from their residential area to different parts of the city as a way of promoting their apartments. Anyone can take the bus, not just residents.

The next day, we took the free bus back to the city center and checked in to a hostel for a night. We took two beds in dormitories, which were 88,000 dongs (270 rupees) for each bed for a night. In Vietnam, if you can spend around 300 rupees per night, you can get a bed in a decent hostel.

Train from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang

On the night of the 15th of December 2024, we boarded a train from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang. The ticket for each of us was 519,000 dongs (1600 Indian rupees). The train name was SNT2. When we reached the Ho Chi Minh City train station, we noticed that the station was rather small by Indian standards.

After entering the train station, we went inside to the first platform, where the tickets were checked by a staff member. Ho Chi Minh City was the originating station for our train, so our train was already standing at the station. We had to cross the railway tracks on foot to reach the platform our train was on. Then we located our coach, where a ticket inspector was standing at the gate. He let us in after checking our tickets. In all these instances, we just had to show our digital boarding pass which we had received by email.

Unlike Indian trains, the train didn’t have side berths. Additionally, I liked the fact that it had a dedicated space to put our bags in, which was very convenient. The train departed from Ho Chi Minh City at 21:05 and arrived in Nha Trang at 05:30 in the morning.

Interior of our train coach. Trains in Vietnam don’t have side berths, unlike India. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A picture of the berths from our coach. It had three tiers, similar to a 3 AC coach in Indian trains. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The train had a cabin to put the bags in. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Nha Trang train station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Nha Trang

Nha Trang is a coastal place, and we planned to go to a beach. We figured out that the bus to the airport goes can drop us near the beach. Therefore, we went to the bus station to get to the airport bus. The bus station was walking distance from the railway station. So, we decided to walk.

On the way, we stopped at a small shop for a coffee. The shop also gave a complimentary cup of green tea along with the coffee. I found out later that it is common for local shops to give a cup of complimentary green tea in Vietnam.

I got a complimentary cup of green tea along with coffee in Nha Trang. In this trip, Badri and I found out that this is customary at local places in Vietnam. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Soon we reached the bus station and took a bus to the beach. It was 65,000 dongs (₹200). After getting down from the bus, I had coconut water and some eggs at a small local place.

Eggs being cooked on a pan for my order. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Then we went to the beach, but nobody else was there. We spent some time there and went back to the place where the bus dropped us as it started raining. We couldn’t find a bus for some time. A taxi driver approached us and agreed to take us to the city center for 200,000 dongs (₹650). For reference, the place where he dropped us was 35 km from the place we took the taxi. Taxi fares in Vietnam were also cheap!

The beach we went to in Nha Trang. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Nha Trang was a beautiful place, and so we roamed around for a while. Then we stopped at a Highlands Coffee branch for a while. Since Christmas was coming up, the café had a Christmas tree, and I liked the Christmas vibes. They were playing Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.

This one was shot in the city center. In this trip, Badri and I found out that this is customary at local places in Vietnam. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Inside a Highlands Coffee cafe in Nha Trang. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A coffee I got from Highlands Coffee in Nha Trang. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

During the evening, we went to a local place to eat. The place mentioned “Chay” in its name, and you know what it means—it was a vegan place. There was a man there and no other customers. I don’t remember the names of the dishes we ordered, but it was a bowl of soupy noodles and a bowl of dry noodles. They were very tasty. To top that off, the meal was a total of 55,000 dongs (₹180) for both of us.

The host was welcoming and friendly. We had a nice conversation with the host. In Vietnam, restaurants give chopsticks to eat noodles. While Badri was good at using them, I wasn’t. So, the host of this restaurant helped me in using chopsticks. Although my technique was not perfect and I take a bit of time, I could now eat solely with chopsticks.

The restaurant we went to in Nha Trang. The word Chay in the name means it was a vegan restaurant. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Soupy noodles we got at that restaurant. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Dry noodles we got at that restaurant. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Our plan was to take a night bus to Hoi An, and we were hoping to find a bus stand. However, we couldn’t find one. Asking around about the pickup location of the Hoi An bus led us to many different locations. Finally, we ended up at a bus booking agency’s office where we found out that there were no tickets available for Hoi An.

At this point, we gave up on booking the bus and searched for trains instead. As we didn’t have a local SIM, we asked the agency to let us connect to their Wi-Fi so that we could look for trains. They were kind enough to let us do that. It also seemed like they were going to close the office in like 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, all the sleeper berths were booked from Nha Trang till Hoi An on the next train with only seating berths being available. It takes around 10 hours, so I wasn’t comfortable traveling on seating berths.

Here I came up with the idea to look for sleeper berths from an intermediate stop. Fortunately, there were sleeper berths available from the next stop, Ninh Hòa. Therefore, we booked a seating berth from Nha Trang to Ninh Hòa and a sleeper berth from Ninh Hòa to Trà Kiệu (the nearest railway station from Hoi An). The train name was SE6, and it was a total of 500,000 dongs per person (₹1600 per person).

So, we went to the Nha Trang railway station and boarded the train. We had to spend 40 minutes seated for the train to reach the next stop before we could go to our sleeper berths. Badri had some friendly co-passengers on that trip who gave him Saigon beer and some crispy papad-like thing. They offered me as well, but I thought it was non-veg, so I declined it.

Hoi An

On the morning of 17th December 2024, we got down at the Trà Kiệu station at around 09:30. Our hostel was in Hoi An, which was around 22 km from the station. There was no public transport to get there.

Instead, there was a taxi driver at the train platform. We told him the name of our hostel, and he quoted 270,000 dongs (around ₹850). We said it was too expensive for us, so he agreed to bargain at 250,000 dongs. At this point, we told him that we could give him no more than 200,000 dongs, but he didn’t agree.

Badri tried a trick. He asked the driver to show us prices in the Grab app (a popular taxi booking app in Southeast Asia). Unfortunately, the Grab app showed 258,000 dongs, which was more than the fare the driver agreed to.

So we walked away as if we had so many options (we didn’t!) to reach the hostel. We got out of the station and stopped at a small shop outside to have some coffee. As is customary in Vietnam, we got a complimentary green tea here as well.

This was the place we had our coffee in Tra Kieu. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

That taxi driver also joined us and sat in that shop. He started talking with the locals in the shop in the local language. The taxi driver was insistent on taking us to Hoi An for 250,000 dongs. At this point, Badri told the taxi driver (by the use of translation software) that we usually use public transport during our trips, and we aren’t used to paying high prices to get around. So, he can drop us somewhere in Hoi An for 200,000 dongs as we don’t mind walking a bit to reach our hotel.

After reading this, the taxi driver agreed to take us to our hostel for 200,000 dongs (₹660). He also had me take a picture with Badri after this. I think such a bargain tactic would not work in India.

Photo of Badri with taxi driver. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The nice thing we noticed in Vietnam is, once bargaining is done and the deal is settled, people don’t try to bargain more or keep on talking about the subject. Before the deal, the driver was being somewhat insistent and argumentative, but after the deal was done, it was as if no argument had happened at all.

A picture of Tra Kieu area near the train station we got down at. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

We were treated to some beautiful scenery on the way to our hostel. Soon we reached our place and completed all the formalities for checking-in. During the time our room was being prepared for check-in, we had an egg sandwich with coffee in the hotel. I found the egg sandwich very tasty. The bread looked like the French baguette. The hostel was ₹240 per night for each of us.

The name of the hostel was Bana Spa. We liked staying here and we can recommend it if you find yourself there. It is operated by a family.

Our breakfast in Hoi An. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A photo of the hostel we stayed in Hoi An. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

We also rented a bicycle for each of us—25,000 dongs per day (₹80)—and explored the old town during the evening. Hoi An is popular for Vietnamese silk. Tourists come here to buy fabric and get it done by the tailor. The buildings here looked old, and they were painted in yellow with a gabled roof.

Typical yellow house with gabled roof in Hoi An old town. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Here, I also had egg coffee for the first time, and I liked it. Egg coffee is a delicacy of Hanoi, but you can get it in other parts of Vietnam. If you find yourself in Vietnam, then I recommend you try egg coffee. We also bought some cool T-shirts and other souvenirs, such as a Vietnamese hat, from here.

Egg coffee I had in Hoi An. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Hue

The next day—the 18th of December 2024—we went to Hue by bus. As we could not take a bus on our own in Nha Trang, we asked the hostel to book it for us this time. We booked it a day before, and they told us to be ready by 07:00 in the morning. At 07:00, a minibus arrived, which took us to a bus agency’s office. There we waited for a few minutes and got into the bus to Hue.

The bus had sleeper seats, so I took the opportunity to catch some sleep. The ride was comfortable, so I am assuming the roads were good. In a couple of hours, we reached Hue. Again, we went to Highlands Coffee to have some coffee, charge our phones, and use the internet, not to mention using the bathrooms.

During the afternoon, we went to a local restaurant named Quán Chay Thanh Liễu. It was a vegan restaurant (remember the thing I mentioned earlier about “Chay” being in the name?). On the way, we had a steamed dumpling shaped like a momo called banh bao from a street vendor. It wasn’t very good, but I found it worthwhile.

Bahn Bao in Hue. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

At the restaurant, we ordered a hot pot. First, they brought noodles and a gas stove. Then came the stock and our gas stove was turned on. The stock was kept simmering on the stove. Then, we had it bit by bit with the noodles. A big hot pot at this place costs 50,000 dongs (₹170). Then we had bánh cuốn. These were steamed rolls made of rice flour for 10,000 dongs (₹33).

Hot Pot. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Added soup to the noodles. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Steamed rolls made of rice flour. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Restaurants in Vietnam usually add photos of the meals in their menu or write a description in English. So, even though the dish names were Vietnamese, we had no problems in ordering food there. In addition, all the places we went to provided free Wi-Fi. They either mention the Wi-Fi password on the bill, on the menu or paste it on the wall. This made our trip smoother without getting a local SIM.

Menu from a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City with detailed description of the food. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Then we slowly walked towards the railway station, as we had a night train to Hanoi. We had egg coffee in a cafe. Near the railway station, we had a bánh mì (egg sandwich). As for sightseeing, we had plans to visit a couple of places in Hue, but we ended up spending all our time inside sheltered spaces due to heavy rain.

We had booked the train SE20 for Hanoi, which had a departure time of 20:41 from Hue. This one was 948,000 dongs (₹3100) for myself and 870,000 dongs (₹2900) for Badri. My ticket was pricier than Badri’s because I got a lower berth. Our train was late by half an hour, so we waited in the common area of the station. After the train arrived, we got inside and took our seats.

The cabin had four berths—two upper and two lower, similar to India’s First AC class. The ticket inspector came to us and offered us the whole cabin (two additional berths) for 300,000 dongs (₹1,000), which we declined. However, this hinted at the other two seats not being reserved. Eventually, we had the whole cabin to ourselves, as nobody else showed up for the other two berths. It was a 14-hour journey, and I got a good sleep.

Our berths in the train. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Hanoi

On the morning of the 19th of December 2024, we reached Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. We had booked a private hotel room for ₹800. It was 1 km from the Hanoi Airport. However, it was pretty far from the railway station. So, we roamed around in the city and went to the hotel in the evening.

First, we walked to a place and had egg coffee with egg sandwiches. Then we went to Hanoi Train Street, which was walking distance from the train station. After clicking some pictures at the train street, we went to a museum nearby. Upon reaching there, we found out that it was closed.

Egg coffee in Hanoi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Hanoi train street is a tourist attraction in Hanoi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Then we went shopping for jackets, as Hanoi was cold compared to other parts of Vietnam we had been to, and since many of them are manufactured in Vietnam, we thought they would be cheaper. I liked some jackets, but they were not my size. Eventually, we didn’t buy anything at the clothes shop.

In the evening, I bought a Vietnamese-styled phin coffee filter and coffee powder from Highlands Coffee. We spent a lot of time in their cafes, so it made sense to buy some souvenirs from there. Badri bought a few coffee filters for his family at Trung Nguyen, where I also bought another filter.

We had dinner at a local place where we had pho and banh it. Bahn it was served packed in banana leaves and it was made of sticky rice.

A picture of pho we had in Hanoi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Bahn it is served packed in banana leaves. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Bahn it. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Next, we went to Hanoi railway station to catch a bus to the airport since our hotel was 1 km from the airport. The locals there helped us take the bus. It took like an hour to get to the airport. We saw on OpenStreetMap that we can take a bus from there to the hotel, but we could not find it. So we walked to our hotel instead.

It was a decent hotel room for ₹800 for a night. We went outside to explore the area and had egg sandwiches and egg coffee at a local place. Again, we were given a complimentary green tea. We went to this place like three times. We had practically become regulars by the time we left.

The next day— 20th of December 2024 — we took a bus to the airport and boarded our flight to Delhi.

Credits: Thanks Badri, Kishy and Richard for proofreading.

My experiences in Brunei

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 22:45:23 +0530

In December 2024, Badri and I went to Brunei’s capital, Bandar Seri Begawan. Brunei—officially Brunei Darussalam—is a country in Southeast Asia, located on Borneo Island. It is one of the few remaining absolute monarchies on Earth.

On the morning of the 10th of December 2024, we reached Brunei International Airport by taking a flight from Kuala Lumpur. Upon arrival at the airport, we had to go through immigration, of course. When I was standing in the queue, I was reminded that I hadn’t filled out my arrival card. So I filled it out and submitted it online while I was in the queue.

The immigration officer asked me how much cash I was carrying of each currency. After completing the formalities, the immigration officer stamped my passport and let me in. Take a look at Brunei’s entry stamp in my passport.

Brunei entry stamp on my passport. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

We exchanged Singapore dollars to get some Brunei dollars at the airport. The Brunei dollar was pegged 1:1 with the Singapore dollar, meaning 1 Singapore dollar equals 1 Brunei dollar. The exchange rate we received at the airport was the same.

Our (pre-booked) accommodation was located near Gadong Mall. So, we went to the information center at the airport to ask how to get there by public transport. However, the person at the information center told us that they didn’t know the public transport routes and suggested we take a taxi instead.

We came out of the airport and came across an Indian with a bus. The bus seemed more like a minibus by Indian standards. He offered to drop us at our accommodation for 10 Brunei dollars (₹630). As we were tired after a sleepless night, we didn’t negotiate and took the offer. There was nobody else on the bus, and it felt a bit weird using the minibus as our private taxi.

In around half an hour, we reach our accommodation. The place was more like a guest house than a hotel. In addition to the rooms, it had common space consisting of a hall, a kitchen, and a balcony.

Our room in Brunei. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0

Upon reaching the place, we paid for our room in cash, which was 66.70 Singapore dollars (4200 Indian rupees) for two nights. We arrived before the check-in time, so we had to wait for our room to get ready before we entered.

The room had a double bed and also a place to hang clothes. We slept for a few hours before going out at night. We went into Gadong Mall and had coffee at a café named The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. The regular caffe latte I had here was 5.20 Brunei dollars. On another note, the snacks we got in Kuala Lumpur covered us for the dinner.

The next day—11th of December 2024—we went to a nearby restaurant named Nadj for lunch. The owner was from Kerala. Here we ordered:

1 paneer pepper masala for 5 Brunei dollars (320 rupees)
1 nasi goreng pattaya biasa for 4.50 Brunei dollars (290 rupees)
1 plain naan for 1.50 Brunei dollars (100 rupees)
1 butter naan for 1.80 Brunei dollars (115 rupees)

So, our lunch cost a total of 12.80 Brunei dollars (825 rupees). I didn’t like the fact that the naan was unusually thick.

After the lunch, we planned to visit Brunei’s famous Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. However, a minibus driver outside of Gadong Mall told us that the mosque would be closed in half an hour and suggested we visit the nearby Jame’ Asr Hassanil Bolkiah Mosque instead.

Jame’ Asr Hassanil Bolkiah Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0

He dropped us there for 1 Brunei dollar per person, which seemed like the standard rate for any bus ride in Brunei. The person hailed from Uttar Pradesh and told us about bus routes in Hindi. Bus routes in Brunei were confusing, so the information he gave us was valuable.

It was evening, and we had the impression that the mosque and its premises were closed. However, soon enough, we stumbled across an open gate entering the mosque complex. We walked inside for some time, took pictures, and exited. Walking in Bandar Seri Begawan wasn’t pleasant, though. The pedestrian infrastructure wasn’t good.

Then we walked back to our place and bought some souvenirs. For dinner and breakfast, we bought bread, fruits, and eggs from local shops, as we had a kitchen to cook for ourselves.

The guest house also had a washing machine (free of charge), which we wanted to use. However, they didn’t have detergent. Therefore, we went outside to get some detergent. It was 8 o’clock, and most of the shops were closed already. Others had detergents in large sizes, the ones you would use if you lived there. We ended up getting a small packet at a supermarket.

The next day—the 12th of December—we had a flight to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam with a long layover in Kuala Lumpur. We had breakfast in the morning and took a bus to Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. The mosque was in prayer session, so it was closed for Muslims. Therefore, we just took pictures from the outside and took a bus to the airport.

Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0

When the bus reached near the airport, the bus went straight rather than taking a left turn for the airport. Initially, I thought the bus would just take a turn and come back. However, the bus kept going away from the airport. Confused by this, I asked other passengers if the bus was going to the airport. The driver stopped the bus at Muara Town terminal— 20 km from the airport. At this point, everyone alighted, except for us. The driver went to a nearby restaurant to have lunch.

I felt very uncomfortable stranded in a town that was 20 km from the airport. We had a lot of time, but I was still worried about missing our flight, as I didn’t want to get stuck in Brunei. After waiting for 15 minutes, I went inside the restaurant and reminded the driver that we had a flight in a couple of hours and needed to go to the airport. He said he will leave soon.

When he was done with his lunch, he drove us to the airport. It was incredibly frustrating. On a positive note, we saw countryside in Brunei that we would not have seen otherwise. The bus ride cost us 1 Brunei dollar each.

A shot of Brunei’s countryside. Picture by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

That’s it for this one. Meet you in the next one. Stay tuned for the Vietnam post!

Thanks to Badri for proofreading.

Why my Riseup account got suspended (and reinstated)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:54:04 +0530

Disclaimer: The goal of this post is not to attack Riseup. In fact, I love Riseup and support their work.

Story

Riseup is an email provider, known for its privacy-friendly email service. The service requires an invite from an existing Riseup email user to get an account.

I created my account on Riseup in the year 2020, of course with the help of a friend who invited me. Since then, I have used the email address only occasionally, although it is logged into my Thunderbird all the time.

Fast-forward to the 4th of January 2026, when Thunderbird suddenly told me that it could not log in to my Riseup account. When I tried logging in using their webmail, it said “invalid password”. Finally, I tried logging in to my account on their website, and was told that…

Log in for that account is temporary suspended while we perform maintenance. Please try again later.

At this point, I suspected that the Riseup service itself was facing some issues. I asked a friend who had an account there if the service was up, and they said that it was. The issue seemed to be specific only to my account.

I contacted Riseup support and informed them of the issue. They responded the next day (the 5th of January) saying:

The my-username-redacted account was found inviting another account that violated our terms of use. As a security measure we suspend all related accounts to ToS violations.

(Before we continue, I would like to take a moment and reflect upon how nice it was to receive response from a human rather than an AI bot—a trend that is unfortunately becoming the norm nowadays.)

I didn’t know who violated their ToS, so I asked which account violated their terms. Riseup told me:

username-redacted@riseup.net attempted to create aliases that could be abused to impersonate riseup itself.

I asked a friend whom I invited a month before the incident, and they confirmed that the username belonged to them. When I asked what they did, they told me they tried creating aliases such as floatup and risedown. I also asked Riseup which aliases violated their terms, but their support didn’t answer this.

I explained to the Riseup support that the “impersonation” wasn’t intentional, that the user hadn’t sent any emails, and that I had been a user for more than 5 years and had donated to them in the past.

Furthermore, I suggested that they should block the creation of such aliases if they think the aliases violate their terms, like how email providers typically don’t allow users to create admin@ or abuse@ email addresses.

After I explained myself, Riseup reinstated my account.

Update on the 10th of January 2025: My friend told me that the alias that violated Riseup’s terms was cloudadmin and his account was reinstated on the 7th of January.

Issues with suspension

I have the following issues regarding the way the suspension took place —

There was no way of challenging the suspension before the action was taken
The action taken against me was disproportionate. Remember that I didn’t violate any terms. It was allegedly done by a user I invited. They could just block the aliases while continuing the discussion in parallel.
I was locked out of my account with no way of saving my emails and without any chance to migrate. What if that email address was being used for important stuff such as bank access or train tickets? I know people who use Riseup email for such purposes.
The violation wasn’t even proven. I wasn’t told which alias violated the terms and how could that be used to impersonate Riseup itself

When I brought up the issue of me getting locked out of my account without a way of downloading my emails or migrating my account, Riseup support responded by saying:

You must understand that we react [by] protecting our service, and therefore we cannot provide notice messages on the affected accounts. We need to act preventing any potential damage to the service that might affect the rest of the users, and that measure is not excessive (think on how abusers/spammers/scammers/etc could trick us and attempt any action before their account is suspended).

This didn’t address my concerns, so let’s move on to the next section.

Room for improvement

Here’s how I think Riseup’s ban policy could be changed while still protecting against spammers and other bad actors:

Even if Riseup can’t provide notice to blocked accounts, perhaps they can scale back limitations on the inviting account which wasn’t even involved—for example, by temporarily disabling invites from that account until the issue is resolved.
In this case, the person didn’t impersonate Riseup, so Riseup could have just blocked the aliases and let the user know about it, rather than banning the account outright.
Riseup should give blocked users access to their existing emails so they have a chance to migrate them to a different provider. (Riseup could disable SMTP and maybe incoming emails but keep IMAP access open). I know people who use Riseup for important things such as bank or train tickets, and a sudden block like this is not a good idea.
Riseup should factor in the account profile in making these decisions. I had an account on their service for 5 years and I had only created around 5 invites. (I don’t remember the exact number and there’s no way to retrieve this information.) This is not exactly an attacker profile. I feel long-term users like this deserve an explanation for a ban.

I understand Riseup is a community-run service and does not have unlimited resources like big corporations or commercial email providers do. Their actions felt disproportionate to me because I don’t know what issues they face behind the scenes. I hope someone can help to improve the policies, or at least shed light on why they are the way they are.

Signing off now. Meet you in the next one!

Thanks to Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing this blog post

Transit through Kuala Lumpur

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:35:53 +0530

In my last post, Badri and I reached Kuala Lumpur - the capital of Malaysia - on the 7th of December 2024. We stayed in Bukit Bintang, the entertainment district of the city. Our accommodation was pre-booked at “Manor by Mingle”, a hostel where I had stayed for a couple of nights in a dormitory room earlier in February 2024.

We paid 4937 rupees (the payment was online, so we paid in Indian rupees) for 3 nights for a private room. From the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS) bus station, we took the metro to the Plaza Rakyat LRT station, which was around 500 meters from the hostel. Upon arriving at the hostel, we presented our passports at their request, followed by a 20 ringgit (400 rupee) deposit which would be refunded once we returned the room keys at checkout.

Manor by Mingle - the hostel where we stayed at during our KL transit. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Our room was upstairs and it had a bunk bed. I had seen bunk beds in dormitories before, but this was my first time seeing a bunk bed in a private room. The room did not have any toilets, so we had to use shared toilets.

Unusually, the hostel was equipped with a pool. It also had a washing machine with dryers - this was one of the reasons we chose this hostel, because we were traveling light and hadn’t packed too many clothes. The machine and dryer cost 10 ringgits (200 rupees) per use, and we only used it once. The hostel provided complimentary breakfast, which included coffee. Outside of breakfast hours, there was also a paid coffee machine.

During our stay, we visited a gurdwara - a place of worship for Sikhs - which was within walking distance from our hostel. The name of the gurdwara was Gurdwara Sahib Mainduab. However, it wasn’t as lively as I had thought. The gurdwara was locked from the inside, and we had to knock on the gate and call for someone to open it. A man opened the gate and invited us in.

The gurdwara was small, and there was only one other visitor - a man worshipping upstairs. We went upstairs briefly, then settled down on the first floor.

We had some conversations with the person downstairs who kindly made chai for us. They mentioned that the langar (community meal) is organized on every Friday, which was unlike the gurdwaras I have been to where the langar is served every day. We were there for an hour before we left.

We also went to Adyar Ananda Bhavan (a restaurant chain) near our hostel to try the chain in Malaysia. The chain is famous in Southern India and also known by its short name A2B. We ordered

an onion dosa for 10 ringgits (200 rupees),
1 masala tea for 6 ringgits (120 rupees),
2 pooris for 8 ringgits (160 rupees) and
1 plate potato bajji for 7 ringgits (140 rupees).

Dosa served at Adyar Ananda Bhavan. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

All this came down to around 33 ringgits (including taxes), i.e. around 660 rupees. We also purchased some snacks such as murukku from there for our trip.

We had planned a day trip to Malacca, but had to cancel it due to rain. We didn’t do a lot in Kuala Lumpur, and it ended up acting as a transit point for us to other destinations: flights from Kuala Lumpur were cheaper than Singapore, and in one case a flight via Kuala Lumpur was even cheaper than a direct flight!

We paid 15,000 rupees in total for the following three flights:

Kuala Lumpur to Brunei,
Brunei to Kuala Lumpur, and
Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam).

These were all AirAsia flights. The cheap tickets, however, did not include any checked-in luggage, and the cabin luggage weight limit was 7 kg. We also bought quite some stuff in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, leading to an increase in the weight of our luggage.

We estimated that it would be cheaper for us to take only essential items such as clothes, cameras, and laptops, and to leave behind souvenirs and other non-essentials in lockers at the TBS bus stand in Kuala Lumpur, than to pay more for check-in luggage. It would take 140 ringgits for us to add a checked-in bag from Kuala Lumpur to Bandar Seri Begawan and back, while the cost for lockers was 55 ringgits at the rate of 5 ringgits every six hours.

We had seen these lockers when we alighted at the bus stand while coming from Johor Bahru. There might have been lockers in the airport itself as well, which would have been more convenient as we were planning to fly back in soon, but we weren’t sure about finding lockers at the airport and we didn’t want to waste time looking.

We had an early morning flight for Brunei on the 10th of December. We checked out from our hostel on the night of the 9th of December, and left for TBS to take a bus to the airport. We took a metro from the nearest metro station to TBS. Upon reaching there, we put our luggage in the lockers. The lockers were automated and there was no staff there to guide us.

Lockers at TBS bus station. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

We bought a ticket for the airport bus from a counter at TBS for 26 ringgits for both of us. In order to give us tickets, the person at the counter asked for our passports, and we handed it over to them promptly. Since paying in cash did not provide any extra anonymity, I would advise others to book these buses online.

In Malaysia, you also need a boarding pass for buses. The bus terminal had kiosks for getting these printed, but they were broken and we had to go to a counter to obtain them. The boarding pass mentioned our gate number and other details such as our names and departure time of the bus. The company was Jet Bus.

My boarding pass for the bus to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

To go to our boarding gate, we had to scan our boarding pass to let the AFC gates open. Then we went downstairs, leading into the waiting area. It had departure boards listing the bus timings and their respective gates. We boarded our bus around 10 minutes before the departure time - 00:00 hours. It departed at its scheduled time and took 45 minutes to reach KL Airport Terminal 2, where we alighted.

We reached 6 hours before our flight’s departure time of 06:30. We stopped at a convenience store at the airport to have some snacks. Then we weighed our bags at a weighing machine to check whether we were within the weight limit. It turned out that we were.

We went to an AirAsia counter to get our boarding passes. The lady at our counter checked our Brunei visas carefully and looked for any Brunei stamps on the passports to verify whether we had used that visa in the past. However, she didn’t weigh our bags to check whether they were within the limit, and gave us our boarding passes.

We had more than 4 hours to go before our flight. This was the downside of booking an early morning flight - we weren’t able to get a full night’s sleep.

A couple of hours before our flight time, we were hanging around our boarding gate. The place was crowded, so there were no seats available. There were no charging points. There was a Burger King outlet there which had some seating space and charging points. As we were hungry, we ordered two cups of cappuccino coffee (15.9 ringgits) and one large french fries (8.9 ringgits) from Burger King. The total amount was 24 ringgits.

When it was time to board the flight, we went to the waiting area for our boarding gates. Soon, we boarded the plane. It took 2.5 hours to reach the Brunei International Airport in the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan.

View of Kuala Lumpur from the aeroplane. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Stay tuned for our experiences in Brunei!

Credits: Thanks to Badri, Benson and Contrapunctus for reviewing the draft.

A Bad Day in Malaysia

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:55:20 +0530

Continuing from where Badri and I left off in the last post. On the 7th of December 2024, we boarded a bus from Singapore to the border town of Johor Bahru in Malaysia. The bus stopped at the Singapore emigration for us to get off for the formalities.

The process was similar to the immigration at the Singapore airport. It was automatic, and we just had to scan our passports for the gates to open. Here also, we didn’t get Singapore stamps on our passports.

After we were done with the emigration, we had to find our bus. We remembered the name of the bus company and the number plate, which helped us recognize our bus. It wasn’t there already after we came out of the emigration, but it arrived soon enough, and we boarded it promptly.

From the Singapore emigration, the bus travelled a few kilometers and dropped us at Johor Bahru Sentral (JB Sentral) bus station, where we had to go through Malaysian immigration. The process was manual, unlike Singapore, and there was an immigration officer at the counter who stamped our passports (which I like) and recorded our fingerprints.

At the bus terminal, we exchanged rupees at an exchange shop to get Malaysian ringgits. We could not find any free drinking water sources on the bus terminal, so we had to buy water.

Badri later told me that Johor Bahru has a lot of data centers, which need a lot of water for cooling. When he read about it later, he immediately connected it with the fact that there was no free drinking water, and we had to buy water. Such data centers can lead to scarcity of water for others in the area.

From JB Sentral, we took a bus to Larkin Terminal, as our hotel was nearby. It was 1.5 ringgits per person (30 rupees). In order to pay for the fare, we had to put cash in a box near the driver’s seat.

Around half-an-hour later, we reached our hotel. The time was 23:30 hours. The hotel room was hot as it didn’t have air-conditioning. The weather in Malaysia is on the hotter side throughout the year. It was a budget hotel, and we paid 70 ringgits for our room.

Badri slept soon after we checked-in. I went out during the midnight at around 00:30. I was hungry, so I entered a small scale restaurant nearby, which was quite lively for the midnight hours. At the restaurant, I ordered a coffee and an omelet. I also asked for drinking water. The unique thing about that was that they put ice in hot water to make its temperature normal.

My bill from the restaurant looked like the below-mentioned table, as the items’ names were in the local language Malay:

Item	Price (Malaysian ringgits)	Conversion to Indian rupees	Comments
Nescafe Tarik	2.50	50	Coffee
Ais Kosong	0.50	10	Water
Telur Dadar	2.00	40	Omelet
SST Tax (6%)	0.30	6
Total	5.30	106

After checking out from the restaurant, I explored nearby shops. I also bought some water before going back to the hotel room.

The next day, we had a (pre-booked) bus to Kuala Lumpur. We checked out from the hotel 10 minutes after the check-out time (which was 14:00 hours). However, within those 10 minutes, the hotel staff already came up three times asking us to clear out (which we were doing as fast as possible). And finally on the third time they said our deposit was forfeit, even though it was supposed to be only for keys and towels.

The above-mentioned bus for Kuala Lumpur was from the nearby Larkin Bus Terminal. The bus terminal was right next to our hotel, so we walked till there.

Upon reaching there, we found out that the process of boarding a bus in Malaysia resembled with taking a flight. We needed to go to a counter to get our boarding passes, followed by reporting at our gate half-an-hour before the scheduled time. Furthermore, they had a separate waiting room and boarding gates. Also, there was a terminal listing buses with their arrival and departure signs. Finally, to top it off, the buses had seatbelts.

We got our boarding pass for 2 ringgits (40 rupees). After that, we proceeded to get something to eat as we were hungry. We went to a McDonald’s, but couldn’t order anything because of the long queue. We didn’t have a lot of time, so we proceeded towards our boarding gate without having anything.

The boarding gate was in a separate room, which had a vending machine. I tried to order something using my card, but the machine wasn’t working. In Malaysia, there is a custom of queueing up to board buses even before the bus has arrived. We saw it in Johor Bahru as well. The culture is so strong that they even did it in Singapore while waiting for the Johor Bahru bus!

Our bus departed at 15:30 as scheduled. The journey was around 5 hours. A couple of hours later, our bus stopped for a break. We got off the bus and went to the toilet. As we were starving (we didn’t have anything the whole day), we thought it was a good opportunity to get some snack. There was a stall selling some food. However, I had to determine which options were vegetarian. We finally settled on a cylindrical box of potato chips, labelled Mister Potato. They were 7 ringgits.

We didn’t know how long the bus is going to stop. Furthermore, eating inside buses in Malaysia is forbidden. When we went to get some coffee from the stall, our bus driver was standing there and made a face. We got an impression that he doesn’t want us to have coffee.

However, after we got into the bus, we had to wait for a long time for it to resume its journey as the driver was taking his sweet time to drink his coffee.

During the bus journey, we saw a lot of palm trees on the way. The landscape was beautiful, with good road infrastructure throughout the journey. Badri also helped me improve my blog post on obtaining Luxembourg visa in the bus.

The bus dropped us at the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan (TBS in short) in Kuala Lumpur at 21:30 hours.

Finally, we got something at the TBS. We also noticed that the TBS bus station had lockers. This gave us the idea of putting some of our luggage in the lockers later while we will be in Brunei. We had booked a cheap Air Asia ticket which doesn’t allow check-in luggage. Further, keeping the checked-in luggage in lockers for three days was cheaper than paying the excess luggage penalty for Air Asia.

We followed it up by taking a metro as our hotel was closer to a metro station. This was a bad day due to our deposit being forfeited unfairly, and got nothing to eat.

We took the metro to reach our hostel, which was located in the Bukit Bintang area. The name of this hostel was Manor by Mingle. I had stayed here earlier in February 2024 for two nights. Back then, I paid 1000 rupees per day for a dormitory bed. However, this time the same hostel was much cheaper. We got a private room for 800 rupees per day, with breakfast included. Earlier it might have been pricier due to my stay falling on weekends or maybe February has more tourists in Kuala Lumpur.

That’s it for this post. Stay tuned for our adventures in Malaysia!

Singapore Trip

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:05:26 +0530

In December 2024, I went on a trip through four countries - Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, and Vietnam - with my friend Badri. This post covers our experiences in Singapore.

I took an IndiGo flight from Delhi to Singapore, with a layover in Chennai. At the Chennai airport, I was joined by Badri. We had an early morning flight from Chennai that would land in Singapore in the afternoon. Within 48 hours of our scheduled arrival in Singapore, we submitted an arrival card online. At immigration, we simply needed to scan our passports at the gates, which opened automatically to let us through, and then give our address to an official nearby. The process was quick and smooth, but it unfortunately meant that we didn’t get our passports stamped by Singapore.

Before I left the airport, I wanted to visit the nature-themed park with a fountain I saw in pictures online. It is called Jewel Changi, and it took quite some walking to get there. After reaching the park, we saw a fountain that could be seen from all the levels. We roamed around for a couple of hours, then proceeded to the airport metro station to get to our hotel.

A shot of Jewel Changi. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

There were four ATMs on the way to the metro station, but none of them provided us with any cash. This was the first country (outside India, of course!) where my card didn’t work at ATMs.

To use the metro, one can tap the EZ-Link card or bank cards at the AFC gates to get in. You cannot buy tickets using cash. Before boarding the metro, I used my credit card to get Badri an EZ-Link card from a vending machine. It was 10 Singapore dollars (₹630) - 5 for the card, and 5 for the balance. I had planned to use my Visa credit card to pay for my own fare. I was relieved to see that my card worked, and I passed through the AFC gates.

We had booked our stay at a hostel named Campbell’s Inn, which was the cheapest we could find in Singapore. It was ₹1500 per night for dorm beds. The hostel was located in Little India. While Little India has an eponymous metro station, the one closest to our hostel was Rochor.

On the way to the hostel, we found out that our booking had been canceled.

We had booked from the Hostelworld website, opting to pay the deposit in advance and to pay the balance amount in person upon reaching. However, Hostelworld still tried to charge Badri’s card again before our arrival. When the unauthorized charge failed, they sent an automatic message saying “we tried to charge” and to contact them soon to avoid cancellation, which we couldn’t do as we were in the plane.

Despite this, we went to the hostel to check the status of our booking.

The trip from the airport to Rochor required a couple of transfers. It was 2 Singapore dollars (approx. ₹130) and took approximately an hour.

Upon reaching the hostel, we were informed that our booking had indeed been canceled, and were not given any reason for the cancelation. Furthermore, no beds were available at the hostel for us to book on the spot.

We decided to roam around and look for accommodation at other hostels in the area. Soon, we found a hostel by the name of Snooze Inn, which had two beds available. It was 36 Singapore dollars per person (around ₹2300) for a dormitory bed. Snooze Inn advertised supporting RuPay cards and UPI. Some other places in that area did the same. We paid using my card. We checked in and slept for a couple of hours after taking a shower.

By the time we woke up, it was dark. We met Praveen’s friend Sabeel to get my FLX1 phone. We also went to Mustafa Center nearby to exchange Indian rupees for Singapore dollars. Mustafa Center also had a shopping center with shops selling electronic items and souvenirs, among other things. When we were dropping off Sabeel at a bus stop, we discovered that the bus stops in Singapore had a digital board mentioning the bus routes for the stop and the number of minutes each bus was going to take.

In addition to an organized bus system, Singapore had good pedestrian infrastructure. There were traffic lights and zebra crossings for pedestrians to cross the roads. Unlike in Indian cities, rules were being followed. Cars would stop for pedestrians at unmanaged zebra crossings; pedestrians would in turn wait for their crossing signal to turn green before attempting to walk across. Therefore, walking in Singapore was easy.

Traffic rules were taken so seriously in Singapore I (as a pedestrian) was afraid of unintentionally breaking them, which could get me in trouble, as breaking rules is dealt with heavy fines in the country. For example, crossing roads without using a marked crossing (while being within 50 meters of it) - also known as jaywalking - is an offence in Singapore.

Moreover, the streets were litter-free, and cleanliness seemed like an obsession.

After exploring Mustafa Center, we went to a nearby 7-Eleven to top up Badri’s EZ-Link card. He gave 20 Singapore dollars for the recharge, which credited the card by 19.40 Singapore dollars (0.6 dollars being the recharge fee).

When I was planning this trip, I discovered that the World Chess Championship match was being held in Singapore. I seized the opportunity and bought a ticket in advance. The next day - the 5th of December - I went to watch the 9th game between Gukesh Dommaraju of India and Ding Liren of China. The venue was a hotel on Sentosa Island, and the ticket was 70 Singapore dollars, which was around ₹4000 at the time.

We checked out from our hostel in the morning, as we were planning to stay with Badri’s aunt that night. We had breakfast at a place in Little India. Then we took a couple of buses, followed by a walk to Sentosa Island. Paying the fare for the buses was similar to the metro - I tapped my credit card in the bus, while Badri tapped his EZ-Link card. We also had to tap it while getting off.

If you are tapping your credit card to use public transport in Singapore, keep in mind that the total amount of all the trips taken on a day is deducted at the end. This makes it hard to determine the cost of individual trips. For example, I could take a bus and get off after tapping my card, but I would have no way to determine how much this journey cost.

When you tap in, the maximum fare amount gets deducted. When you tap out, the balance amount gets refunded (if it’s a shorter journey than the maximum fare one). So, there is incentive for passengers not to get off without tapping out. Going by your card statement, it looks like all that happens virtually, and only one statement comes in at the end. Maybe this combining only happens for international cards.

We got off the bus a kilometer away from Sentosa Island and walked the rest of the way. We went on the Sentosa Boardwalk, which is itself a tourist attraction. I was using Organic Maps to navigate to the hotel Resorts World Sentosa, but Organic Maps’ route led us through an amusement park. I tried asking the locals (people working in shops) for directions, but it was a Chinese-speaking region, and they didn’t understand English. Fortunately, we managed to find a local who helped us with the directions.

A shot of Sentosa Boardwalk. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Following the directions, we somehow ended up having to walk on a road which did not have pedestrian paths. Singapore is a country with strict laws, so we did not want to walk on that road. Avoiding that road led us to the Michael Hotel. There was a person standing at the entrance, and I asked him for directions to Resorts World Sentosa. The person told me that the bus (which was standing at the entrance) would drop me there! The bus was a free service for getting to Resorts World Sentosa. Here I parted ways with Badri, who went to his aunt’s place.

I got to the Resorts Sentosa and showed my ticket to get in. There were two zones inside - the first was a room with a glass wall separating the audience and the players. This was the room to watch the game physically, and resembled a zoo or an aquarium. :) The room was also a silent room, which means talking or making noise was prohibited. Audiences were only allowed to have mobile phones for the first 30 minutes of the game - since I arrived late, I could not bring my phone inside that room.

The other zone was outside this room. It had a big TV on which the game was being broadcast along with commentary by David Howell and Jovanka Houska - the official FIDE commentators for the event. If you don’t already know, FIDE is the authoritative international chess body.

I spent most of the time outside that silent room, giving me an opportunity to socialize. A lot of people were from Singapore. I saw there were many Indians there as well. Moreover, I had a good time with Vasudevan, a journalist from Tamil Nadu who was covering the match. He also asked questions to Gukesh during the post-match conference. His questions were in Tamil to lift Gukesh’s spirits, as Gukesh is a Tamil speaker.

Tea and coffee were free for the audience. I also bought a T-shirt from their stall as a souvenir.

After the game, I took a shuttle bus from Resorts World Sentosa to a metro station, then travelled to Pasir Ris by metro, where Badri was staying with his aunt. I thought of getting something to eat, but could not find any cafés or restaurants while I was walking from the Pasir Ris metro station to my destination, and was positively starving when I got there.

Badri’s aunt’s place was an apartment in a gated community. On the gate was a security guard who asked me the address of the apartment. Upon entering, there were many buildings. To enter the building, you need to dial the number of the apartment you want to go to and speak to them. I had seen that in the TV show Seinfeld, where Jerry’s friends used to dial Jerry to get into his building.

I was afraid they might not have anything to eat because I told them I was planning to get something on the way. This was fortunately not the case, and I was relieved to not have to sleep with an empty stomach.

Badri’s uncle gave us an idea of how safe Singapore is. He said that even if you forget your laptop in a public space, you can go back the next day to find it right there in the same spot. I also learned that owning cars was discouraged in Singapore - the government imposes a high registration fee on them, while also making public transport easy to use and affordable. I also found out that 7-Eleven was not that popular among residents in Singapore, unlike in Malaysia or Thailand.

The next day was our third and final day in Singapore. We had a bus in the evening to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. We got up early, had breakfast, and checked out from Badri’s aunt’s home. A store by the name of Cat Socrates was our first stop for the day, as Badri wanted to buy some stationery. The plan was to take the metro, followed by the bus. So we got to Pasir Ris metro station. Next to the metro station was a mall. In the mall, Badri found an ATM where our cards worked, and we got some Singapore dollars.

It was noon when we reached the stationery shop mentioned above. We had to walk a kilometer from the place where the bus dropped us. It was a hot, sunny day in Singapore, so walking was not comfortable. We had to go through residential areas in Singapore. We saw some non-touristy parts of Singapore.

After we were done with the stationery shop, we went to a hawker center to get lunch. Hawker centers are unique to Singapore. They have a lot of shops that sell local food at cheap prices. It is similar to a food court. However, unlike the food courts in malls, hawker centers are open-air and can get quite hot.

This is the hawker center we went to. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

To have something, you just need to buy it from one of the shops and find a table. After you are done, you need to put your tray in the tray-collecting spots. I had a kaya toast with chai, since there weren’t many vegetarian options. I also bought a persimmon from a nearby fruit vendor. On the other hand, Badri sampled some local non-vegetarian dishes.

Table littering at the hawker center was prohibited by law. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Next, we took a metro to Raffles Place, as we wanted to visit Merlion, the icon of Singapore. It is a statue having the head of a lion and the body of a fish. While getting through the AFC gates, my card was declined. Therefore, I had to buy an EZ-Link card, which I had been avoiding because the card itself costs 5 Singapore dollars.

From the Raffles Place metro station, we walked to Merlion. The place also gave a nice view of Marina Bay Sands. It was filled with tourists clicking pictures, and we also did the same.

Merlion from behind, giving a good view of Marina Bay Sands. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

After this, we went to the bus stop to catch our bus to the border city of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The bus was more than an hour late, and we worried that we had missed the bus. I asked an Indian woman at the stop who also planned to take the same bus, and she told us that the bus was late. Finally, our bus arrived, and we set off for Johor Bahru.

Before I finish, let me give you an idea of my expenditure. Singapore is an expensive country, and I realized that expenses could go up pretty quickly. Overall, my stay in Singapore for 3 days and 2 nights was approx. 5500 rupees. That too, when we stayed one night at Badri’s aunt’s place (so we didn’t have to pay for accomodation for one of the nights) and didn’t have to pay for a couple of meals. This amount doesn’t include the ticket for the chess game, but includes the costs of getting there. If you are in Singapore, it is likely you will pay a visit to Sentosa Island anyway.

Stay tuned for our experiences in Malaysia!

Credits: Thanks to Dione, Sahil, Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing the draft. Thanks to Bhe for spotting a duplicate sentence.

Installing Debian With Btrfs and Encryption

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:53:11 +0530

Motivation

On the 8th of August 2025 (a day before the Debian Trixie release), I was upgrading my personal laptop from Debian Bookworm to Trixie. It was a major update. However, the update didn’t go smoothly, and I ran into some errors. From the Debian support IRC channel, I got to know that it would be best if I removed the texlive packages.

However, it was not so easy to just remove texlive with a simple apt remove command. I had to remove the texlive packages from /usr/bin. Then I ran into other errors. Hours after I started the upgrade, I realized I preferred having my system as it was before, as I had to travel to Noida the next day. Needless to say, I wanted to go to sleep rather than fix my broken system. Only if I had a way to go back to my system before I started upgrading, it would have saved a lot of trouble for me. I ended up installing Trixie from scratch.

It turns out that there was a way to recover to the state before the upgrade - using Timeshift to roll back the system to a state (in our example, it is the state before the upgrade process started) in the past. However, it needs the Btrfs filesystem with appropriate subvolumes, not provided by Debian installer in their guided partitioning menu.

I have set it up after a few weeks of the above-mentioned incident. Let me demonstrate how it works.

Check the screenshot above. It shows a list of snapshots made by Timeshift. Some of them were made by me manually. Others were made by Timeshift automatically as per the routine - I have set up hourly backups and weekly backups etc.

In the above-mentioned major update, I could have just taken a snapshot using Timeshift before performing the upgrade and could have rolled back to that snapshot when I found that I cannot spend more time on fixing my installation errors. Then I could just perform the upgrade later.

Installation

In this tutorial, I will cover how I installed Debian with Btrfs and disk encryption, along with creating subvolumes @ for root and @home for /home so that I can use Timeshift to create snapshots. These snapshots are kept on the same disk where Debian is installed, and the use-case is to roll back to a working system in case I mess up something or to recover an accidentally deleted file.

I went through countless tutorials on the Internet, but I didn’t find a single tutorial covering both the disk encryption and the above-mentioned subvolumes (on Debian). Debian doesn’t create the desired subvolumes by default, therefore the process requires some manual steps, which beginners may not be comfortable performing. Beginners can try distros such as Fedora and Linux Mint, as their installation includes Btrfs with the required subvolumes.

Furthermore, it is pertinent to note that I used Debian Trixie’s DVD iso on a real laptop (not a virtual machine) for my installation. Debian Trixie is the codename for the current stable version of Debian. Then I took screenshots in a virtual machine by repeating the process. Moreover, a couple of screenshots are from the installation I did on the real laptop.

Let’s start the tutorial by booting up the Debian installer.

The above screenshot shows the first screen we see on the installer. Since we want to choose Expert Install, we select Advanced Options in the screenshot above.

Let’s select the Expert Install option in the above screenshot. It is because we want to create subvolumes after the installer is done with the partition, and only then proceed to installing the base system. “Non-expert” install modes proceed directly to installing the system right after creating partitions without pausing for us to create the subvolumes.

After selecting the Expert Install option, you will get the screen above. I will skip to partitioning from here and leave the intermediate steps such as choosing language, region, connecting to Wi-Fi, etc. For your reference, I did create the root user.

Let’s jump right to the partitioning step. Select the Partition disks option from the menu as shown above.

Choose Manual.

Select your disk where you would like to install Debian.

Select Yes when asked for creating a new partition.

I chose the msdos option as I am not using UEFI. If you are using UEFI, then you need to choose the gpt option. Also, your steps will (slightly) differ from mine if you are using UEFI. In that case, you can watch this video by the YouTube channel EF Linux in which he creates an EFI partition. As he doesn’t cover disk encryption, you can continue reading this post after following the steps corresponding to EFI.

Select the free space option as shown above.

Choose Create a new partition.

I chose the partition size to be 1 GB.

Choose Primary.

Choose Beginning.

Now, I got to this screen.

I changed mount point to /boot and turned on the bootable flag and then selected “Done setting up the partition.”

Now select free space.

Choose the Create a new partition option.

I made the partition size equal to the remaining space on my disk. I do not intend to create a swap partition, so I do not need more space.

Select Primary.

Select the Use as option to change its value.

Select “physical volume for encryption.”

Select Done setting up the partition.

Now select “Configure encrypted volumes.”

Select Yes.

Select Finish.

Selecting Yes will take a lot of time to erase the data. Therefore, I would say if you have hours for this step (in case your SSD is like 1 TB), then I would recommend selecting “Yes.” Otherwise, you could select “No” and compromise on the quality of encryption.

After this, you will be asked to enter a passphrase for disk encryption and confirm it. Please do so. I forgot to take the screenshot for that step.

Now select that encrypted volume as shown in the screenshot above.

Here we will change a couple of options which will be shown in the next screenshot.

In the Use as menu, select “btrfs journaling file system.”

Now, click on the mount point option.

Change it to “/ - the root file system.”

Select Done setting up the partition.

This is a preview of the paritioning after performing the above-mentioned steps.

If everything is okay, proceed with the Finish partitioning and write changes to disk option.

The installer is reminding us to create a swap partition. I proceeded without it as I planned to add swap after the installation.

If everything looks fine, choose “yes” for writing the changes to disks.

Now we are done with partitioning and we are shown the screen in the screenshot above. If we had not selected the Expert Install option, the installer would have proceeded to install the base system without asking us.

However, we want to create subvolumes before proceeding to install the base system. This is the reason we chose Expert Install.

Now press Ctrl + F2.

You will see the screen as in the above screenshot. It says “Please press Enter to activate this console.” So, let’s press Enter.

After pressing Enter, we see the above screen.

The screenshot above shows the steps I performed in the console. I followed the already mentioned video by EF Linux for this part and adapted it to my situation (he doesn’t encrypt the disk in his tutorial).

First we run df -h to have a look at how our disk is partitioned. In my case, the output was:

# df -h
Filesystem              Size  Used  Avail   Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                   1.6G  344.0K  1.6G    0% /run
devtmpfs                7.7G       0  7.7G   0% /dev
/dev/sdb1               3.7G    3.7G    0   100% /cdrom
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt  952.9G  5.8G  950.9G  0% /target
/dev/sda1               919.7M  260.0K  855.8M  0% /target/boot

df -h shows us that /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt and /dev/sda1 are mounted on /target and /target/boot respectively.

Let’s unmount them. For that, we run:

# umount /target
# umount /target/boot

Next, let’s mount our root filesystem to /mnt.

# mount /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /mnt

Let’s go into the /mnt directory.

# cd /mnt

Upon listing the contents of this directory, we get:

/mnt # ls
@rootfs

Debian installer has created a subvolume @rootfs automatically. However, we need the subvolumes to be @ and @home. Therefore, let’s rename the @rootfs subvolume to @.

/mnt # mv @rootfs @

Listing the contents of the directory again, we get:

/mnt # ls
@

We only one subvolume right now. Therefore, let us go ahead and create another subvolume @home.

/mnt # btrfs subvolume create @home
Create subvolume './@home'

If we perform ls now, we will see there are two subvolumes:

/mnt # ls
@ @home

Let us mount /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt to /target

/mnt # mount -o noatime,space_cache=v2,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,subvol=@ /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /target/

Now we need to create a directory for /home.

/mnt # mkdir /target/home/

Now we mount the /home directory with subvol=@home option.

/mnt # mount -o noatime,space_cache=v2,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,subvol=@home /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /target/home/

Now mount /dev/sda1 to /target/boot.

/mnt # mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot/

Now we need to add these options to the fstab file, which is located at /target/etc/fstab. Unfortunately, vim is not installed in this console. The only way to edit is Nano.

nano /target/etc/fstab

Edit your fstab file to look similar to the one in the screenshot above. I am pasting the fstab file contents below for easy reference.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# systemd generates mount units based on this file, see systemd.mount(5).
# Please run 'systemctl daemon-reload' after making changes here.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /        btrfs   noatime,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=@ 0       0
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /home    btrfs   noatime,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=@home 0       0
# /boot was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=12842b16-d3b3-44b4-878a-beb1e6362fbc /boot           ext4    defaults        0       2
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

Please double check the fstab file before saving it. In Nano, you can press Ctrl+O followed by pressing Enter to save the file. Then press Ctrl+X to quit Nano. Now, preview the fstab file by running

cat /target/etc/fstab

and verify that the entries are correct, otherwise you will booted to an unusable and broken system after the installation is complete.

Next, press Ctrl + Alt + F1 to go back to the installer.

Proceed to “Install the base system.”

Screenshot of Debian installer installing the base system.

I chose the default option here - linux-image-amd64.

After this, the installer will ask you a few more questions. For desktop environment, I chose KDE Plasma. You can choose the desktop environment as per your liking. I will not cover the rest of the installation process and assume that you were able to install from here.

Post installation

Let’s jump to our freshly installed Debian system. Since I created a root user, I added the user ravi to the suoders file (/etc/sudoers) so that ravi can run commands with sudo. Follow this if you would like to do the same.

Now we set up zram as swap. First, install zram-tools.

sudo apt install zram-tools

Now edit the file /etc/default/zramswap and make sure to have the following lines are uncommented:

ALGO=lz4
PERCENT=50

Now, run

sudo systemctl restart zramswap

If you run lsblk now, you should see the below-mentioned entry in the output:

zram0          253:0    0   7.8G  0 disk  [SWAP]

This shows us that zram has been activated as swap.

Now we install timeshift, which can be done by running

sudo apt install timeshift

After the installation is complete, run Timeshift and schedule snapshots as you please. We are done now. Hope the tutorial was helpful.

See you in the next post and let me know if you have any suggestions and questions on this tutorial.

Tricked by a website while applying for Vietnam visa

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 04:25:05 +0530

In December 2024, Badri and I went to Vietnam. In this post, I’ll document our experiences with the visa process of Vietnam. Vietnam requires an e-visa to enter the country. The official online portal for the e-visa application is evisa.xuatnhapcanh.gov.vn/. However, I submitted my visa application on the website vietnamvisa.govt.vn. It was only after submitting my application and making the payment that I realized that it’s not the official e-visa website. The realization came from the tagline mentioned in the top left corner of the website - the best way to obtain a Vietnam visa.

I was a bit upset that I got tricked by that website. I should have checked the top level domains of Vietnam’s government websites. Anyways, it is pretty easy to confuse govt.vn with gov.vn. I also paid double the amount of the official visa fee. However, I wasn’t asked to provide a flight reservation or hotel bookings - documents which are usually asked for most of the visas. But they did ask me for a photo. I was not even sure whether the website was legit or not.

Badri learnt from my experience and applied through the official Vietnam government website. During the process, he had to provide a hotel booking as well as enter the hotel address into the submission form. Additionally, the official website asked to provide the exact points of entry to and exit from the country, which the non-official website did not ask for. On the other hand, he had to pay only 25 USD versus my 54 USD.

It turned out that the website I registered on was also legit, as they informed me a week later that my visa has been approved, along with a copy of my visa. Further, I was not barred from entering and found to be holding a fake visa. It appears that the main “scam” is not about the visa being fake, but rather that you will be charged more than if you apply through the official website.

I would still recommend you (the readers) to submit your visa application only through the official website and not on any of the other such websites.

Our visa was valid for a month (my visa was valid from the 4th of December 2024 to the 4th of January 2025). We also had a nice time in Vietnam. Stay tuned for my Vietnam travel posts!

Credits to Badri for proofreading and writing his part of the experience.

How to paste your password on your bank's website

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:08:51 +0530

If your bank is like mine, its website doesn’t allow you to copy your password and paste it by performing a simple Ctrl+V. I tried the Don’t Fuck With Paste extension in Firefox, which could paste my bank account’s profile password but not the login password.

Therefore, I asked on Mastodon a couple of days ago and got some responses. The solution that worked for me was to use Shift+Insert to paste the password. It worked for me in LibreWolf and Firefox, and that’s all I needed.

Furthermore, this behavior by bank websites leads to users choosing insecure and memorable passwords. Using this trick will help you choose strong passwords for your bank account.

I prefer to use random and strong passwords generated using the password manager pass. It is a freedom-respecting software, unlike popular proprietary password managers promoted by YouTubers. Feel free to check out their webpage here. The reason I use pass is that it stores all the passwords locally (and optionally in a remote Git repository) in encrypted form, which can only be decrypted using your private GPG keys.

Getting Brunei visa

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:30:51 +0530

In December 2024, my friend Badri and I were planning a trip to Southeast Asia. At this point, we were planning to visit Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. My Singapore visa had already been approved, and Malaysia was visa-free for us. For Vietnam, we had to apply for an e-visa online.

We considered adding Brunei to our itinerary. I saw some videos of the Brunei visa process and got the impression that we needed to go to the Brunei embassy in Kuching, Malaysia in person.

However, when I happened to search for Brunei on Organic Maps¹, I stumbled upon the Brunei Embassy in Delhi. It seemed to be somewhere in Hauz Khas. As I was going to Delhi to collect my Singapore visa the next day, I figured I’d also visit the Brunei Embassy to get information about the visa process.

The next day I went to the location displayed by Organic Maps. It was next to the embassy of Madagascar, and a sign on the road divider confirmed that I was at the right place.

That said, it actually looked like someone’s apartment. I entered and asked for directions to the Brunei embassy, but the people inside did not seem to understand my query. After some back and forth, I realized that the embassy wasn’t there.

I now searched for the Brunei embassy on the Internet, and this time I got an address in Vasant Vihar. It seemed like the embassy had been moved from Hauz Khas to Vasant Vihar. Going by the timings mentioned on the web page, the embassy was closing in an hour.

I took a Metro from Hauz Khas to Vasant Vihar. After deboarding at the Vasant Vihar metro station, I took an auto to reach the embassy. The address listed on the webpage got me into the correct block. However, the embassy was still nowhere to be seen. I asked around, but security guards in that area pointed me to the Burundi embassy instead.

After some more looking around, I did end up finding the embassy. I spoke to the security guards at the gate and told them that I would like to know the visa process. They dialled a number and asked that person to tell me the visa process.

I spoke to a lady on the phone. She listed the documents required for the visa process and mentioned that the timings for visa application were from 9 o’clock to 11 o’clock in the morning. She also informed me that the visa fees was ₹1000.

I also asked about the process Badri, who lives far away in Tamil Nadu and cannot report at the embassy physically. She told me that I can submit a visa application on his behalf, along with an authorization letter.

Having found the embassy in Delhi was a huge relief. The other plan - going to Kuching, Malaysia - was a bit uncertain, and we didn’t know how much time it would take. Getting our passport submitted at an embassy in a foreign country was also not ideal.

A few days later, Badri sent me all the documents required for his visa. I went to the embassy and submitted both the applications. The lady who collected our visa submissions asked me for our flight reservations from Delhi to Brunei, whereas ours were (keeping with our itinerary) from Kuala Lampur. She said that she might contact me later if it was required.

For reference, here is the list of documents we submitted -

Visa application form
Passport
A photocopy of passport
Authorization letter from Badri (authorizing me to submit his application on his behalf)
Airline ticket itinerary
Hotel bookings
Cover letter
2 photos
Proof of employment
6 months bank statement (they specifically asked for ₹1,00,000 or more in bank balance)

I then asked about the procedure to collect the passports and visa results. Usually, embassies will tell you that they will contact you when they have decided on your applications. However, here I was informed that if they don’t contact me within 5 days, I can come and collect our passports and visa result between 13:30-14:30 hours on the fifth day. That was strange :)

I did visit the embassy to collect our visa results on the fifth day. However, the lady scolded me for not bringing the receipt she gave me. I was afraid that I might have to go all the way back home and bring the receipt to get our passports. The travel date was close, and it would take some time for Badri to receive his passport via courier as well.

Fortunately, she gave me our passports (with the visa attached) and asked me to share a scanned copy of the receipt via email after I get home.

We were elated that our visas were approved. Now we could focus on booking our flights.

If you are going to Brunei, remember to fill their arrival card from the website within 48 hours of your arrival!

Thanks to Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing the draft before publishing the article.

Nowadays, I prefer using Comaps instead of Organic Maps and recommend you do the same. Organic Maps had some issues with its governance and the community issues weren’t being addressed. ↩︎

Singapore Visa Process

Tue, 27 May 2025 20:20:49 +0530

In November 2024, Badri and I applied for a Singapore visa to visit the country. To apply for a Singapore visa, you need to visit an authorized travel agent listed by the Singapore High Commission on their website. Unlike the Schengen visa (where only VFS can process applications), the Singapore visa has many authorized travel agents to choose from. I remember that the list mentioned as many as 25 authorized agents in Chennai. For my application, I randomly selected Ria International in Karol Bagh, New Delhi from the list.

Further, you need to apply not more than a month before your travel dates. As our travel dates were in December, we applied in the month of November.

For your reference, I submitted the following documents:

Passport
My photograph (35 mm x 45 mm)
Visa application form (Form 14A)
Cover letter to the Singapore High Commission, New Delhi
Proof of employment
Hotel booking
Flight ticket (reservations are sufficient)
Bank account statement for the last 6 months

I didn’t have my photograph in the specified dimensions, so the travel agent took my photo on the spot. The visa application was ₹2,567. Furthermore, I submitted my application on a Saturday and received a call from the travel agent on Tuesday informing me that they had received my visa from the Singapore High Commission.

The next day, I visit the travel agent’s office and picked up my passport and a black and white copy of my e-visa. Later, I downloaded a PDF of my visa from the website mentioned on it, and took a colored printout myself.

Singapore granted me a multiple-entry visa for 2 months, even though I had applied for a 4-day single-entry visa. We were planning to add more countries to this trip; therefore, a multiple-entry visa would be helpful in case we wanted to use Singapore Airport, as it has good connectivity. However, it turned out that flights from Kuala Lumpur were much cheaper than those from Singapore, so we didn’t enter Singapore again after leaving.

Badri also did the same process but entirely remotely—he posted the documents to the visa agency in Chennai, and got his e-visa in a few days followed by his original passport which was delivered by courier.

He got his photo taken in the same dimensions mentioned above, and printed as matte finish as instructed. However, the visa agents asked why his photo was looking so faded. We don’t know if they thought the matte finish was faded or what. To rectify this, Badri emailed them a digital copy of the photo to them (both the cropped version and the original) and they handled the reprinting on their end (which he never got to see).

Before entering Singapore, we had to fill an arrival card - an online form asking a few details about our trip - within 72 hours of our arrival in Singapore.

That’s it for now. Meet you in the next post.

Thanks to Badri for reviewing the draft.

KDE India Conference 2025

Tue, 13 May 2025 23:28:18 +0530

Last month, I attended the KDE India conference in Gandhinagar, Gujarat from the 4th to the 6th of April. I made my mind to attend when Sahil told me about his plans to attend and giving a talk.

A day after my talk submission, the organizer Bhushan contacted me on Matrix and informed me that my talk had been accepted. I was also informed that KDE will cover my travel and accommodation expenses. So, I planned to attend the conference at this point. I am a longtime KDE user, so why not ;)

I arrived in Ahmedabad, the twin city of Gandhinagar, a day before the conference. The first thing that struck me as soon as I came out of the Ahmedabad airport was the heat. I felt as if I was being cooked—exactly how Bhushan put it earlier in the group chat. I took a taxi to get to my hotel, which was close to the conference venue.

Later that afternoon, I met Bhushan and Joseph. Joseph lived in Germany. Bhushan was taking him to get a SIM card, so I tagged along and got to roam around. Joseph was unsure about where to go after the conference, so I asked him what he wanted out of his trip and had conversations along that line.

Later, Vishal convinced him to go to Lucknow. Since he was adamant about taking the train, I booked a Tatkal train ticket for him to Lucknow. He was curious about how Tatkal booking works and watched me in amusement while I was booking the ticket.

The 4th of April marked the first day of the conference, with around 25 attendees. Bhushan started the day with an overview of KDE conferences in India, followed by Vishal, who discussed FOSS United’s activities. After the lunch, Joseph gave an overview of his campaign to help people switch from Windows to GNU/Linux due to environmental and security reasons. He continued his session in detail the next day.

Conference hall

A key takeaway for me from Joseph’s session was the idea pointed out by Adwaith: marketing GNU/Linux as a cheap alternative may not attract as much attention as marketing it as a status symbol. He gave the example of how the Tata Nano didn’t do well in the Indian market due to being perceived as a poor person’s car.

My talk was scheduled for the evening of the first day. I hadn’t prepared any slides because I wanted to make my session interactive. During my talk, I did an activity with the attendees to demonstrate the federated nature of XMPP messaging, of which Prav is a part. After the talk, I got a lot of questions, signalling engagement. The audience was cooperative (just like Prav ;)), contrary to my expectations (I thought they will be tired and sleepy).

On the third day, I did a demo on editing OpenStreetMap (referred to as “OSM” in short) using the iD editor. It involved adding points to OSM based on the students’ suggestions. Since my computer didn’t have an HDMI port, I used Subin’s computer, and he logged into his OSM account for my session. Therefore, any mistakes I made will be under Subin’s name. :)

On the third day, I attended Aaruni’s talk about backing up a GNU/Linux system. This was the talk that resonated with me the most. He suggested formatting the system with the btrfs file system during the installation, which helps in taking snapshots of the system and provides an easy way to roll back to a previous version if, for example, a file is accidentally deleted. I have tried many backup techniques, including this one, but I never tried backing up on the internal disk. I’ll certainly give this a try.

A conference is not only about the talks, that’s why we had a Prav table as well ;) Just kidding. What I really mean is that a conference is more about interactions than talks. Since the conference was a three-day affair, attendees got plenty of time to bond and share ideas.

Prav stall at the conference

Conference group photo

After the conference, Bhushan took us to Adalaj Stepwell, an attraction near Gandhinagar. Upon entering the complex, we saw a park where there were many langurs. Going further, there were stairs that led down to a well. I guess this is why it is called a stepwell.

Adalaj Stepwell

Later that day, we had Gujarati Thali for dinner. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet and was reasonably priced at 300 rupees per plate. Aamras (Mango juice) was the highlight for me. This was the only time we had Gujarati food during this visit. After the dinner, Aaruni dropped Sahil and I off at the airport. The hospitality was superb - for instance, in addition to Aaruni dropping us, Bhushan also picked up some of the attendees from the airport.

Finally, I would like to thank KDE for sponsoring my travel and accommodation costs.

Let’s wrap up this post here and meet you in the next one.

Thanks to contrapunctus and Joseph for proofreading.

A visit to Paris

Tue, 06 May 2025 01:32:43 +0530

After attending the 2024 LibreOffice conference in Luxembourg, I visited Paris in October 2024.

If you are wondering whether I needed another visa to cross the border into France— I didn’t! Further, they are both also EU members, which means you don’t need to go through customs either. Thus, crossing the Luxembourg-France border is no different from crossing Indian state borders - like going from Rajasthan to Uttar Pradesh.

I took a TGV train from Luxembourg Central Station, which was within walking distance from my hostel. The train took only 2 hours and 20 minutes to cover the 300 km distance to Paris. It departed from Luxembourg at 10:00 AM and reached Paris at 12:20 PM. The ride was smooth and comfortable, arriving on time. It gave me an opportunity to see the countryside of France. I booked the train ticket online a couple of days prior through the Omio website.

TGV train I rode from Luxembourg to Paris

I planned the first day with my friend Joenio, whom I met upon arriving in Paris’ Gare de l’Est station, along with his wife Mari. We went to my hostel (which was within walking distance from the station) to store my luggage, but we were informed that we needed to wait for a couple of hours before I could check in. Consequently, we went to an Italian restaurant nearby for lunch, where I ordered pasta. My hostel was unbelievably cheap by French standards (25 euros per night) that Joenio was shocked when he learned about it.

Pasta I had in Paris

Walking in the city, I noticed it had separate cycling tracks and wide footpaths, just like Luxembourg. The traffic was also organized. For instance, there were traffic lights even for pedestrian crossings, unlike India, where crossing roads can be a nightmare. Car drivers stopping for pedestrians is a big improvement over what I am used to in India. The weather was also pleasant. It was a bit on the cooler side - around 15 degrees Celsius - and I had to wear a jacket.

A cycling track in Paris

After lunch, we returned to my hostel for my check-in at around 3 o’clock. Then, we went to the Luxembourg Museum (Musée du Luxembourg in French) as Joenio had booked tickets for an exhibition of paintings by the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral. To reach there, we took a subway train from Gare du Nord station. The Paris subway charges 2.15 euros irrespective of the distance (or number of stations) traveled, as opposed to other metro systems I have used.

We reached the museum at around 4 o’clock. I found the paintings beautiful, but I would have appreciated them much more if the descriptions were in English.

Luxembourg Museum

Afterward, we went to a beautiful garden just behind the museum. It served as a great spot to relax and take pictures. Following this, we walked to the Pantheon - a well-known attraction in the city. It is a church built a couple of centuries ago. It has a dome-shaped structure at the top, recognizable from far away.

A shot of the park near to the Luxembourg Museum

Pantheon, one of the attractions of Paris.

Then we went to Notre Dame after having evening snacks and coffee at a nearby bakery. The Notre Dame was just over a kilometer from the Pantheon, so we took a walk. We also crossed the beautiful Seine river. On the way, I sampled a crêpe, a signature dish of France. The shop was named Crêperie and had many varieties of Crêpe. I took the one with eggs and Emmental cheese. It was savory and delicious.

Photo with Joenio and Mari

Notre Dame, another tourist attraction of Paris.

By the time we reached Notre Dame, it was 07:30 PM. I learned from Joenio that Notre Dame was closed and being renovated due to a fire a couple of years ago, so we just sat around and clicked photos. It is a catholic cathedral built in French Gothic architecture (I read that on Wikipedia ;)). I read on Wikipedia that it is located on an island named Île de la Cité and I didn’t even realize we are on an island.

At night, we visited the most well-known attraction of Paris, The Eiffel Tower. We again took the subway, alighting at the Bir-Hakeim station, followed by a short walk. We reached the Eiffel Tower at 9 o’clock. It was lit bright yellow. There was not much to do there, so we just clicked photos and hung out. After that, I came back to my hostel.

My photo with Eiffel Tower in the background

Next day, I roamed around the city by walking mostly. France is known for its bakeries, so I checked out a couple of local bakeries. I had espresso a couple of times and sampled croissant, pain au chocolat and lemon meringue tartlet.

Items at a bakery in Paris. Items from left to right are: Chocolate Twist, Sugar briochette, Pain au Chocolat, Croissant with almonds, Croissant, Croissant with chocolate hazlenut filling.

Here are some random shots:

The Paris subway

Inside a Paris subway

A random building and road in Paris

A shot near the Seine river

A view of the Seine river

On the third day, I had my flight for India. Thus, I checked out of the hostel early in the morning, took an RR train from Gare du Nord station to reach the airport. It costs 11.8 euros.

I am listing my expenses during my 3-day stay in Paris below:

Category	Amount (in euros)
Food	€40
Public Transport	€20
Accommodation (2 nights)	€50
Total	€110

I heard some of my friends had bad experiences in France. Thus, I had the impression that I would not feel welcomed. Furthermore, I have encountered language problems during my previous Europe trip in Albania and Kosovo. Likewise, I learned a couple of French words, like how to say thank you and good morning, which went a long way.

However, I didn’t have bad experiences in Paris, except for one instance in which I asked my hostel’s reception about my misplaced watch and the person at the reception asked me to be “polite” by being rude. She said, “Excuse me! You don’t know how to say Good Morning?”

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Paris and would like to thank Joenio and Mari for showing me around. I would also like to thank Sophie for giving me a map of Paris, which was handy.

Let’s end this post here. I’ll meet you in the next one!

Credits: Thanks to contrapunctus for reviewing this post before publishing

Libreoffice Conference 2024 in Luxembourg

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 21:48:39 +0530

Last year, I attended the annual LibreOffice Conference in Luxembourg with the help of a generous travel grant by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was a three-day event from the 10th to the 12th of October 2024, with an additional day for community meetup on the 9th.

Luxembourg is a small country in Western Europe. It is insanely wealthy with high living standards. After going through an arduous visa process, I got to the country on the 8th of October. Upon arriving in Luxembourg, I took a bus to the city center, where my hotel — Park Inn — was located. I deboarded the bus at the Luxembourg Central station. Before walking towards my hotel, I stopped to click a few pictures of the beautiful station.

All the public transport in Luxembourg was free of cost. The experience of being in Luxembourg was as if I had stepped in another world. The roads had separate tracks for cycling and separate lanes for buses, along with wide footpaths. In addition, the streets were pretty neat and clean.

Luxembourg's Findel Airport. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Separate cycling tracks in Luxembourg. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A random road in Luxembourg with separate lane for buses. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The conference venue was in Belval, while I stayed in the city center. Even though my stay was 20 km from the conference venue, the commute was convenient thanks to free of cost train connections. The train rides were comfortable, smooth, and scenic, covering the distance in half an hour. Moreover, I never found the trains to be very crowded, which enabled me to always get a seat.

This is what trains look like in Luxembourg. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The train ride from my hotel to the conference venue had some scenic views like this one on the way. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A tram in Luxembourg with Luxembourg Central station in the background. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

My breakfast was included in the hotel booking. The breakfast had many options. It had coffee and fruit juices, along with diverse food options. Some of the items I remember were croissant, pain au chocolat, brie (a type of cheese), scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, and various types of meat dishes. Other than this, there were fruits such as pears.

That circular pie in the center of the image is brie - a type of cheese - which I found delicious. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Pre-conference, a day was reserved for the community meetup on the 9th of October. On that day, the community members introduced themselves and their contributions to the LibreOffice project. It acted as a brainstorming session. All the attendees got a lovely conference bag, which contained a T-Shirt, a pen and a few stickers. I also met my long time collaborators Mike, Sophie and Italo from the TDF, whom I had interacted only remotely till then. Likewise, I also met TDF’s sysadmin Guilhem, who I interacted before regarding setting up my LibreOffice mirror.

Lovely swag bag. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The conference started on the 10th. There were 5 attendees from India, including me, while most of the attendees were from Europe. The talks were in English. One of the talks that stood out for me was about Luxchat — a chat service run by the Luxembourg government based on the Matrix protocol for the citizens of Luxembourg. I also liked Italo’s talk on why document formats must be freedom-respecting. On the first night, the conference took us to a nice dinner in a restaurant. It offered one more way to socialize with other attendees and explore food at the same time.

A slide from Italo's talk on document freedom. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Picture of the hall in which talks were held. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On the 11th of October, I went for a walk in the morning with Biswadeep for some sightseeing around our hotel area. As a consequence, I missed the group photo of the conference, which I wanted to be in. Anyway, we enjoyed roaming around the picturesque Luxembourg city. We also sampled a tram ride to return to our hotel.

We encountered such scenic views during our walk. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Another view of Luxembourg city area. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi. Released under the CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The conference ended on the 12th with a couple of talks. This conference gave me an opportunity to meet the global LibreOffice community, connect and share ideas. It also gave me a peek into the country of Luxembourg and its people, where I had good experience. English was widely known, and I had no issues getting by.

Thanks to all the organizers and sponsors of the conference!

The Arduous Luxembourg Visa Process

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:15:57 +0530

In 2024, I was sponsored by The Document Foundation (TDF) to attend the LibreOffice annual conference in Luxembourg from the 10th to the 12th of October. Being an Indian passport holder, I needed a visa to visit Luxembourg. However, due to my Kenya trip coming up in September, I ran into a dilemma: whether to apply before or after the Kenya trip.

To obtain a visa, I needed to submit my application with VFS Global (and not with the Luxembourg embassy directly). Therefore, I checked the VFS website for information on processing time, which says:

As a rule, the processing time of an admissible Schengen visa application should not exceed 15 calendar days (from the date the application is received at the Embassy).

It also mentions:

If the application is received less than 15 calendar days before the intended travel date, the Embassy can deem your application inadmissible. If so, your visa application will not be processed by the Embassy and the application will be sent back to VFS along with the passport.

If I applied for the Luxembourg visa before my trip, I would run the risk of not getting my passport back in time, and therefore missing my Kenya flight. On the other hand, if I waited until after returning from Kenya, I would run afoul of the aforementioned 15 working days needed by the embassy to process my application.

I had previously applied for a Schengen visa for Austria, which was completed in 7 working days. My friends who had been to France told me they got their visa decision within a week. So, I compared Luxembourg’s application numbers with those of other Schengen countries. In 2023, Luxembourg received 3,090 applications from India, while Austria received 39,558, Italy received 52,332 and France received 176,237. Since Luxembourg receives a far fewer number of applications, I expected the process to be quick.

Therefore, I submitted my visa application with VFS Global in Delhi on the 5th of August, giving the embassy a month with 18 working days before my Kenya trip. However, I didn’t mention my Kenya trip in the Luxembourg visa application.

For reference, here is a list of documents I submitted:

Passport
Photocopy of passport data pages
Visa application form
One photograph
Visa appointment confirmation
Cover letter
Return flight reservations
Hotel bookings
Invitation letter from the conference organizer, TDF
Confirmation from The Luxembourg Convention Bureau G.I.E - the venue
Last three months bank account statement with bank seal
Travel insurance
Income Tax Return Statement
Monthly payslips for the last three months

I submitted ‘flight reservations’ instead of ‘flight tickets’. It is because, in case of visa rejection, I would have lost a significant amount of money if I booked confirmed flight tickets. The embassy also recommends the same. After the submission of documents, my fingerprints were taken.

The expenses for the visa application were as follows:

Service Description	Amount (INR)
Visa Fee	8,114
VFS Global Fee	1,763
Courier	800
Total	10,677

Going by the email notifications I received from VFS, my application reached the Luxembourg embassy the next day. Fast-forward to the 27th of August — 14th day of my visa application. I had already booked my flight ticket to Nairobi for the 4th of September, but my passport was still with the Luxembourg embassy, and I hadn’t heard back. In addition, I also obtained Kenya’s eTA and got vaccinated for Yellow Fever, a requirement to travel to Kenya.

In order to check on my application status, I gave the embassy a phone call, but missed their calling window, which was easy to miss since it was only 1 hour - 12:00 to 1:00 PM. So, I dropped them an email explaining my situation. At this point, I was already wondering whether to cancel the Kenya trip or the Luxembourg one, if I had to choose.

After not getting a response to my email, I called them again the next day. The embassy told me they would look into it and asked me to send my flight tickets over email. One week to go before my flight now.

I followed up with the embassy on the 30th by a phone call, and the person who picked up the call told me that my request had already been forwarded to the concerned department and is under process. They asked me to follow up on Monday, 2nd September.

During the visa process, I was in touch with three other Indian attendees.¹ In the meantime, I got to know that all of them had applied for a Luxembourg visa by the end of the month of August.

Back to our story, over the next two days, the embassy closed for the weekend. I began weighing my options. On one hand, I could cancel the Kenya trip and hope that Luxembourg goes through. Even then, Luxembourg wasn’t guaranteed as the visa could get rejected, so I might have ended up missing both the trips. On the other hand, I could cancel the Luxembourg visa application and at least be sure of going to Kenya. However, I thought it would make Luxembourg very unlikely because it didn’t leave 15 working days for the embassy to process my visa after returning from Kenya. I also badly wanted to attend the LibreOffice conference because I couldn’t make it two years ago. Therefore, I chose not to cancel my Luxembourg visa application. I checked with my travel agent and learned that I could cancel my Nairobi flight before September 4th for a cancelation fee of approximately 7,000 INR.

On the 2nd of September, I was a bit frustrated because I hadn’t heard anything from the embassy regarding my request. Therefore, I called the embassy again. They assured me that they would arrange a call for me from the concerned department that day, which I did receive later that evening. During the call, they offered to return my passport via VFS the next day and asked me to resubmit it after returning from Kenya. I immediately accepted the offer and was overjoyed, as it would enable me to take my flight to Nairobi without canceling my Luxembourg visa application. However, I didn’t have the offer in writing, so it wasn’t clear to me how I would collect my passport from VFS. The next day, I would receive it when I would be on my way to VFS in the form of an email from the embassy which read:

Dear Mr. Dwivedi,

We acknowledge the receipt of your email.

As you requested, we are returning your passport exceptionally through VFS, you can collect it directly from VFS Delhi Center between 14:00-17:00 hrs, 03 Sep 2024. Kindly bring the printout of this email along with your VFS deposit receipt and Original ID proof.

Once you are back from your trip, you can redeposit the passport with VFS Luxembourg for our processing.

With best regards,
Consular Section

GRAND DUCHY OF LUXEMBOURG
Embassy in New Delhi

I took a printout of the email and submitted it to VFS to get my passport. This seemed like a miracle - just when I lost all hope of making it to my Kenya flight and was mentally preparing myself to miss it, I got my passport back “exceptionally” and now I had to mentally prepare again for Kenya. I had never heard of an embassy returning passport before completing the visa process before. The next day, I took my flight to Nairobi as planned. In case you are interested, I have written two blog posts on my Kenya trip - one on the OpenStreetMap conference in Nairobi and the other on my travel experience in Kenya.

After returning from Kenya, I resubmitted my passport on the 17th of September. Fast-forward to the 25th of September; I didn’t hear anything from the embassy about my application process. So, I checked with TDF to see whether the embassy reached out to them. They told me they confirmed my participation and my hotel booking to the visa authorities on the 19th of September (6 days ago). I was wondering what was taking so long after the verification.

On the 1st of October, I received a phone call from the Luxembourg embassy, which turned out to be a surprise interview. They asked me about my work, my income, how I came to know about the conference, whether I had been to Europe before, etc. The call lasted around 10 minutes. At this point, my travel date - 8th of October - was just two working days away as the 2nd of October was off due to Gandhi Jayanti and 5th and 6th October were weekends, leaving only the 3rd and the 4th. I am not sure why the embassy saved this for the last moment, even though I submitted my application 2 months ago. I also got to know that one of the other Indian attendees missed the call due to being in their college lab, where he was not allowed to take phone calls. Therefore, I recommend that the embassy agree on a time slot for the interview call beforehand.

Visa decisions for all the above-mentioned Indian attendees were sent by the embassy on the 4th of October, and I received mine on the 5th. For my travel date of 8th October, this was literally the last moment the embassy could send my visa. The parcel contained my passport and a letter. The visa was attached to a page in the passport. I was happy that my visa had been approved. However, the timing made my task challenging. The enclosed letter stated:

Subject: Your Visa Application for Luxembourg

Dear Applicant,

We would like to inform you that a Schengen visa has been granted for the 8-day duration from 08/10/2024 to 30/10/2024 for conference purposes in Luxembourg.

You are requested to report back to the Embassy of Luxembourg in New Delhi through an email (email address redacted) after your return with the following documents:

Immigration Stamps (Entry and Exit of Schengen Area)

Restaurant Bills

Shopping/Hotel/Accommodation bills

Failure to report to the Embassy after your return will be taken into consideration for any further visa applications.

I understand the embassy wanting to ensure my entry and exit from the Schengen area during the visa validity period, but found the demand for sending shopping bills excessive. Further, not everyone was as lucky as I was as it took a couple of days for one of the Indian attendees to receive their visa, delaying their plan. Another attendee had to send their father to the VFS center to collect their visa in time, rather than wait for the courier to arrive at their home.

Foreign travel is complicated, especially for the citizens of countries whose passports and currencies are weak. Embassies issuing visas a day before the travel date doesn’t help. For starters, a last-minute visa does not give enough time for obtaining a forex card as banks ask for the visa. Further, getting foreign currency (Euros in our case) in cash with a good exchange rate becomes difficult. As an example, for the Kenya trip, I had to get US Dollars at the airport due to the plan being finalized at the last moment, worsening the exchange rate. Back to the current case, the flight prices went up significantly compared to September, almost doubling. The choice of airlines also got narrowed, as most of the flights got booked by the time I received my visa. With all that said, I think it was still better than an arbitrary rejection.

Credits: Contrapunctus, Badri, Fletcher, Benson, and Anirudh for helping with the draft of this post.

Thanks to Sophie, our point of contact for the conference, for putting me in touch with them. ↩︎

Asante Kenya for a Good Time

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:55:21 +0530

In September of this year, I visited Kenya to attend the State of the Map conference. I spent six nights in the capital Nairobi, two nights in Mombasa, and one night on a train. I was very happy with the visa process being smooth and quick. During the conference, I stayed at the Nairobi Transit Hotel with other attendees, with Ibtehal from Bangladesh as my roommate. I found it interesting that the shops around the hotel were grated, presumably to protect against robberies. The hotel guard had to open the lock of the hotel for us to go out at night. Further, I noticed that the banks had three layers of security. Despite this, Ibtehal and I used to hangout at a coffee shop during midnight.

The coffee shop Ibtehal and me used to visit during the midnight

Grating at a chemist shop in Mombasa, Kenya

The country lies on the equator, which might give the impression of extremely hot temperatures. However, Nairobi was on the cooler side (10–25 degrees Celsius), and I found myself needing a hoodie, which I bought the next day. It also served as a nice souvenir, as it had an outline of the African map printed on it.

I also bought a Safaricom SIM card for 100 shillings and recharged it with 1000 shillings for 8 GB internet with 5G speeds and 400 minutes talk time.

A visit to Nairobi’s Historic Cricket Ground

On this trip, I got a unique souvenir that can’t be purchased from the market—a cricket jersey worn in an ODI match by a player. The story goes as follows: I was roaming around the market with my friend Benson from Nairobi to buy a Kenyan cricket jersey for myself, but we couldn’t find any. So, Benson had the idea of visiting the Nairobi Gymkhana Club, which used to be Kenya’s main cricket ground. It has hosted some historic matches, including the 2003 World Cup match in which Kenya beat the mighty Sri Lankans and the record for the fastest ODI century by Shahid Afridi in just 37 balls in 1996.

Although entry to the club was exclusively for members, I was warmly welcomed by the staff. Upon reaching the cricket ground, I met some Indian players who played in Kenyan leagues, as well as Lucas Oluoch and Dominic Wesonga, who have represented Kenya in ODIs. When I expressed interest in getting a jersey, Dominic agreed to send me pictures of his jersey. I liked his jersey and collected it from him. I gave him 2000 shillings, an amount suggested by those Indian players.

Me with players at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club

Cricket pitch at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club

A view of the cricket ground inside the Nairobi Gymkhana Club

Scoreboard at the Nairobi Gymkhana cricket ground

Giraffe Center in Nairobi

Kenya is known for its safaris and has no shortage of national parks. In fact, Nairobi is the only capital in the world with a national park. I decided not to visit one, as most of them were expensive and offered multi-day tours, and I didn’t want to spend that much time in the wildlife.

Instead, I went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi with Pragya and Rabina. The ticket cost 1500 Kenyan shillings (1000 Indian rupees). In Kenya, matatus - shared vans, usually decorated with portraits of famous people and play rap songs - are the most popular means of public transport. Reaching the Giraffe Center from our hotel required taking five matatus for 150 shillings and a 2 kilometer walk. The journey back was 90 shillings, suggesting that we didn’t find the most efficient route to get there. At the Giraffe Center, we fed giraffes and took photos.

A matatu with a Notorious BIG portrait.

Inside the Giraffe Center

Train ride from Nairobi to Mombasa

I wanted to visit a place outside of Nairobi. Mombasa being a coastal city and the second-largest in Kenya was a natural choice. It is 500 kilometers from the capital Nairobi. I love trains in general, so I decided to take the SGR train from Nairobi to Mombasa. I tried reserving a seat for myself from home, but found out that the train could only be booked using M-PESA. It is a mobile bank transfer system in Kenya, and I didn’t have an M-PESA account. Therefore, I could not book my ticket in advance. When I was in Kenya, I was helped by Pragya’s friend Mary for booking my ticket. It was a second-class ticket for 1500 shillings (1000 Indian rupees).

If you are a tourist, note that local shops in Kenya can facilitate such an M-PESA transfer in exchange for cash. Your hotel may also be providing such a service, so make sure to check with them.

The train was scheduled to depart from Nairobi at 08:00 hours in the morning and arrive in Mombasa at 14:00 hours. The security check at the station required scanning bags and having them sniffed by sniffer dogs. I also fell victim to a scam by a security official who offered to help me get my ticket printed, only to later ask me to get him some coffee, which I politely declined.

Before boarding the train, I was treated to some stunning views at the Nairobi Terminus station. It was a seating train, but I wished it were a sleeper train, as I was sleep-deprived. The train was neat and clean, with good toilets. It reached Mombasa on time.

SGR train at Nairobi Terminus.

Interior of the SGR train

Arrival in Mombasa

Mombasa Terminus station.

Mombasa was a bit hotter than Nairobi, with temperatures reaching around 30 degrees Celsius. However, that’s not too hot for me, as I am used to higher temperatures in India. I had booked a hostel in the Old Town and was searching for a hitchhike from the Mombasa Terminus station. After trying for more than half an hour, I took a matatu that dropped me 3 km from my hostel for 200 shillings (140 Indian rupees). I tried to hitchhike again but couldn’t find a ride.

I think I know why I couldn’t get a ride in both the cases. In the first case, the Mombasa Terminus was in an isolated place, so most of the vehicles were taxis or matatus while any noncommercial cars were there to pick up friends and family. If the station were in the middle of the city, there would be many more car/truck drivers passing by, thus increasing my possibilities of getting a ride. In the second case, my hostel was at the end of the city, and nobody was going towards that side. In fact, many drivers told me they would love to give me a ride, but they were going in some other direction.

Finally, I took a tuktuk for 70 shillings to reach my hostel, Tulia Backpackers. It was 11 USD (1400 shillings) for one night. The balcony gave a nice view of the Indian Ocean. The rooms had fans, but there was no air conditioning. Each bed also had mosquito nets. The place was walking distance of the famous Fort Jesus. Mombasa has had more Islamic influence compared to Nairobi and also has many Hindu temples.

The balcony at Tulia Backpackers Hostel had a nice view of the ocean.

A room inside the hostel with fans and mosquito nets on the beds

Visiting White Sandy Beaches and Hitchhiking

Visiting Nyali beach marked my first time ever at a white sand beach. It was like 10 km from the hostel. The next day, I visited Diani Beach, which was 30 km from the hostel. Going to Diani Beach required crossing a river, for which there’s a free ferry service every few minutes, followed by taking a matatu to Ukunda and then a tuk-tuk. The journey gave me a glimpse of the beautiful countryside of Kenya.

Nyali beach is a white sand beach

This is the ferry service for crossing the river.

During my return from Diani Beach to the hostel, I was successful in hitchhiking. However, it was only a 4 km ride and not sufficient to reach Ukunda, so I tried to get another ride. When a truck stopped for me, I asked for a ride to Ukunda. Later, I learned that they were going in the same direction as me, so I got off within walking distance from my hostel. The ride was around 30 km. I also learned the difference between a truck ride and a matatu or car ride. For instance, matatus and cars are much faster and cooler due to air conditioning, while trucks tend to be warmer because they lack it. Further, the truck was stopped at many checkpoints by the police for inspections as it carried goods, which is not the case with matatus. Anyways, it was a nice experience, and I am grateful for the ride. I had a nice conversation with the truck drivers about Indian movies and my experiences in Kenya.

Diani beach is a popular beach in Kenya. It is a white sand beach.

Selfie with truck drivers who gave me the free ride

Back to Nairobi

I took the SGR train from Mombasa back to Nairobi. This time I took the night train, which departs at 22:00 hours, reaching Nairobi at around 04:00 in the morning. I could not sleep comfortably since the train only had seater seats.

I had booked the Zarita Hotel in Nairobi and had already confirmed if they allowed early morning check-in. Usually, hotels have a fixed checkout time, say 11:00 in the morning, and you are not allowed to stay beyond that regardless of the time you checked in. But this hotel checked me in for 24 hours. Here, I paid in US dollars, and the cost was 12 USD.

Almost Got Stuck in Kenya

Two days before my scheduled flight from Nairobi back to India, I heard the news that the airports in Kenya were closed due to the strikes. Rabina and Pragya had their flight back to Nepal canceled that day, which left them stuck in Nairobi for two additional days. I called Sahil in India and found out during the conversation that the strike was called off in the evening. It was a big relief for me, and I was fortunate to be able to fly back to India without any changes to my plans.

Newspapers at a stand in Kenya covering news on the airport closure

Experience with locals

I had no problems communicating with Kenyans, as everyone I met knew English to an extent that could easily surpass that of big cities in India. Additionally, I learned a few words from Kenya’s most popular local language, Swahili, such as “Asante,” meaning “thank you,” “Jambo” for “hello,” and “Karibu” for “welcome.” Knowing a few words in the local language went a long way.

I am not sure what’s up with haggling in Kenya. It wasn’t easy to bring the price of souvenirs down. I bought a fridge magnet for 200 shillings, which was the quoted price. On the other hand, it was much easier to bargain with taxis/tuktuks/motorbikes.

I stayed at three hotels/hostels in Kenya. None of them had air conditioners. Two of the places were in Nairobi, and they didn’t even have fans in the rooms, while the one in Mombasa had only fans. All of them had good Wi-Fi, except Tulia where the internet overall was a bit shaky.

My experience with the hotel staff was great. For instance, we requested that the Nairobi Transit Hotel cancel the included breakfast in order to reduce the room costs, but later realized that it was not a good idea. The hotel allowed us to revert and even offered one of our missing breakfasts during dinner.

The staff at Tulia Backpackers in Mombasa facilitated the ticket payment for my train from Mombasa to Nairobi. One of the staff members also gave me a lift to the place where I could catch a matatu to Nyali Beach. They even added an extra tea bag to my tea when I requested it to be stronger.

Food

At the Nairobi Transit Hotel, a Spanish omelet with tea was served for breakfast. I noticed that Spanish omelette appeared on the menus of many restaurants, suggesting that it is popular in Kenya. This was my first time having this dish. The milk tea in Kenya, referred to by locals as “white tea,” is lighter than Indian tea (they don’t put a lot of tea leaves).

Spanish Omelette served in breakfast at Nairobi Transit Hotel

I also sampled ugali with eggs. In Mombasa, I visited an Indian restaurant called New Chetna and had a buffet thali there twice.

Ugali with eggs.

Tips for Exchanging Money

In Kenya, I exchanged my money at forex shops a couple of times. I received good exchange rates for bills larger than 50 USD. For instance, 1 USD on xe.com was 129 shillings, and I got 128.3 shillings per USD (a total of 12,830 shillings) for two 50 USD notes at an exchange in Nairobi, while 127 shillings, which was the highest rate at the banks. On the other hand, for smaller bills such as a one US dollar note, I would have got 125 shillings. A passport was the only document required for the exchange, and they also provided a receipt.

My advice for travelers would be to keep 50 USD or larger bills for exchanging into the local currency while saving the smaller US dollar bills for accommodation, as many hotels and hostels accept payment in US dollars (in addition to Kenyan shillings).

Missed Malindi and Lamu

There were more places on my to-visit list in Kenya. But I simply didn’t have time to cover them, as I don’t like rushing through places, especially in a foreign country where there is a chance of me underestimating the amount of time it takes during transit. I would have liked to visit at least one of Kilifi, Watamu or Malindi beaches. Further, Lamu seemed like a unique place to visit as it has no cars or motorized transport; the only options for transport are boats and donkeys. But I missed Lamu as well.

That’s it for now. Meet you in the next one :)

State of the Map Conference in Kenya

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:35:30 +0530

Last month, I traveled to Kenya to attend a conference called State of the Map 2024 (“SotM” for short), which is an annual meetup of OpenStreetMap contributors from all over the world. It was held at the University of Nairobi Towers in Nairobi, from the 6th to the 8th of September.

University of Nairobi.

I have been contributing to OpenStreetMap for the last three years, and this conference seemed like a great opportunity to network with others in the community. As soon as I came across the travel grant announcement, I jumped in and filled the form immediately. I was elated when I was selected for the grant and couldn’t wait to attend. The grant had an upper limit of €1200 and covered food, accommodation, travel and miscellaneous expenses such as visa fee.

Pre-travel tasks included obtaining Kenya’s eTA and getting a yellow fever vaccine. Before the conference, Mikko from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team introduced me to Rabina and Pragya from Nepal, Ibtehal from Bangladesh, and Sajeevini from Sri Lanka. We all booked the Nairobi Transit Hotel, which was within walking distance of the conference venue. Pragya, Rabina, and I traveled together from Delhi to Nairobi, while Ibtehal was my roommate in the hotel.

Our group at the conference.

The venue, University of Nairobi Towers, was a tall building and the conference was held on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors. The open area on the fifth floor of the building had a nice view of Nairobi’s skyline and was a perfect spot for taking pictures. Interestingly, the university had a wing dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who is regarded in India as the Father of the Nation.

View of Nairobi's skyline from the open area on the fifth floor.

A library in Mahatma Gandhi wing of the University of Nairobi.

The diversity of the participants was mind-blowing, with people coming from a whopping 54 countries. I was surprised to notice that I was the only participant traveling from India, despite India having a large OpenStreetMap community. That said, there were two other Indian participants who traveled from other countries. I finally got to meet Arnalie (from the Phillipines) and Letwin (from Zimbabwe), both of whom I had only met online before. I had met Anisa (from Albania) earlier during DebConf 2023. But I missed Mikko and Honey from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, whom I knew from the Open Mapping Guru program.

I learned about the extent of OSM use through Pragya and Rabina’s talk; about the logistics of running the OSM Board, in the OSMF (OpenStreetMap Foundation) session; about the Youth Mappers from Sajeevini, about the OSM activities in Malawi from Priscilla Kapolo, and about mapping in Zimbabwe from Letwin. However, I missed Ibtehal’s lightning session. The ratio of women speakers and participants at the conference was impressive, and I hope we can get such gender representation in our Delhi/NCR mapping parties.

One of the conference halls where talks took place.

Outside of talks, the conference also had lunch and snack breaks, giving ample time for networking with others. In the food department, there were many options for a lacto-ovo vegetarian like myself, including potatoes, rice, beans, chips etc. I found out that the milk tea in Kenya (referred to as “white tea”) is usually not as strong compared to India, so I switched to coffee (which is also called “white coffee” when taken with milk). The food wasn’t spicy, but I can’t complain :) Fruit juices served as a nice addition to lunch.

One of the lunch meals served during the conference.

At the end of the second day of the conference, there was a surprise in store for us — a bus ride to the Bao Box restaurant. The ride gave us the experience of a typical Kenyan matatu (privately-owned minibuses used as share taxis), complete with loud rap music. I remember one of the songs being Kraff’s Nursery Rhymes. That day, I was wearing an original Kenyan cricket jersey - one that belonged to Dominic Wesonga, who represented Kenya in four ODIs. This confused Priscilla Kapolo, who asked if I was from Kenya! Anyway, while it served as a good conversation starter, it didn’t attract as much attention as I expected :) I had some pizza and chips there, and later some drinks with Ibtehal. After the party, Piyush went with us to our hotel and we played a few games of UNO.

Minibus which took us from the university to Bao Box restaurant.

This minibus in the picture gave a sense of a real matatu.

I am grateful to the organizers Laura and Dorothea for introducing me to Nikhil when I was searching for a companion for my post-conference trip. Nikhil was one of the aforementioned Indian participants, and a wildlife lover. We had some nice conversations; he wanted to go to the Masai Maara Natural Reserve, but it was too expensive for me. In addition, all the safaris were multi-day affairs, and I wasn’t keen on being around wildlife for that long. Eventually I chose to go my own way, exploring the coastal side and visiting Mombasa.

While most of the work regarding the conference was done using free software (including the reimbursement form and Mastodon announcements), I was disappointed by the use of WhatsApp for coordination with the participants. I don’t use WhatsApp and so was left out. WhatsApp is proprietary software (they do not provide the source code) and users don’t control it. It is common to highlight that OpenStreetMap is controlled by users and the community, rather than a company - this should apply to WhatsApp as well.

My suggestion is to use XMPP, which shares similar principles with OpenStreetMap, as it is privacy-respecting, controlled by users, and powered by free software. I understand the concern that there might not be many participants using XMPP already. Although it is a good idea to onboard people to free software like XMPP, we can also create a Matrix group, and bridge it with both the XMPP group and the Telegram group. In fact, using Matrix and bridging it with Telegram is how I communicated with the South Asian participants. While it’s not ideal - as Telegram’s servers are proprietary and centralized - but it’s certainly much better than creating a WhatsApp-only group. The setup can be bridged with IRC as well. On the other hand, self-hosted mailing lists for participants is also a good idea.

Finally, I would like to thank SotM for the generous grant, enabling me to attend this conference, meet the diverse community behind OSM and visit the beautiful country of Kenya. Stay tuned for the blog post on Kenya trip.

Thanks to Sahilister, Contrapunctus, Snehal and Badri for reviewing the draft of this blog post before publishing.

My Austrian Visa Refusal Story

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 11:59:04 +0530

Vienna - the capital of Austria - is one of the most visited cities in the world, popular for its rich history, gardens, and cafes, along with well-known artists like Beethoven, Mozart, Gödel, and Freud. It has also been consistently ranked as the most livable city in the world.

For these reasons, I was elated when my friend Snehal invited me last year to visit Vienna for a few days. We included Christmas and New Year’s Eve in my itinerary due to the city’s popular Christmas markets and lively events. The festive season also ensured that Snehal had some days off for sightseeing.

Indians require a visa to visit Austria. Since the travel dates were near, I rushed to book an appointment online with VFS Global in Delhi, and quickly arranged the required documents. However, at VFS, I found out that I had applied in the wrong appointment category (tourist), which depends on the purpose of the visit, and that my travel dates do not allow enough time for visa authorities to make a decision. Apparently, even if you plan to stay only for a part of the trip with the host, you need to apply under the category “Visiting Friends and Family”.

Thus, I had to book another appointment under this category, and took the opportunity to shift my travel dates to allow at least 15 business days for the visa application to be processed, removing Christmas and New Year’s Eve from my itinerary.

The process went smoothly, and my visa application was submitted by VFS. For reference, here’s a list of documents I submitted -

VFS appointment letter
Duly-filled visa application form
Original passport
Copy of passport
1 photograph
My 6 months bank account statement
Cover letter
Consent form (that visa processing will take up to 15 business days)
Snehal’s job contract
My work contract
Rent contract of Snehal
Residence permit of Snehal
A copy of Snehal’s passport
Invitation letter from Snehal
Return flight ticket reservations
Travel insurance for the intended travel dates

The following charges were collected from me.

Service Description	Amount (Indian Rupees)
Cash Handling Charge - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)	0
VFS Fee - India - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)	1,820
VISA Fee - India - SAC Code:	7,280
Convenience Fee - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)	182
Courier Service - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)	728
Courier Assurance - SAC Code: (SAC:998599)	182
Total	10,192

I later learned that the courier charges (728 INR) and the courier assurance charges (182 INR) mentioned above were optional. However, VFS didn’t ask whether I wanted to include them. When the emabssy is done processing your application, it will send your passport back to VFS, from where you can either collect it yourself or get it couriered back home, which requires you to pay courier charges. However, courier assurance charges do not add any value as VFS cannot “assure” anything about courier and I suggest you get them removed.

My visa application was submitted on the 21st of December 2023. A few days later, on the 29th of December 2023, I received an email from the Austrian embassy asking me to submit an additional document -

Subject: AUSTRIAN VISA APPLICATION - AMENDMENT REQUEST: Ravi Dwivedi VIS 4331

Dear Applicant,

On 22.12.2023 your application for Visa C was registered at the Embassy. You are requested to kindly send the scanned copies of the following documents via email to the Embassy or submit the documents at the nearest VFS centre, for further processing of your application:

Kindly submit Electronic letter of guarantee “EVE- Elektronische Verpflichtungserklärung” obtained from the “Fremdenpolizeibehörde” of the sponsor’s district in Austria. Once your host company/inviting company has obtained the EVE, please share the reference number (starting from DEL_____) received from the authorities, with the Embassy.

I misunderstood the required document (the EVE) to be a scanned copy of the letter of guarantee form signed by Snehal, and responded by attaching it.

Upon researching, Snehal determined that the document is an electronic letter of guarantee, and is supposed to be obtained at a local police station in Vienna. He visited a police station the next day and had a hard time conversing due to the language barrier (German is the common language in Austria, whereas Snehal speaks English). That day was a weekend, so he took an appointment for Monday, but in the meantime the embassy had finished processing my visa.

My visa was denied, and the refusal letter stated:

The Austrian embassy in Delhi examined your application; the visa has been refused.

The decision is based on the following reason(s):

The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay was not reliable.

There are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory of the Member States before the expiry of the visa.

Other remarks:

You have been given an amendment request, which you have failed to fulfil, or have only fulfilled inadequately, within the deadline set.

You are a first-time traveller. The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident. The return from Schengen territory does therefore not seem to be certain.

I could have reapplied after obtaining the EVE, but I didn’t because I found the following line

The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident.

offensive for someone who was born and raised in India, got the impression that the absence of electronic guarantee letter was not the only reason behind the refusal, had already wasted 12,000 INR on this application, and my friend’s stay in Austria was uncertain after January. In fact, my friend soon returned to India.

To summarize -

If you are visiting a host, then the category of appointment at VFS must be “Visiting Friends and Family” rather than “Tourist”.
VFS charged me for courier assurance, which is an optional service. Make sure to get these removed from your bill.
Neither my travel agent nor the VFS application center mentioned the EVE.
While the required documents list from the VFS website does mention it in point 6, it leads to a dead link.
Snehal informed me that a mere two months ago, his wife’s visa was approved without an EVE. This hints at inconsistency in processing of applications, even those under identical categories.

Such incidents are a waste of time and money for applicants, and an embarrassment to VFS and the Austrian visa authorities. I suggest that the Austrian visa authorities fix that URL, and provide instructions for hosts to obtain the EVE.

Credits to Snehal and Contrapunctus for editing, Badri for proofreading.

Kenya Visa Process

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:24:02 +0530

Prior to arrival in Kenya, you need to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) on their website by uploading all the required documents. This system is in place since Jan 2024 after the country abolished the visa system. The required documents will depend on the purpose of your visit, which in my case, was to attend a conference.

Here is the list of documents I submitted for my eTA:

Scanned copy of my passport
Photograph with white background
Flight tickets (reservation)
Hotel bookings (reservation)
Invitation letter from the conference
Yellow Fever vaccination certificate (optional)
Job contract (optional)

“Reservation” means I didn’t book the flights and hotels, but rather reserved them. Additionally, “optional” means that those documents were not mandatory to submit, but I submitted them in the “Other Documents” section in order to support my application. After submitting the eTA, I had to make a payment of around 35 US Dollars (approximately 3000 Indian Rupees).

It took 40 hours for me to receive an email from Kenya stating that my eTA has been approved, along with an attached PDF, making this one of my smoothest experiences of obtaining travel documents to travel to a country :). An eTA is technically not a visa, but I put the word “visa” in the title due to familiarity with the term.

Yellow Fever Vaccine

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 13:26:03 +0530

Recently, I got vaccinated with yellow fever vaccine as I am planning to travel to Kenya, a high risk country for yellow fever, in the near future. It should be taken at least 10 days before getting into the areas with yellow fever transmission to provide enough time for the formation of the antibodies. In order to get vaccinated, I searched for vaccination centers in Delhi and stumbled upon this page by the Indian government, which lists vaccination centers for yellow fever all over India. From that list, I made a phone call to the Airport Health Organization, a vaccination center near the Delhi Airport.

They asked me to write an email stating that I need yellow fever vaccination. After sending the email, they prompted me to attach a scanned copy of my passport data page, upon sending which they emailed me my appointment date, asking me to pay 300 INR in advance along with other instructions. The appointment date was 4 days after I sent scanned copy of my passport. The email also mentioned that those who are allergic to eggs or have never taken eggs should instead visit RML Hospital.

The vaccination center must be visited during 10 AM to 12 noon on the date of appointment. I reached there at around 11 AM and got vaccinated in around 40 minutes, followed by obtaining a vaccine certificate in half an hour.

One dose of this vaccine gives immunity against yellow fever for lifetime. Therefore, I can travel to any country with yellow fever transmission after getting this dose. Although some countries may require proof of vaccination within some time frame and some people might need a booster dose to maintain immunity.

A visit to the Taj Mahal

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 15:43:21 +0530

Introduction

I visited the Taj Mahal this month with my friend Badri. Taj Mahal is a major tourist attraction, getting 7-8 million visitors per year. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture.

Journey to Agra

Taj Mahal is in the city of Agra, which is 188 km from Delhi by train. We had booked a train by the name of Taj Express from Hazrat Nizamuddin station in Delhi to Agra Cantt railway station. The night before the journey, we stayed in a retiring room at Old Delhi railway station because we could not get one at Hazrat Nizamuddin station. Retiring rooms are accommodations for the passengers at the railway stations, which require a confirm train ticket to stay.

Of all the retiring rooms I have been to, locating the ones at Old Delhi station was the most challenging. I recommend reading Badri’s blog post, where he details our experience with this and other retiring rooms.

Our retiring room at the Old Delhi Railway Station.

The next day, we barely reached Hazrat Nizamuddin station in time for the train. However, the train had not yet arrived at the station and was delayed by half an hour.

Arrival in Agra

We reached Agra Cantt station at 10:30 hours, where we stayed in a retiring room. Before heading out to Taj Mahal, we rested in our rooms for a couple of hours, followed by having lunch at the station. As we came out of the station, we were approached by an autorickshaw driver who quoted the price to Taj Mahal as 150 INR. I negotiated the price down to 60 INR, which the driver agreed to on the condition of sharing the ride with other passengers. When we realized he was not making any effort to bring in more passengers to share the ride with, we walked away.

As we came out of the station complex, an autorickshaw driver offered a ride to the Taj Mahal for 20 INR per person on a sharing basis, or 100 INR for a reserved ride. We agreed to share the ride with other passengers for 20 INR, but the driver started driving as soon as we got in. We mistook the other person in the autorickshaw for a passenger we were sharing the ride with, but later found out that they were with the driver. Upon reaching the outer gate of the Taj Mahal, we paid him 40 INR as agreed, but he insisted that we had reserved the auto. We told him that we did not reserve the auto, but rather chose the sharing option. He insisted on this for some time. I suspect it was a scam, but we just walked away, and he didn’t pursue us further.

Exploring the Taj Mahal

The autorickshaw dropped us at one of the outer gates, from where we had to walk about 500 meters to reach the ticket counter just outside the west gate. We bought tickets worth 250 INR per person, which also allowed us to enter the mausoleum. Then we proceeded to the security check before entering the Taj Mahal complex.

Security outside the Taj Mahal complex.

This red-colored building is the entrance to where you can see the Taj Mahal.

Taj Mahal.

Upon entering, we saw red sandstone walls on three sides enclosing the Taj Mahal complex. We took photos using my phone and a Fujifilm camera. Later, we learned that we needed to cover our shoes before entering the mausoleum. We also saw a few people barefoot, but we couldn’t find a place to leave our shoes. We came out of the whole complex at 18:00 hours and had snacks with tea at a nearby shop. I also bought a fridge magnet as a souvenier for 30 INR.

Shoe covers for going inside the mausoleum.

Taj Mahal from a side angle.

Our next destination was Jaipur and we had booked our seats in a train from Agra Cantt station. We decided to walk towards the station, hoping to have dinner along the way. However, we could not find a place to eat. Since we enjoyed the lunch at the station earlier, we went there for dinner as well, after which we boarded our train to Jaipur. On our way back to the station, I found the bus station for the Taj Mahal.

Expenses

These were our expenses per person:

Description	Amount (Indian Rupees)
Retiring room at Delhi Railway Station (12 hours)	131
Train ticket from Delhi to Agra (Taj Express)	110
Retiring room at Agra Cantt station for 12 hours:	450
Auto-rickshaw to Taj Mahal	20
Taj Mahal ticket (including entry to the mausoleum)	250
Food	350
Total	1,311

Thailand Trip

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 02:15:00 +0530

Arrival

I was staying at a hostel in Bukit Bintang, a shopping hub and entertainment center of Kuala Lumpur, which was like 200 metres from the monorail station, where I took a metro train for KL Sentral. Then I took a bus from KL Sentral to the airport, followed by taking a Malaysian Airlines flight to Bangkok. Meals were included without any extra charge.

The flight took around 2 hours, landing in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport at around 15:00 hours local time. My friend Fletcher was leaving for Pattaya from Bangkok, which is about 150 km and 2 hours bus ride, but takes a longer time from within the Bangkok city compared to Suvarnabhumi Airport due to the traffic in Bangkok. We had planned to meet in Pattaya and had already booked a hostel there. At the bus counter, I came to know that buses leave for Pattaya every hour. However, the next bus for which tickets were available was at scheduled to leave at 19:00 hours.

The ticket cost was 143 Thai Baht (360 Indian Rupees) per seat. This left me with a couple of hours at the airport, which I spent charging my phone, exploring shops and eating snacks which I had packed. As I had one week to spend in Thailand, buying a SIM card was essential to have internet access on the go. The internet plans I checked at the airport were expensive compared to Kuala Lumpur, so I didn’t buy a SIM card from there, leaving me with no way to coordinate with Fletcher.

Welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.

Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

Pattaya

My bus left airport at 7 PM and dropped me at the last stop named Jomtien beach in Pattaya at around 9 PM. The bus journey was smooth, thanks to good roads and lack of traffic jam. I used OsmAnd app for navigation and decided to walk to my hostel as it was around 1 km away. While walking, I noticed Cannabis bars on the street side and ubiquitous massage parlors, not to mention the street prostitutes vying for your attention.

After some time, I realized that the address mentioned on the hostel receipt was different from the one OpenStreetMap was showing, leading me to ask a person sitting at a café for help. That person agreed to help me and took me to the exact place where the hostel was. On the way, he told me he was originally from Kuwait but lived in Pattaya for many years. He also told me about the shared hail-and-ride cheap songthaew rides which ran along the Jomtien Beach, charging 10 Baht (25 Rupees) for any distance along that route, making our trip cost-effective.

Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. These songthaews run along Jomtien Second road and take 10 Thai Baht to anywhere on the route.

Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya

I was at my hostel, but I was still not sure if I was at the correct place. There was no reception in sight, but only a staircase. In the meanwhile, I bumped into Fletcher, which gave me a sigh of relief. Adjacent to the property was a hairdresser who helped us get into the hostel. This was my first time checking in to a hostel without a reception. It seemed like a shared room without service. After some time, we went outside and bought a SIM card for me at a 7-Eleven store. The cost was 399 Baht for 7 day unlimited internet.

Next day, we went to Pattaya Tiger Park where you can go inside the tiger’s cage and touch the tiger. Then we went to the nearby Floating Market but decided against going inside after reviewing ticket prices which were higher than we deemed worthwhile. After this, we walked towards the Jomtien beach, but I planned to hitchhike as it was very sunny, and our drinking water supply was getting depleted. A few cars passed by without responding, but a scooty stopped and picked us up. Initially, I thought he would let only one of us ride, but to my surprise he let both of us on it. During the ride, he told us he is from Delhi and dropped us at walking distance from the bus station where Fletcher had to board his bus for Bangkok.

A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.

Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

In the evening, I went to a shop which was selling fruits like guavas, dragon fruits, mangoes. I sampled guavas, which I found tasty and got mangoes and dragon fruits packed for eating later, and they were yummy.

Bangkok

Next day, on 9th Feb, I left for Bangkok, taking the bus at the bus station where the bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport dropped me the other day. I reached the airport in 2 hours and boarded a metro train from there to Huai Khwang, followed by walking to my hotel. This hotel room costed 5600 INR for four days for a double bed. In Bangkok too, I found abundance of convenience stores like 7-Eleven, similar to Pattaya and Kuala Lumpur. I had difficulty finding vegetarian food and labels were in Thai language, and the staff didn’t know English.

A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.

In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.

Next day, on 10th Feb 2024 was Chinese New year. I didn’t see a lot of celebrations in my area, but I saw celebratory programs and discount sales while I was in Kuala Lumpur, a few days before the Chinese New Year. In terms of food, I mainly relied on fruits. The pineapples were different from what I have seen in India, and this was the first time I saw banana flesh yellow. I tried Korean vegetable noodles, which were good. Another option was eating bread and cheese from the 7-Eleven. I also tried some Indian food like Chhole Kulche at Sukhumvit and some paneer dish at Ratchada Night market.

Banana with yellow flesh

Fruits at a stall in Bangkok

Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.

Corn in Bangkok.

This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.

I explored malls in Siam and explored the area around Sukhumvit. The highlight of my Bangkok trip was the Chao Phraya Express Boat, which sails on the Chao Phraya River and covers some important tourist destinations of Bangkok. I took the all day river pass for the boat for 150 Thai Baht, which allows you to hop on and off any boat at any station for the day, only to realize later that it would have been better to buy respective station tickets to reduce the costs. I highly recommend taking the boat ride as it offers stunning views of the city. I went to Wat Arun, a famous Buddhist temple and a major tourist attraction. Upon entering the temple after buying the ticket, they stamped my hand ;) Following this, I took a boat to the famous Khao San Road, which is famous for cheap accommodations and food stalls.

Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry

Wat Arun temple

Khao San Road

A food stall at Khao San Road

Chao Phraya Express Boat

I had booked a flight from Bangkok to Delhi with Air India, and during the flight, they were serving alcohol onboard. I decided to try red wine, marking my first experience of consuming alcohol while flying.

Red wine being served in Air India

Notes

There are many malls in Bangkok and you can easily find toilets/restrooms, which can help to avoid paying for using washrooms.
Compared to Malaysia, I found Thailand more expensive, contrary to expectations. In addition, shopping in Malaysia was quite cheap due to Chinese New Year discounts, which I didn’t see in Thailand.
I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok, mainly due to Pattaya having a nice beach and I could engage with locals and foreigners. Perhaps booking a hostel instead of a hotel in Bangkok would have given more opportunities to engage with people.

Malaysia Trip

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:29:59 +0530

Introduction

In January of this year, my friend Snehal invited me to Vienna, Austria, but our plans were thwarted when Austria refused me a visa. So, I thought about traveling to a country that does not require a visa, and a few candidates came to mind, one of them being Malaysia which had recently waived visa requirements for Indian tourists. I also included Thailand, as it was visa-free, near to Malaysia, and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

I booked an AirAsia flight from Delhi, India, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; a Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok; and an Air India ticket from Kuala Lumpur to Delhi.

Boarding from the Delhi Airport

On the 31st of January, before boarding my flight to Kuala Lumpur, I went to the AirAsia counter to obtain my boarding pass. During this process, the airline staff asked me a range of questions, from the usual - such as my purpose of visit, hotel bookings, and return ticket - to the ridiculous, including requests for invoices of hotel bookings, email confirmations of my return ticket, and the amount of currency I was carrying.

I didn’t have the invoices of my bookings as I didn’t pay for them in advance except for the first night, nor could I find the confirmation email by Air India. I was afraid that the airline staff might not give me the boarding pass, which is required to board the flight. I never had such experiences at airports in other countries.

Then I passed through the immigration where I was asked sensible questions such as my country of visit and return tickets. Following this, I went through security check, and proceeded to the flight’s boarding gate. Unfortunately, my flight was delayed by three hours. Even though AirAsia is a budget airline, I was surprised to find out that drinking water inside the plane was not free-of-cost, only hot drinking water was. It was a direct flight, which took 5 hours to reach Kuala Lumpur. I landed at Kuala Lumpur’s KLIA2 airport at around 09:00 hours local time (which is 2 hours 30 minutes ahead of Indian time) on the 1st of Feb.

Day 1: Arrival in Kuala Lumpur

After arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, I went through immigration where I was asked my purpose of visit, number of people accompanying me, number of days of stay, return/onward tickets and hotel bookings.

Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

I had filled Malaysia Digital Arrival Card a day before my flight’s scheduled departure as per my travel agent’s advice, though the immigration officer didn’t ask for it. The immigration officer stamped my passport, after which I went through custom clearance. After clearing customs, I roamed around the airport and checked out SIM and internet plans, without buying.

Malaysian entry stamp on my passport.

Malaysia’s currency is the Malaysian ringgit, abbreviated as MYR. One MYR was equivalent to 18 Indian Rupees (INR). I exchanged Malaysian ringgit at a money exchange in my hometown.

My stay was booked at a hostel called Travel Hub Guesthouse in the Chinatown area of Kuala Lumpur, which was within walking distance of the Pasar Seni metro station, known as LRT station in local jargon. Every booking included a MYR 10 tourism tax per night. The hostel stay was 26.71 MYR plus 10 MYR (taxes), adding up to a total of 36.71 MYR (660 INR) per night.

KL Sentral serves as the city center and is located about 50 km from the airport. The rapid train from the airport to KL Sentral costs 55 MYR (approximately 1,000 INR), which I found to be quite expensive. Instead, I opted for the bus, which was a more economical choice at 15 MYR (approximately 270 INR). The bus took about an hour to reach KL Sentral and had comfortable seats. The well-maintained roads made my overall journey smooth and offered a glimpse of Kuala Lumpur city.

Interior view of the bus.

As soon as I checked in and entered my room, I met an Indian named Fletcher, who was also a tourist, and been in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days, was planning to visit the National Museum and I joined him out of excitement for exploration, even though I was too tired after such a long trip and wanted to rest instead.

LRT at KL Sentral.

Entrance of Pasar Seni LRT station

Room inside Travel Hub Guesthouse.

In the evening, I visited the National Museum (ticket was 5 MYR, equivalent to 90 INR) with Fletcher, and explored Little India, which had abundance of Indian food restaurants, especially by Tamils, making vegetarian food easily available. I came across a stall where I drank masala tea and sampled Mee Goreng. A quick search on the internet revealed that Mee Goreng is a dish unique to Indian immigrants in Malaysia and neighboring countries, but not found in India!

Board welcoming us to Little India

Mee Goreng, a dish made of noodles in Malaysia.

Day 2: Visiting Batu Caves and Petronas Towers

To stay with Fletcher, I extended my stay at the same hostel for one night. The next day (February 2nd), Fletcher went on a day trip to the Genting Highlands. Although I planned to join him, I couldn’t because his bus had no available bookings when we reached the KL Sentral station the next day. I noticed that at the KL Sentral station, bus tickets need to be paid for using a card or can be booked online through websites like RedBus. They had a cash option at the KL airport, but not at KL Sentral.

I took the opportunity to buy a local SIM card from the company CelcomDigi at the KL Sentral station for MYR 10, which included 5G internet up to 5 GB of usage. However, making calls required a recharge of MYR 5, which I didn’t include. At the bus ticket counter, I met a family from Delhi and joined them for a day trip to Batu Caves, which is a cave complex located on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

To reach Batu Caves, we took the KTM Komuter train from KL Sentral station, which costs MYR 5.2 for a return journey. The train takes around 40 minutes to reach Batu Caves. Upon reaching there, we could immediately see the shrine of Murugan outside the Batu Caves. There were stairs leading to the caves. In order to take the stairs to the caves, make sure you cover your knees and shoulders. A woman from the family I went with was wearing shorts, so she had to buy a scarf worth MYR 15 to cover her knees for the entry. After climbing the stairs, we went inside the Temple Cave. This particular cave doesn’t have an entry fee, however some other caves (for example, the Ramayana Cave) have an entry fee. I didn’t go to the Ramayana Cave because I didn’t know about it.

KTM Komuter train

Murugan statue outside of Batu Caves.

View from the top after climbing all the stairs.

Temple inside the cave.

The temperature inside the cave was cooler. We spent some time resting inside the cave. After we were done, we returned to KL Sentral, and went our separate ways. I came back to hostel and rested for some time.

My trip to Kuala Lumpur would be incomplete without a photo at the iconic Petronas Towers, which was my next destination. To get there from my hostel, I took the LRT to KLCC station and then walked to the photo point of the Petronas Towers, where I asked an Indonesian tourist for help in taking my pictures.

Me at Petronas Towers.

After roaming around at Petronas Towers, I gave a phone call to Fletcher who was on his way back to KL Sentral and we decided to meet there. We went to the same stall we had Mee Goreng the previous day and ordered Ghee Roast Dosa this time. We also had nice conversations with a family having Malaysian citizenship with Indian ancestry. Then, we went to another place to eat Roti Canai, which I had with dal. Interestingly, Roti Canai is another dish popularized by Indian immigrants in Southeast Asia, but it is not popular in India.

Photo with Malaysians.

Day 3: Berjaya Times Square and Bukit Bintang

For the third day (3rd Feb), I could not extend my hostel booking as it was fully booked due to weekend. So, I booked another hostel by the name of The Manor by Mingle for two nights, 1 km far from my previous hostel, which was MYR 99.34 (1800 INR) for two nights, including MYR 10 tourism fee per night. This was expensive compared to other hostels I stayed in this trip, probably due to weekend. It had a swimming pool, which was of no use to me. Further, it also had laundry services, which I used. The charges were MYR 5 for washing, while MYR 3 for the dryer.

After checking-in and keeping my luggage into my room, I and Fletcher went to nearby shopping mall Berjaya Times Square, which was decorated in celebrations of the upcoming Chinese New Year on 8th Feb, due to which prices were greatly discounted. After roaming around and a bit of shopping, we went back to our respective hostels to take rest. At night, we went to Bukit Bintang, which is known for its nightlife and called the entertainment hub of the city.

Berjaya Times Square dipped in Chinese New Year celebrations.

Day 4: Genting Highlands

On the 4th of Feb, I took a solo day trip to Genting Highlands, a hill station located on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. To reach there, I took a bus from KL Sentral (return ticket was MYR 20), which dropped me at the bus terminal below Awana Skyway cable car station. I took a cable car to reach Genting Highlands from there (MYR 18 for a return ticket), which passes through misty air along with stunning views. I roamed around and did some shopping, buying three T-Shirts for myself. Furthermore, I also sampled Paneer Makhani with naan for MYR 41.8 at a restaurant.

Views from cable car.

I ordered Paneer Makhani with naan at a restaurant in Genting Highlands.

There was not much to do here for me, as this place was popular for being the only legal place to gamble in Malaysia, nothing of my interest. Although the cable car ride had scenic views, I don’t think Genting Highlands was worth visiting. Sure, it’s a good place for a day trip from KL, but I had more time and should have instead gone to some other place like Cameron Highlands. Genting Highlands is for people staying for a couple of days in KL who don’t want to visit far-off places. I think my decision to visit Genting Highlands was a case of falling into the trap of herd mentality, as when I went to the bus counter a couple of days ago, I saw a big queue for Genting Highlands, which was the basis of my decision.

I took the return cable car to reach the bus terminal, from where I took the bus for KL Sentral. Then I went to meet Fletcher, who was leaving for Bangkok. We later met in Pattaya, Thailand, after a few days, which will be covered in the next post.

Days 5 and 6

Since the hostel Manor by Mingle was a bit expensive, I booked a cheaper hostel for last two nights in Bukit Bintang. I didn’t really do much on last two days. I roamed around and added some places on the OpenStreetMap. As I was living in Bukit Bintang, I bought some souveniers from there and tried a middle-eastern dessert named Kunafa, which was yummy. I also discovered a shop named ‘I Love KL Gifts’ which had souvenirs at a great price.

Kunafa, a middle-eastern dessert I sampled in Bukit Bintang.

7th Feb: Malaysian Airlines to Bangkok

On the 7th of Feb, I took a Malaysian Airlines flight for Bangkok, which was scheduled to depart from KL Airport at 12:15 hours, but the departure got delayed by 2 hours, landing in Bangkok at around 15:00 hours local time (which is 1 hours 30 minutes ahead of Indian time). More details will be covered in the Thailand post.

Malaysian Airlines jet standing at KL Airport.

Expenses

Category	Amount (INR)
Food + Accommodation + Travel in Malaysia	10,000
Delhi to Kuala Lumpur flight	13,000
Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok flight	10,000
Bangkok to Delhi flight	12,000

Learning for future trips

Malaysia has numerous places worthy of a visit: the Cameron Highlands (for its beautiful tea gardens), Malacca (due to its unique history and culture), Langkawi (for its white sand beaches) – and this list does not include the scenic spots from the part of Malaysia on the island of Borneo. However, I limited my trip to Kuala Lumpur and nearby places, which was a bad idea. After the trip, I realized that my mobility was reduced because I was carrying a trolley bag. Additionally, my trip to the Genting Highlands could have been replaced by a better alternative.

If you are like me and avoid taking a lot of taxis, preferring to walk or use public transport whenever possible, I highly advise you to cut back on luggage. Another instance where I could have benefited from this was with the airline ticket from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok, which would have been much cheaper if I had carried less luggage (the tickets were 3,000-4,000 INR), compared to the ticket I bought for 10,000 INR.

Fixing Mobile Data issue on Lineage OS

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:34:08 +0530

I have used LineageOS in many Android devices and face internet connectivity issues with mobile data. My mobile data never used to work properly in Xiaomi MI A2 on Lineage OS and my current phone OnePlus 9 Pro 5G. A few days ago, I met contrapunctus who has the same phone model with Lineage OS. He fixed this issue by comparing the settings of my phone with his.

In case, you are suffering from this issue, the following steps fixed the issue for me:

Navigate to Settings -> Network Settings -> Your SIM settings -> Access Point Names.
Click on the ‘+’ symbol to add a new access point.
In the Name section, you can input any name (e.g., test).
In the APN section, enter www and save the settings.

Check the screenshot below.

APN settings screenshot. Notice the circled entries.

Once you have added this new APN, ensure to select it from the list of available APNs. Following this configuration change, the issue got fixed. I hope this works for you :)

Software Freedom Day at sflc.in

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 03:25:34 +0530

Software Freedom Law Center, India, also known as sflc.in, organized an event to celebrate the Software Freedom Day on 30th September 2023. I, Sahil, Contrapunctus and Suresh joined. The venue was at the SFLC India office in Delhi. The sflc.in office was on the second floor of what looked like someone’s apartment:). I also met Chirag, Orendra, Surbhi and others.

My plan was to have a stall on LibreOffice and Prav app to raise awareness about these projects. I didn’t have QR code for downloading prav app printed already, so I asked the people at sflc.in if they can get it printed for me. They were very kind and helped me in getting a color printout for me. So, I got a stall in their main room. Surbhi was having an Inkscape stall next to mine and gave me company. People came and asked about the prav project and then I realized I was still too tired to explain the idea behind the prav project and about LibreOffice (after a long Kerala trip). We got a few prav app installs during the event, which is cool.

My stall. Photo credits: Tejaswini.

Sahil had a Debian stall, and contrapunctus had an OpenStreetMap stall. After about an hour, Revolution OS was screened for all of us to watch, along with popcorn. The documentary gave an overview of history of Free Software Movement. The office had a kitchen where fresh chai was being made and served to us. The organizers ordered a lot of good snacks for us.

Snacks and tea at the front desk. CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Ravi Dwivedi.

I came out of the movie hall to take more tea and snacks from the front desk. I saw a beautiful painting was hanging at the wall opposite to the front desk and Tejaswini (from sflc.in) revealed that she had made it. The tea was really good as it was freshly made in the kitchen.

After the movie, we played a game of pictionary. We were divided into two teams. The game goes as follows: A person from a team is selected and given a term related to freedom respecting software written on a piece of paper, but concealed from other participants. Then that person draws something on the board (no logo, no alphabets) without speaking. If the person’s team correctly guesses the term, the team gets one step ahead on the leaderboard. The team that reaches the finish line wins.

I recall some fun Pictionary rounds. For example, the one in the picture below seemed far from the word “Wireguard,” but someone from the team still guessed that word. Our team won in the end \o/.

Pictionary drawing nowhere close to the intended word Wireguard :), which was guessed. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Then, we posed for a group picture. At the end, SFLC.in had a delicious cake in store for us. They also had some merchandise available, such as handbags, T-shirts, etc., which we could take if we made a donation to SFLC.in. I “bought” a handbag with “Ban Plastic, not Internet” written on it in exchange for a donation. I hope that gives people around me a powerful message :)

Group photo. Photo credits: Tejaswini.

Tasty cake. CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Ravi Dwivedi.

Merchandise by sflc.in. CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Ravi Dwivedi.

Overall, sflc.in hosted a fantastic event!

Kochi - Wayanad Trip in August-September 2023

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 17:48:54 +0530

A trip full of hitchhiking, beautiful places and welcoming locals.

Day 1: Arrival in Kochi

Kochi is a city in the state of Kerala, India. This year’s DebConf was to be held in Kochi from 3rd September to 17th of September, which I was planning to attend. My friend Suresh, who was planning to join, told me that 29th August 2023 will be Onam, a major festival of the state of Kerala. So, we planned a Kerala trip before the DebConf. We booked early morning flights for Kochi from Delhi and reached Kochi on 28th August.

We had booked a hostel named Zostel in Ernakulam. During check-in, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using a Google account. I told them I don’t have a Google account and I don’t want to create one either. The people at the front desk seemed receptive, so I went ahead with telling them the problems of such a sign-in being mandatory for check-in. Anyways, they only took a photo of my passport and let me check-in without a Google account.

We stayed in a ten room dormitory, which allowed travellers of any gender. The dormitory room was air-conditioned, spacious, clean and beds were also comfortable. There were two bathrooms in the dormitory and they were clean. Plus, there was a separate dormitory room in the hostel exclusive for females. I noticed that that Zostel was not added in the OpenStreetMap and so, I added it :) . The hostel had a small canteen for tea and snacks, a common sitting area outside the dormitories, which had beds too. There was a separate silent room, suitable for people who want to work.

Dormitory room in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.

Beds in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.

We had lunch at a nearby restaurant and it was hard to find anything vegetarian for me. I bought some freshly made banana chips from the street and they were tasty. As far as I remember, I had a big glass of pineapple juice for lunch. Then I went to the Broadway market and bought some cardamom and cinnamon for home. I also went to a nearby supermarket and bought Matta brown rice for home. Then, I looked for a courier shop to send the things home but all of them were closed due to Onam festival. After returning to the Zostel, I overslept till 9 PM and in the meanwhile, Suresh planned with Saidut and Shwetank (who met us during our stay in Zostel) to go to a place in Fort Kochi for dinner. I suspected I will be disappointed by lack of vegetarian options as they were planning to have fish. I already had a restaurant in mind - Brindhavan restaurant (suggested by Anupa), which was a pure vegetarian restaurant.

To reach there, I got off at Palarivattom metro station and started looking for an auto-rickshaw to get to the restaurant. I didn’t get any for more than 5 minutes. Since that restaurant was not added to the OpenStreetMap, I didn’t even know how far that was and which direction to go to. Then, I saw a Zomato delivery person on a motorcycle and asked him where the restaurant was. It was already 10 PM and the restaurant closes at 10:30. So, I asked him whether he can drop me off. He agreed and dropped me off at that restaurant. It was 4-5 km from that metro station. I tipped him and expressed my gratefulness for the help. He refused to take the tip, but I insisted and he accepted.

I entered the restaurant and it was coming to a close, so many items were not available. I ordered some Kadhai Paneer (only item left) with naan. It tasted fine. Since the next day was Thiruvonam, I asked the restaurant about the Sadya thali menu and prices for the next day. I planned to eat Sadya thali at that restaurant, but my plans got changed later.

Onam sadya menu from Brindhavan restaurant.

Day 2: Onam celebrations

Next day, on 29th of August 2023, we had plan to leave for Wayanad. Wayanad is a hill station in Kerala and a famous tourist spot. Praveen suggested to visit Munnar as it is far closer to Kochi than Wayanad (80 km vs 250 km). But I had already visited Munnar in my previous trips, so we chose Wayanad. We had a train late night from Ernakulam Junction (at 23:30 hours) to Kozhikode, which is the nearest railway station from Wayanad. So, we checked out in the morning as we had plans to roam around in Kochi before taking the train.

Zostel was celebrating Onam on that day. To opt-in, we had to pay 400 rupees, which included a Sadya Thali and a Mundu. Me and Suresh paid the amount and opted in for the celebrations. Sadya thali had Rice, Sambhar, Rasam, Avial, Banana Chips, Pineapple Pachadi, Pappadam, many types of pickels and chutneys, Pal Ada Payasam and Coconut jaggery Pasam. And, there was water too :). Those payasams were really great and I had one more round of them. Later, I had a lot of variety of payasams during the DebConf.

Sadya lined up for serving

Sadya thali served on banana leaf.

In the evening, we hung out in the common room and put our luggage there. We played UNO and had conversations with other travellers in the hostel. I had a fun time there and I still think it is one of the best hostel experiences I had. We made good friends with Saiduth (Telangana) and Shwetank (Uttarakhand). They were already aware about the software like debian, and we had some detailed conversations about the Free Software movement. I remember explaining the difference between the terms “Open Source” and “Free Software”. I also told them about the Streetcomplete app, a beginner friendly app to edit OpenStreetMap. We had dinner at a place nearby (named Palaraam), but again, the vegetarian options were very limited! After dinner, we came back to the Zostel and me and Suresh left for Ernakulam Junction to catch our train Maveli Express (16604).

Day 3: Going to Wayanad

Maveli Express was scheduled to reach Kozhikode at 03:25 (morning). I had set alarms from 03:00 to 03:30, with the gap of 10 minutes. Every time I woke up, I turned off the alarm. Then I woke up and saw train reaching the Kozhikode station and woke up Suresh for deboarding. But then I noticed that the train is actually leaving the station, not arriving! This means we missed our stop. Now we looked at the next stops and whether we can deboard there. I was very sleepy and wanted to take a retiring room at some station before continuing our journey to Wayanad. The next stop was Quilandi and we checked online that it didn’t have a retiring room. So, we skipped this stop. We got off at the next stop named Vadakara and found out no retiring room was available. So, we asked about information regarding bus for Wayanad and they said that there is a bus to Wayanad around 07:00 hours from bus station which was a few kilometres from the railway station.

We took a bus for Kalpetta (in Wayanad) at around 07:00. The destination of the buses were written in Malayalam, which we could not read. Once again, the locals helped us to get on to the bus to Kalpetta. Vadakara is not a big city and it can be hard to find people who know good Hindi or English, unlike Kochi. Despite language issues, I had no problem there in navigation, thanks to locals. I mostly spent time sleeping during the bus journey.

A few hours later, the bus dropped us at Kalpetta. We had a booking at a hostel in Rippon village. It was 16 km from Kalpetta. On the way, we were treated with beautiful views of nature, which was present everywhere in Wayanad. The place was covered with tea gardens and our eyes were treated with beautiful scenery at every corner.

We were treated with such views during the Wayanad trip.

Rippon village was a very quiet place and I liked the calm atmosphere. This place is blessed by nature and has stunning scenery. I found English was more common than Hindi in Wayanad. Locals were very nice and helpful, even if they didn’t know my language.

A road in Rippon.

After catching some sleep at the hostel, I went out in the afternoon. I hitchhiked to reach the main road from the hostel. I bought more spices from a nearby shop and realized that I should have waited for my visit to Wayanad to buy cardamom, which I already bought from Kochi. Then, I was looking for post office to send spices home. The people at the spices shop told me that the nearby Rippon post office was closed by that time, but the post office at Meppadi was open, which was 5 km from there.

I went to Meppadi and saw the post office closes at 15:00, but I reached five minutes late. My packing was not very good and they asked me to pack it tighter. There was a shop near the post office and the people there gave me a cardboard and tapes, and helped pack my stuff for the post. By the time I went to the post office again, it was 15:30. But they accepted my parcel for post.

Day 4: Kanthanpara Falls, Zostel Wayanad and Karapuzha Dam

Kanthanpara waterfalls were 2 km from the hostel. I hitchhiked to the place from the hostel on a scooty. Entry ticket was worth Rs 40. There were good views inside and nothing much to see except the waterfalls.

Entry to Kanthanpara Falls.

Kanthanpara Falls.

We had a booking at Zostel Wayanad for this day and so we shifted there. Again, as with their Ernakulam branch, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using Google, but when I said I don’t have a Google account they checked me in without that. There were tea gardens inside the Zostel boundaries and the property was beautiful.

A view of Zostel Wayanad.

A map of Wayanad showing tourist places.

A view from inside the Zostel Wayanad property.

Later in the evening, I went to Karapuzha Dam. I witnessed a beautiful sunset during the journey. Karapuzha dam had many activites, like ziplining, and was nice to roam around.

Chembra Peak is near to the Zostel Wayanad. So, I was planning to trek to the heart shaped lake. It was suggested by Praveen and looking online, this trek seemed worth doing. There was an issue however. The charges for trek were Rs 1770 for upto five people. So, if I go alone I will have to spend Rs 1770 for the trek. If I go with another person, we split Rs 1770 into two, and so on. The optimal way to do it is to go in a group of five (you included :D). I asked front desk at Zostel if they can connect me with people going to Chembra peak the next day, and they told me about a group of four people planning to go to Chembra peak the next day. I got lucky! All four of them were from Kerala and worked in Qatar.

Day 5: Chembra peak trek

The date was 1st September 2023. I woke up early (05:30 in the morning) for the Chembra peak trek. I had bought hiking shoes especially for trekking, which turned out to be a very good idea. The ticket counter opens at 07:00. The group of four with which I planned to trek met me around 06:00 in the Zostel. We went to the ticket counter around 06:30. We had breakfast at shops selling Maggi noodles and bread omlette near the ticket counter.

It was a hot day and the trek was difficult for an inexperienced person like me. The scenery was green and beautiful throughout.

The day was scorching hot, and the trek proved to be challenging for someone like me, who was relatively inexperienced. However, the lush green scenery surrounding us was incredibly beautiful throughout the journey.

Terrain during trekking towards the Chembra peak.

Heart-shaped lake at the Chembra peak.

Me at the heart-shaped lake.

Views from the top of the Chembra peak.

View of another peak from the heart-shaped lake.

On the way back from the trek, I stumbled upon a shop selling bamboo rice, which I purchased with the intention of making bamboo rice payasam at home (I even have some coconut milk from Kerala to use ;)). We arrived back at Zostel in the afternoon. I experienced muscle soreness after the trek, and it has yet to completely subside. Later that night, we boarded a bus from Kalpetta to Kozhikode to begin our journey back to Kochi.

Day 6: Return to Kochi

At midnight on the 2nd of September, we arrived at Kozhikode bus stand. Afterward, we wandered around in search of something to eat, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find any vegetarian options. Not a surprising turn of events, considering Kozhikode is especially famous for its non-vegetarian dishes. We then headed to Kozhikode railway station to inquire about retiring rooms, but we were out of luck. We waited at the station and caught the next train to Kochi at 03:30, arriving at Ernakulam Junction at 07:30, half an hour before the scheduled arrival time of the train. From there, we made our way to Zostel Fort Kochi, where we spent the night before checking out the next morning.

Day 7: Roaming around in Fort Kochi

On the 3rd of September, we explored Fort Kochi, visiting popular landmarks such as St. Francis Church, Dutch Palace, Jew Town, and the Pardesi Synagogue. During our visit, I also had the opportunity to tour some homestays, where the owners graciously showed me around their properties, despite my clear indication that I was not seeking accommodation. In the evening, we made our way to Kakkanad to participate in DebConf.

For more details on my experiences at DebConf23, you can continue reading in my DebConf23 blog post.

Fixing audio and keymaps in Chromebook Running Debian Bookworm

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:07:22 +0530

I recently bought an HP Chromebook from Abhas who had already flashed coreboot in it. I ran a fresh installation of Debian 12 (Bookworm) on it with KDE Plasma.

Right after installation, the Wi-Fi and bluetooth were working, but I was facing two issues:

Playing a music file or any audio file does not give any audio.
Keyboard buttons like the ones for brightness and audio adjustment were not working (alphabet keys were working).

Fixing audio

I ran the script mentioned here and that fixed the audio.

The instructions from that link are:

git clone https://github.com/WeirdTreeThing/chromebook-linux-audio
cd chromebook-linux-audio
./setup-audio

Fixing keyboard

To fix the keyboard, go to KDE Settings and in the Hardware section, under the “Keyboard model” box select the option Google | Chromebook as depicted in the screenshot below.

Screenshot depicting keyboard layout settings of KDE.

I hope this post fixed the issues for you. Meet you in the next post.

Debconf23

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 23:49:38 +0530

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction

DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn’t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :)

For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about “freedom” in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting.

My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.

Hotel overview

The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23, photo by rmb

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

Meals

On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it’s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table…but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala…and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :)

Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the “spicy” food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn’t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled “Kerala rice”. I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn’t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag

The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie

During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor

There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk

My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn’t get the time…so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame.

My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop

After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don’t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree…but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party

On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend’s room), but not in public places.

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room

Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted…and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating.

I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali

On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn’t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip

On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it.

Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat.

The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost

When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip.

Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June.

We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them.

The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation.

On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website.

Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled.

As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham’s house

On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham’s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap.

In two hours, we reached Abraham’s house. I couldn’t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn’t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift

I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo

On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.

Volunteer work and talks attended

I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas’ presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi’s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

Departure day

The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers

DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event.

None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them.

The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself

I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me.

PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

My Steps: Switching e-mail provider from gandi.net

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 08:52:43 +0530

Earlier this year, gandi.net’s ownership changed and it was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions. My domain and email were both hosted by this provider. Since I didn’t agree with the ownership change, I decided to switch my email provider. After discussing with Sahil, Snehal, Praveen, Nilesh, I shortlisted two email providers to choose from for ravi at ravidwivedi.in. One was purelymail and the other was mailbox.org. Since purelymail($10 per year) was cheaper than mailbox(€36 per year), I decided to give it a try. If this does not work out, I thought, I will switch to mailbox later.

Below are my steps on how I did it. The steps will be same in principle for any other provider you would like to switch to. So the guide will be helpful to you if you want to switch to any other email provider other than purelymail.

Be sure to read docs of the email provider you want to switch to in addition to this guide.

Step 1: Create an account on purelymail.com

First, I signed up on purelymail and created an account (like something@purelymail.com). They charged $10 upfront for creating this acount.

Step 2: Add your domain to your purelymail account

Sign in to your purelymail account and click on Domains section on the top and you will see a page like the screenshot below:

Click on ‘Add new domain’ as in the above screenshot.

Step 3: Enter domain name

Enter your domain name (like example.com) to the page which you got after clicking ‘Add new domain’ in last step.

Step 4: Create an MX record

Create a new MX record in your gandi.net portal or whatever domain registrar you bought your domain from. Use your mail provider docs to obtain these values and plug in.

Type	Host	Value
MX	(Empty)	mailserver.purelymail.com. (this is a sample value, you should put the value recommended by your email provider. dot at the end of the value is important.)

Step 5: Add an SPF record

Create a new SPF record as you did in Step 4. Again, use your mail provider docs to obtain these values and plug in.

Type	Host	Value
TXT	(Empty)	v=spf1 include:_spf.purelymail.com ~all (this is a sample value, you should put the value recommended by your email provider)

Step 6: Add a TXT record to prove that you own the domain

I am not sure if this step is necessary for other email providers or even for purelymail, but since it was recommended by their docs I added this value from my gandi.net portal. It is a TXT record like this:

Type	Host	Value
TXT	(Empty)	Redacted

Step 7: Add DKIM signatures

DKIM signature is for the email receiver to verify whether the email has indeed been sent by the domain owner. It is highly recommended. You can read more about DKIM signature here. Read your docs of your email provider and put the respective values.

Below is a sample taken from my steps:

Type	Host	Value
CNAME	purelymail1._domainkey	key1.dkimroot.purelymail.com.

Note: the dot at the end is important.

I added two other CNAME records in this step as suggested by purelymail docs.

Step 8: Add DMARC record

Create a DMARC record (check your provider docs for values) as you created other records in previous steps.

Type	Host	Value
CNAME	check your docs	check your docs

Step 9: Check your DNS records

Now we verify whether our records point to our new provider. Purelymail portal has a button ‘Check DNS records’ and it can find whether records you entered are correct. It takes a few minutes and sometimes a few hours for the DNS records to propagate.

Purelymail portal showing all DNS records were entered correctly.

Step 10: Create account on new provider

After all the records have been correctly added, create an account on purelymail by clicking ‘Users’ button at the top and create a new user. I created ravi@ user on my domain from there.

Step 11: Import data from gandi.net email

purelymail has an option to import data, like emails, calendar and address book from previous account. Use that option to import emails from gandi.net. Or you can use IMAP to login to your new provider in an email client like Thunderbird and manually copy all the emails to your new account.

Step 12: Delete gandi.net email and DNS records

Delete gandi.net email from the gandi.net portal and remove all the previous records which point to gandi.net for email(like MX, SPF, DKIM).

You are done. Enjoy your new email provider and let me know which one you switched to and why :-)

FreeBSD Install: Hiccups and Issues

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:44:19 +0530

I installed FreeBSD 13.2 with KDE today on my Dell Inspiron 5482. I have heard good things about FreeBSD primarily as an operating system for servers, but the project claims that it works well for desktop users as well. So, I thought I will give it a try. There were some things I had to figure out during the installation which I will note in this post for future reference. And I had to uninstall FreeBSD within hours of installation, due to issues I faced so it didn’t went well. I am going to list them here and how I figured out some things.

Regdomain selection during install

During install, the installer asked me to select a regdomain. I figured out that the default option – FCC/United States of America worked for me.

Xorg didn’t startup

Post installation, I installed xorg in FreeBSD and added a file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf as per the example 1 in the official handbook. But startx command wasn’t working, so I ran the command:

Xorg -configure

and then

cp /root/xorg.conf.new /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf followed by editing the file /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf by changing Driver value to "i1915kms" under the Section “Device”.

Managing brightness during startup

When using FreeBSD, my keyboard’s brightness buttons were not working. To decrease brightness, I used the preinstalled backlight utility.

backlight -f /dev/backlight/backlight0 10

Credits to this answer.

I couldn’t manage the brightness to be automatically low at startup. It was at 100% after very time I booted.

Crashed frequently

The system crashed frequently and wasn’t stabled at all. It automatically reboots after some time. I tried to debug and fix, but couldn’t. So, for now I have uninstalled FreeBSD.

If you know any of the fixes, please let me know.

My Steps: Self hosting Snikket behind nginx

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 01:53:54 +0530

Snikket is a server side software for XMPP chat communications. This guide is for anyone who wants to set up a Snikket server behind nginx. The operating system on the server is debian in my case. My guide is based on the official guide.

Run all the commands mentioned below as root.

Point your domain to server’s IP address

Install curl for debian

apt install curl

Now run:

curl -4 ifconfig.co

The output of the previous command is the IP Address of the server you are using.

Create an A record corresponding to the domain you want to use. Since I have domain ravidwivedi.in, I will deploy my chat server at the subdomain chat.ravidwivedi.in.

Create CNAME records for groups.chat.ravidwivedi.in and share.chat.ravidwivedi.in so that they point to chat.ravidwivedi.in

Open required ports

Open required ports if you are behind a firewall like ufw. The official Snikket docs list which ones you have to allow.

Docker and snikket configuration

Install docker and docker-compose packages on your server. The commands for debian are:

apt install docker docker-compose

Snikket configuration

Create a snikket config file and download docker-compose.yml file prepared by the Snikket project.

mkdir /etc/snikket
cd /etc/snikket
curl -o docker-compose.yml https://snikket.org/service/resources/docker-compose.beta.yml

Create a file named snikket.conf in the /etc/snikket directory with the following contents (replace appropriate fields according to your domain and email):

# The primary domain of your Snikket instance
SNIKKET_DOMAIN=chat.ravidwivedi.in

# An email address where the admin can be contacted
# (also used to register your Let's Encrypt account to obtain certificates)
SNIKKET_ADMIN_EMAIL=your-email@ravidwivedi.in

Nginx config and HTTPS

For nginx setup, we follow Snikket project’s reverse proxy docs. We will also setup HTTPS certificates using certbot. Let’s install nginx and certbot:

apt install nginx python3-certbot-nginx

Obtain certificates for all the subdomains

certbot certonly --standalone -d share.chat.ravidwivedi.in -d groups.chat.ravidwivedi.in  -d chat.ravidwivedi.in

The output for me was:

Successfully received certificate.
Certificate is saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/fullchain.pem
Key is saved at:         /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/privkey.pem
This certificate expires on 2023-10-23.
These files will be updated when the certificate renews.
Certbot has set up a scheduled task to automatically renew this certificate in the background.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
 * Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
 * Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

We want nginx to listen at ports 80 and 443. So, let’s direct Snikket to bind to ports 5080 and 5443 to avoid conflict with nginx. To do this, add these lines to /etc/snikket/snikket.conf:

SNIKKET_TWEAK_HTTP_PORT=5080
SNIKKET_TWEAK_HTTPS_PORT=5443

Now create a file /etc/nginx/sites-available/chat.ravidwivedi.in and add the following contents to it, followed by replacing ravidwivedi.in with your domain name and specifying correct ssl_certificate path to the location of your certificates.

server {
  # Accept HTTP connections
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  server_name chat.ravidwivedi.in;
  server_name groups.chat.ravidwivedi.in;
  server_name share.chat.ravidwivedi.in;

  location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:5080/;
      proxy_set_header      Host              $host;
      proxy_set_header      X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

      # This is the maximum size of uploaded files in Snikket
      client_max_body_size 104857616; # 100MB + 16 bytes
  }
}

server {
  # Accept HTTPS connections
  listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on;
  listen 443 ssl;
  ssl_certificate /path/to/certificate.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.pem;

  server_name chat.ravidwivedi.in;
  server_name groups.chat.ravidwivedi.in;
  server_name share.chat.ravidwivedi.in;

  location / {
      proxy_pass https://localhost:5443/;
      proxy_set_header      Host              $host;
      proxy_set_header      X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      # REMOVE THIS IF YOU CHANGE `localhost` TO ANYTHING ELSE ABOVE
      proxy_ssl_verify      off;
      proxy_set_header      X-Forwarded-Proto https;
      proxy_ssl_server_name on;

      # This is the maximum size of uploaded files in Snikket
      client_max_body_size 104857616; # 100MB + 16 bytes

      # For BOSH and WebSockets
      proxy_set_header Connection $http_connection;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_read_timeout 900s;

  }
}

In the above config, we need to specify path to our certificates created by certbot in an earlier step of this guide. Locate the following lines:

ssl_certificate /path/to/certificate.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.pem;

The output of my certbot command earlier told me that the certificates are at /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/fullchain.pem and ssl_key is at /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/privkey.pem

So we change the above mentioned two lines in the nginx config at /etc/nginx/sites-available/chat.ravidwivedi.in to:

ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/chat.ravidwivedi.in/privkey.pem;

After making these changes to file, save it. Now, create symlink to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/chat.ravidwivedi.in file by running the command:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/chat.ravidwivedi.in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/chat.ravidwivedi.in

Restart nginx:

systemctl restart nginx

You can also check if nginx syntax is correct by running

nginx -t

If the output of this command indicates an error, you need to fix that error before moving on.

Launch Snikket

Go back into /etc/snikket directory by running:

cd /etc/snikket

Now run:

docker-compose up -d

After the command run is complete, visit chat.ravidwivedi.in and you will see a login page as in the screenshot below.

If you don’t see this login page, there is some error in your setup.

If you are able to see that login page, create an account with admin privileges by running the command:

docker exec snikket create-invite --admin --group default

Post install

Snikket project has a page mentioning additional lines you can add to your snikket config file, like for example, setting limit on size of each attachment. Also, check out the upgrade page on how to keep snikket software updated.

If you are using Snikket, be sure to donate to the Snikket project to support them.

Free bus rides for women: What change do they bring?

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 01:00:50 +0530

Recently, I read news about Karnataka state government announcing free bus rides for women in the state. It was in the Indian National Congress’ pre-election guarantee, so no big surprise on the announcement. I wondered what changes this announcement makes in terms of people’s lives, even when the Delhi government announced such a scheme earlier. I thought such a decision is far from attaining any real goals of women safety and is only an easy way for politicians to earn some goodwill in the name of gender equality, rather than doing any long term work for gender equality. Earlier when I saw advertisements of providing free bus tickets by the Delhi government, they never mentioned any claims on what this move is intended for. One thing I could infer was that greater number of women going out may impact safety, but I was overall not sure on what this policy achieves.

I got a new perspective on the issue when, a couple of days ago, I read an article by The Guardian on the same topic. Then I found another article with similar arguments in the Indian Express. Later I read a report in the Times of India on how free bus ride scheme helped women in Chennai. These writeups shed light on the benefits of free bus rides to women which I could not think of myself (shows my ignorance:( ).

You can click on the links of the articles and read them there. But I will summarize here: In India, many women rely on family males for money (which is also used as a form of control) and so they have to rely on their savings to travel. I also had misconception, due to the scheme’s counterpart in Delhi, that the fares of city buses are not much to make a real difference. But in the Karnataka case they are. I know from my experience that Karnataka’s capital city Bengaluru has expensive public transport compared to other Indian cities. For example, bus fare from Bengaluru Airport to Satellite Bus station, which is also in Bengaluru, was 246 Indian Rupees six years ago, and I have never seen such a high price in a city bus run by government within any other Indian city. Also, due to scheme being available in the whole state, which I somehow overlooked, women will be able to get free rides for which they would have to pay huge amount otherwise. This will boost their savings, ease travel for women, increase the number of women in public transport leading to even more women travelling in buses. It is also expected to increase women participation in labour which matters in a country where women labour participation is very low. Obviously, such a scheme also needs to be evaluated in terms of economic terms and bigger picture of state finances, but the point is that the scheme has a lot of potential and upsides, where I struggled to find any.

Debian Packaging Tutorial: Removing Git From Gemspec

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 01:48:53 +0530

Recently, I was packaging silent_stream for Debian. sbuild was showing error because there was git in gemspec file. Specifically, this line

`git ls-files -z`.split("\x0").reject { |f| f.match(%r{^(tests|spec|features)/}) }

in this file.

Thanks to Vinay who helped me in fixing this. It took some time and it is common to run into this error, I was told. So, I am documenting what worked for me.

We will use quilt and Rapahel has written a good article on how to use it to patch. You will need to setup quilt first which is explained in the article.

—————Run all these commands in debian unstable environment—————————–

Since I had already pushed my changes to salsa.debian.org, I had to clone the repository. We do this by using:

gbp clone --pristine-tar git@salsa.debian.org:ruby-team/ruby-silent-stream.git

cd into the repository just cloned

cd ruby-silent-stream
Now, insert a new empty patch

quilt new remove-git-in-gemspec.patch
Tell quilt that you intend to modify files

quilt add remove-git-in-gemspec.patch
Edit the file which requires to be fixed. In our case it is silent_stream.gemspec file

vim silent_stream.gemspec
Delete lines 50,51,52 in this file
Replace those lines with:

spec.files = Dir.glob("**/*")

and save the file.
To generate the patch, run

quilt refresh
Add metadata to your patch header

quilt header --dep3 -e
Add debian/patches directory to git staging area:

git add debian/patches
Restore gemspec file.

git restore silent_stream.gemspec
Run debclean

debclean
Before running sbuild, I had to import tar files in parent directory

uscan --verbose -dd --download-current-version
Check if sbuild is successful.

sbuild -d unstable (where to run this command depends on how you setup sbuild and your debian unstable)

—————–Run above commands in debian unstable environment————

If the sbuild was successful, then commit and push your changes. I usually commit in my host system as signing the commits does not work for me inside chroot or the unstable environment I setup using systemd-nspawn.

git commit -S -m "add remove-git-in-gemspec.patch"

So, that’s it for this tutorial. Meet you in the next post.

Nobody asked this important question about Prav

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:35:25 +0530

Earlier this month, I gave a presentation introducing Prav along with my friend Arun. Many people got curious and asked various questions about the project. However, I was surprised that nobody inquired about the operation of a privacy messaging service in India, especially considering the weakening privacy laws in the country as highlighted in this article.

The conference where I presented had at least two talks/discussions on the policy/law aspects of technology. Even outside the conference, I did not encounter this question, which I believe is crucial. It seems that people are not yet fully aware of the implications of the new IT rules.

Update on 27 May 2023: This question was later raised on social media, reminding me of a similar question asked here before I wrote this post.

Backstory Behind Prav Project

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 21:02:40 +0530

In 2020, I uninstalled WhatsApp due to its proprietary nature and being backed by a surveillance company. In my quest to find alternatives, I came across many messengers, before finally settling on Matrix and XMPP, both of which are decentralized chat protocols built on freedom-respecting software.

But chat applications are only as good as the number of people using them, and it was not easy to onboard people to XMPP or Matrix.

Creating an account on either of them requires installing an app, followed by choosing a server, a username, and a password. This onboarding process is relatively difficult compared to more commonly-known messengers like WhatsApp and Telegram. It was suitable for privacy-conscious users, but not for the majority of people who are not so privacy-conscious, or who just found it too much effort to invest into a new app.

At some point, Praveen (of FSCI fame) introduced me to Quicksy - an XMPP client which provides two features found in WhatsApp -

easier registration, allowing users to register by entering a phone number and an OTP;
easier contact discovery, which automatically adds people to your Quicksy contact list if you have their phone number in your phone book.

These made onboarding easier, and I was successfully able to use Quicksy to onboard users.

At the time, we were also running our own XMPP services at poddery.com and disap.in. These services were run by volunteers, and there had been instances where it took us months to fix something.

Further, we found that the XMPP clients weren’t consistent in their features across platforms. For example, Kaidan didn’t have OMEMO encryption, while Gajim doesn’t support calls. So, if a user wants to use a desktop client to make XMPP calls, they need to figure out that they have to install Dino (which is only available on GNU/Linux). Having a consistent brand across all platforms helps newbies, as it might be hard for them to wrap their head around using Dino to talk to Conversations.

One day, when Praveen’s friend installed Quicksy to share pictures with him, he gave him an idea to make a business out of it. Praveen also thought it would be better to market our own XMPP service rather than Quicksy, giving us more control over the privacy policy and service operations. This is when he asked me if I would like to get involved, to which I immediately agreed.

Praveen had many years of experience running XMPP services, albeit in a volunteer setting. He thought of experimenting with paid sysadmins rather than volunteers. This is how the Prav project was born. The phone number and contact discovery part was inspired by the Quicksy app, and the idea of consistent branding across platforms was inspired by Snikket. We also added the idea of making it subscription based, which can help us fund sysadmins and allocate funds towards marketing.

A few months later, we decided to make it a cooperative so that the decision-making is democratic (one person, one vote, as opposed to companies in which each person has voting power proportional to the number of shares they hold). Nagarjuna proposed we run a beta service to attract people to pledge the cooperative membership. This gave birth to our beta app and service.

Free software gives users the freedom to adapt the software - but in practice, only programmers or resourceful entities like governments or corporations get to exercise this freedom. With the cooperative model of the Prav project, we want to empower members to collectively decide upon which features to implement, followed by raising funds for developers to implement them.

I am excited to see how this experiment will turn out.

A Tough Day in Albania

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 02:46:03 +0530

After attending DebConf22 in Kosovo, Akshat and I planned to spend a couple of days in Shkodër, Albania. From Prizren, Kosovo, we reached Tirana, Albania and stayed for a night. Many of the fellow Indians who attended DebConf22 were also with me. The next morning, we checked out and took a bus for Shkodër.

While Akshat boarded the bus and sat with Abraham, I decided to search for some snacks outside before boarding. As a consequence, the bus got full and I didn’t get a seat. Seeing this, a lady from Germany sitting beside Abraham made space for me. Therefore, three people were sitting on two seats. It was a nice gesture, but obviously uncomfortable.

The weather was scorchingly hot, and the bus fans weren’t working properly. After a two-hour ride, we deboarded in Shkodër. Akshat and I had booked an apartment from Airbnb. Going by the location, we figured out it was 1 kilometer away, which we decided to walk.

Upon reaching the location, we texted our apartment owner on Airbnb. On the other side was a lady, and we were not able to understand what she was saying as her texts weren’t in English. We tried translating her texts, but the translation didn’t make sense to us. She seemed to be saying that she has an appointment in the church at 3 o’clock.

It was very frustrating. We were standing in hot sun with our apartment nowhere in sight. Then we tried calling her as I had a local SIM card. A boy was passing the street we were on, and we handed the phone to him. However, he could not translate what the lady said, as he probably didn’t know English.

Then I left Akshat to search for anyone else who could translate. I came across a car repair shop where someone agreed to translate the call for me. After talking with the lady over the phone, the person told me that the location is 2 kilometers away and offered a ride in his car. I told him that I would need to bring my friend as well.

I went back to Akshat. A girl was passing by on a bicycle. We handed over the phone to her and phoned the lady from our Airbnb booking. The girl translated the call for us in English. She told us that they are calling us at Hotel Rozafa. We asked her for directions to Hotel Rozafa, and we later discovered that it was where the bus from Tirana dropped us, but we didn’t know at that time. We walked towards Hotel Rozafa and came across the car repair shop I mentioned above. Turned out that the person who offered help earlier had left the car repair shop by then.

Then a person at that car repair place gave us a few grapes and water. At that moment, a few grapes felt refreshing and energizing. Then we went ahead and bought water from a shop. The shopkeeper asked whether we were from Afghanistan, to which we said, “No, we are from India.”

Upon reaching a shop named Neptune, Akshat texted the lady again, telling her that we had reached Neptune. Turned out they knew that shop as a few minutes later, her husband was there. He came there by taxi to pick us up. It was at this point that their plan was revealed. Earlier, I wondered why they were calling us to Hotel Rozafa - it was to pick us up.

Finally, we reached our apartment and the lady and her husband gave instructions about how things work at the apartment. She had to call her sister in Italy every time she needed to talk to us as she didn’t know English, so her sister acted as a translator.

I have noticed with a couple of Airbnbs we had booked in Albania that the locations given online were not correct, and we had to ask for help from the locals. However, the locals in Albania were very helpful. Whether they knew English or not, they always tried to lend a helping hand. I think that the apartment owner taking a taxi to pick us up was a nice gesture as well.

Announcement: I updated my gpg keys

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 16:01:36 +0530

I updated my gpg keys because I had a 3072 bits RSA key and Debian requires 4096 bits RSA or elliptic curve. The key fingerprint is:

FF7D B951 7CE1 E19B 6EFE 695F E0E5 BAFD 3BBF 70B3

Check my gpg page for details.

So, if you are from Debian community and signing someone else’s keys which they will be using for the purposes of debian, make sure they are using a 4096 bit RSA key or an elliptic curve key.

Introducing Fediverse: A Decentralized Social Media

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 14:44:56 +0530

Finally, Elon Musk is the owner of Twitter. On the first day after the takeover, Twitter has already undergone some major changes. If you are wondering what the big deal is, here is a reminder that tech giants work for profit and control, rather than to make the world a better place. While I do not consider the previous CEO of Twitter to be good, the takeover by Musk may have made people more receptive to the ideas I am going to discuss.

This is a problem of centralization

Centralized services such as Twitter are vulnerable to such handovers. Even if the company is good today, it may get compromised in future due to change of ownership. The same thing happened with WhatsApp. After Facebook took over WhatsApp, it later introduced a policy to share data of WhatsApp users with Facebook.

Introducing Fediverse

Fediverse logo

Fediverse is NOT another company or a startup, rather a community made project.

Fediverse is a decentralized social network, where users using different services can follow, boost posts, and communicate with each other, similar to how users with accounts on different email providers can email each other. Different services on Fediverse have different policies, so you can choose a service which suits your needs. Anyone can self host their instance of Fediverse, or pay someone to host for them(just like any task in the world). There is no single company or person who owns Fediverse, rather different instances have different admins, usually running service in their free time, so don’t forget to send them a donation if you like the service. Fediverse users do not get tied to a particular service, as when they change their service providers, they can migrate their friends and followers, so they don’t need to start from scratch again.

Fediverse is a collection of different types of services. For example, Mastodon is like Twitter(according to use-case), Friendica is like Facebook, Pixelfed is for sharing images, similar to Instagram, and PeerTube is for sharing videos, a replacement for YouTube.

Each service on Fediverse is free software which means you can add features youself as well. For example, let’s say Mastodon does not have a feature and you would like to add it, then you have the ability to run your modififed version of Mastodon on your server as well. You can pay someone to add that feature too, or you can collaborate with others who like the same feature and colectively crowdfund to add that feature.

You can learn more about Fediverse here. Further, this is a good unofficial guide to get started. We need to fight for our freedom. You can take a step by deleting your Twitter account, or just trying out Fediverse and bring your friends on Fediverse to reduce your dependence on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I suggest major organizations (which usually have resources) to switch to Fediverse, which will raise awareness about it to their users. If they don’t feel like deleting their Twitter account, Fediverse can reduce their dependence on it and, hopefully, more users will join.

My profile on Fediverse is here. Feel free to connect.

For further reading on this topic, check out this blog post by Free Software Community of India.

Couldn't Attend Libreoffice Conference 2022 in Italy

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:29:56 +0530

This year, The Document Foundation (TDF) invited me to attend the LibreOffice conference in Milan, Italy. In order to travel to Italy, I needed a visa.

To apply for the same, I had to book an appointment with VFS Global and submit the required documents. The conference was to be held from the 28th of September to the 1st of October 2022. I started checking for visa appointments on the 10th of August. However, I got no available slots in Delhi. I also checked the availability of appointments in other cities. I saw appointments were available in Kolkata, which is pretty far from where I live, and I didn’t want to spend that much time and money for the visa.

After looking up for appointments at the VFS Delhi center for 8 consecutive days, I got one for the 22nd of August. During my appointment, I was informed by the staff that I had applied in the wrong category - tourist. They told me further that if my purpose of travel is to attend a conference, then the category of application should be “business” or “invitation.” Therefore, I was advised to book another appointment in the correct category. It was not a visa refusal. I didn’t get to pay for my visa fee or submit my documents.

I tried to book another appointment in the correct category meant for attending conferences, but didn’t get any slots for days, and so I finally gave up in mid-September and told the conference organizers that I wouldn’t be able to join.

Finally, I would like to end this post by thanking TDF for inviting me to the conference and offering to sponsor my costs. It is unfortunate that I could not attend.

A budget layover in Dubai

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 13:19:11 +0530

A few days ago, I had a layover in Dubai while returning from a fun DebConf in Kosovo. The layover was a bit longer than 24 hours. I was joined by my friend Abraham Raji, who had to go to Kochi, and had a layover of around 22 hours.

Since my layover was longer than 24 hours, I needed a transit visa for boarding my Dubai to Delhi flight. For layovers less than 24 hours, the transit visa was not a requirement for boarding the next flight. Note that you just need to fill a form online to obtain a transit visa for UAE. Since my travel agent booked the flights, they took care of the transit visa on my behalf for a fee of 2,000 INR.

My flight from Tirana landed at the Terminal 2 of the Dubai airport at around 21:30 local time. Since I had a transit visa, my plan was to roam around in Dubai and return to the airport to catch my connecting flight. Therefore, I went through immigration. The officer had a lok at my visa and stamped the UAE entry stamp on my passport. Then I went through customs and came out at the Arrivals section of the airport, where I took a seat. It was around 22:00 hours local time.

The airline handed over my checked-in luggage - a heavy trolley bag - at the Dubai airport even though my connecting flight was with the same airline FlyDubai. Perhaps, it was because my layover was more than 24 hours long. The airline staff at Tirana only issued my boarding pass till Dubai. However, Abraham got his boarding passes till Kochi and he would get his luggage directly in Kochi.

I asked around but couldn’t find any cloak rooms to put my luggage. Soon Abraham joined me and I got to know he also has plans to roam around in the city.

At the airport, Abraham met a person whom he was talking in Malayalam. That person recommended that we withdraw at least 200 dirhams or AED (around 4,000 INR) in cash from ATM in order to roam around the city. Therefore, I withdrew 200 AED in cash.

Dirham notes of denominations 10, 20, 50, 100.

We planned to spend the night at the airport and roam around in the city in the morning. We didn’t book a hotel and instead planned to sleep on the benches in the arrivals. I was hungry as I didn’t have lunch in my Tirana to Dubai flight, due to the lack of lacto-ovo vegetarian options on the flight. Therefore, I took a banana from the Costa Coffee shop located next to where we were sitting for 6 AED (equivalent to 120 rupees).

Unable to sleep, we came out of the airport in search of a place to eat. It was midnight and all the shops were closed. We were suggested by someone to check whether the McDonald’s inside the departures section was open. I was not sure whether we can just go inside the departures, as this is not allowed at Indian airports, unless you are catching a flight.

We met a lot of Indians and we asked where can we go for dining. One of them claimed that a restaurant near the Al-Qiyada metro station should be open. We walked 2 kilometers to reach that metro station. However, the restaurant wasn’t open, and so we had to return with disappointment. Abraham and I made some interesting conversations on the way to pass the time. I was starving at this point.

While returning to the Arrivals, we saw a restaurant open on the way. The name of the restaurant was ‘Food Castle Express’. It was located within 1 km of the Arrivals.

A photo of the Food Castle Express restaurant where we had a filling meal.

The restaurant had Indian food with reasonable prices. It was being run by people from Kerala and seemed to be a popular place among the airport staff. To give you an idea of prices, a plate of 3 Idlis was 5.5 AED (equivalent to 110 Indian Rupees), a cup of tea was 1 AED (20 Indian Rupees), a plate of Pav Bhaji was 8 AED (around 160 Indian Rupees), while Chicken Samosa, Aloo Samosa and Cheese Samosa, were 1.5 AED per piece, and Chicken Fried Rice was 12 AED.

I took the following:

Item	Price (AED)	Price (INR)
Idli (3 pcs)	5.5	110
1 Tea	1	20
Chhole Bhature	7.5	150
Total	14	280

We had this meal around 04:30 hours, and it kept me satiated literally for the whole day. Even though I was not in India, I was delighted to have Indian food. It is because we were having it after a long time because we were coming from Europe after a 3-week long stay, where every dish was bland.

A chhole bhature plate from the Food Castle Express restaurant

After having our meal, we went back to the Arrivals section to catch some sleep. Abraham took a nap on the benches, while I failed to get any. In the meanwhile, I found out that the water inside the washroom was too hot to even wash my face.

Dubai Airport had a very good Wi-Fi which was a lifesaver. I didn’t have a local SIM card, so this helped me a lot in contacting home and passing time. The Wi-Fi has free unlimited access. You just need to simply select the “DXB Free Wifi” option, and it connects without asking for a phone number or OTP.

Abraham had slept for a couple of hours on the benches and woke up by 09:00. At this time, we exited the airport and were looking for a bus to drop us at some metro station. We found out that we need a card to use the public transport (such as buses, trams, metro) in Dubai. This card is called the Nol card. In order to obtain one, we had to go to a metro station. There must be other ways to obtain that card, but we didn’t know any.

The nearest metro station was Abu Hail Metro station - 2 km walk from the airport - which we had to cover by walking. It was not exactly fun as Dubai has a hot desert climate and the temperature was around 40°C, with sand coming into our eyes. To add to his, we had a lot of luggage. The bus stops were air-conditioned and sheltered, so we took shelter in one of the them while walking towards the metro station.

A bus stop in Dubai.

At the Abu Hail metro station, we took the silver Nol card (one for each), which was 25 AED (500 INR) with 19 AED balance. We planned to go to Burj Khalifa from here.

The metro from Abu Hail to Burj Khalifa was 5 AED. It was much cheaper than taking a taxi which would have added 25 AED as the basic fare. We reached the Burj Khalifa metro station in 25 minutes, following by walking to reach there. While clicking pictures, we realized that fitting the whole Burj Khalifa in a single frame is difficult. After all, it is the tallest building in the world!

Me and Abraham with Burj Khalifa in the background

After roaming around a bit, we went to the Dubai Mall, which was walking distance from the Burj Khalifa. The strategy was to spend as much time as possible inside such buildings to avoid the onslaught by the harsh weather. Abraham had a meal in the mall, while I didn’t eat anything due to lack of vegetarian options.

Dubai Mall

We still had 14 AED left in our Nol card at this point. Further, there is no facility to return the card and get the balance refunded. Therefore,we wanted to spend that amount before leaving the city. So, we planned a tram ride which will spend almost all the card balance, cover the city and does not require walking outside of air-conditioning. To take the tram, we went to Sobha Realty Metro Station and walked towards the tram station.

The tram ride was nice. If you ride the Dubai tram, be careful to check in and check-out using the Nol card at the tram station, otherwise you could be fined. We saw the Dubai’s Marina area from the tram. The tram takes 3 AED regardless of the station you check out from. We deboarded at the same station where we took the tram.

From there, we took a metro from DMCC station and returned to Abu Hail metro station. We went to Food Castle Express. I didn’t find a good vegetarian option there, so I skipped eating there and just took a chai.

View from inside the tram

After this, we returned to the airport to catch our respective flights. We didn’t face any language problems in Dubai. English was widely spoken. Most of my conversations were in Hindi, as I met many Indians and Pakistanis who knew Hindi. In fact, Abraham was talking to people in Malayalam (which is more popular in Dubai than Hindi). Overall, people were very nice which made us feel like home.

We had a nice time in Dubai, even though it was tiring due to lack of sleep and harsh weather.

My Experience of attending DebConf22 in Kosovo

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 22:22:10 +0200

I just came out of what has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life– DebConf in Kosovo. DebConf is the annual conference of Debian contributors from all around the world. This was my first time attending a DebConf ever, which presented a great opportunity for me to explore different cultures and food, along with making many new friends in the Debian community as it featured 210 attendees from 38 countries.

DebConf22 logo

I registered and applied for bursary which was accepted by the DebConf bursary team. I applied for the Kosovo visa and after a long frustrating process of getting the visa, reached the venue of DebConf on 10th July 2022, which I have already written in detail. Getting Kosovo visa was already a great feat before DebConf and I am highly grateful to the organizers for putting their sincere efforts. Without this, it would not have been possible for us Indians to attend the event.

The Venue

The DebConf venue was Innovation and Training Park in Prizren, Kosovo. As soon as we reached the ITP campus, our eyes were treated with beautiful views of mountains and blue sky in all directions. The natural beauty of the place was stunning. You take a random photo of this place and it will come off as beautiful. This is how good it was. The fact that the campus was a German military base till December 2019 spiced up many people’s interests in the history of the place and there were some discussions regarding this.

The city of Prizren has a bridge over the Lumbardhi river which also features in the DebConf 22 logo. The bridge is a must visit place in Prizren, in my opinion. There was also a castle, which had views of the beautiful city of Prizren, but I missed visiting it.

The DebCamp held from 10 July to 16 July 2022 and the DebConf happened from 17th-24th July 2022. Most of the people came at the time of DebConf and the DebCamp days did not had so many attendees. By the time DebConf started, I already got adjusted to the campus.

Food

Being a non-meat eater, the first thing I was worried about before arriving at the venue was food as I read on the internet that Kosovo’s food is heavily based on meat. In my first lunch, I had only Veg Pasta multiple plates as most of the items in this lunch was meat-based. In the next two-three days, the availability of vegetarian food got better and I started enjoying the food. They started serving bean soup, vegetable soup, lentils and rice in the lunch time, expanding their vegetarian dishes. I enjoyed the food and it was way better than what I expected. The coconut and chocolate pastry served in the dinner time were delicious, and there was another delicious desert called Al-Baklava. Watermelon, Apples and Musk Melon, peach were frequently served fruits. The food got repetitive though after a point and it wasn’t as enjoyable, but I think it was still good as I am not sure if there is a lot of variety to expect from Kosovo in the vegetarian section.

The availability of drinking water was through the plastic bottles in the restaurant. In my opinion, this wastes a lot of plastic and is not an environment friendly option. Probably the locals were saying that the tap water is drinkable but it would still made sense to have a water filter in the dorms or water coolers etc.

DebConf

When the DebConf started on 17th July, new attendees started arriving in bigger numbers. Here I made many friends in the hacklab or when sitting over the lunch. As far as I remember, the most discussed topic was politics. They were very enthusiastic about telling their country’s history and the politics and asking me about the Indian culture, food etc.

The people were very very nice and I had a great time with the Debian community. The people were from very diverse backgrounds with each one having their unique stories on their involvement with Debian. On the other hand, there were people new to Debian and they asked my viewpoints on it, which gave me opportunities to propagate the Free Software Philosophy.

The participants ranged from being Google or Canonical employees to college students and high school students. I met a lot of students from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, for whom the DebConf must have been a good opportunity. Since Debian is for everyone, there were many people from the non-technical side of Debian. I liked the fact that the attendees included people who didn’t know English, which gave more diversity.

I attended the talks whenever the topics seemed interesting to me. Since there were three tracks of talks happening simultaneously, I missed some of them. The dining, hacklab and the the accommodation were a bit far from each other. Further, it was mountaineous area and was not a easy breeze for me to get around in the campus so quickly.

There was a noisy hacklab and a silent hacklab. I used to hangout at the noisy hacklab as that gave me chance to meet new people. The noisy hacklab had free of charge coffee, while beer and water were given on the paid basis. Attendees could volunteer to be a bartender brewing and serving beer and coffee in the hacklab. The card games I played in the hacklab were very fun. Karl from the video team told me a long story on how much travelling video team has to do with the equipment and how hectic it is. I was totally ignorant about this aspect of DebConf before Karl told me this.

I didn’t spend a lot of time in my accommodation. I used to go there mainly for sleep and shower. The walls were thin, so there was an actual email sent in some debconf mailing list about not to talk loudly in the dorms. The rooms were spacious and had good air-conditioning. By the time DebConf started, dorms had a very good Wi-Fi connection.

I volunteered for some tasks for the video team. I was a talk meister in one talk– person who introduces the speaker and gives mic to people in audience who want to ask questions from the speaker, a camera operator in two of the talks.

Cheese and Wine Party

Cheese and Wine Party is a tradition of DebConf in which people bring food from their local areas to share with others. I brought Dal Samosa, which is a snack from my local place in India. This was, in general, liked by people in the party. I tried French alcoholic drink Pastis, which tasted like Fennel, and found it good. Cheese and Wine Party happened after the dinner, so I didn’t eat a lot. I had great conversations in the party with many people and it was fun.

Dal Samosa at a shop in India. Credits: Ravi Dwivedi, CC BY-SA 4.0

DayTrip

The DayTrip was conducted by the DebConf to take time out of their schedule to visit some places in Kosovo. You can see all the options of DayTrips here.

I went to tour A: Bus tour of Eastern Kosovo. It covered Gadime Cave, Ulpiana Ancient City, Gracanica Monastery, Bear Sanctuary, Artana (Novoberda) Fortress. My feeling was that the day trip was trying to cover a lot of places, so it became more rushed. The places were beautiful and worth visiting in Kosovo. The tour featured an unexpected hiking in the Bear Sanctuary. The weather was sunny and very hot, so overall it was a tiring trip with beautiful places and good pictures.

The tour guide was excellent. He was informative and also took care of the people falling behind in the trip. We were joined by other guides, one at Marble Cave and the other at Gracanica Monestary. The guide at Marble cave was telling us about it in the Albanian langauge, which our tour guide was translating into English. The guides were very enthusiastic about the places they were telling us about. It was like an overdose of knowledge that day. We got a little late in our schedule and so we couldn’t really explore the Gracanica Monestary, we had to rush back to our destination after a few minutes.

Some photos from DayTrip taken by me:

Gracanica Lake

Gracanica Monestary

Beautiful views seen from the Bear Sanctuary

Conference Dinner

The Conference Dinner was held outside of the DebConf venue in Alegria Hotel. Here the food was a disappointment for non-meat eaters/vegan as the restaurant only gave rice and some snacks. At the conference dinner, I liked the Flija. I still had some good company at the conference dinner so it was still fun.

Keysigning

In Debian, people sign each other’s keys in order to make a web of trust. It usually involves an ID check. People will usually ask you for your pasport to verify that it is really you. I saw many countries’ passport when keysigning, which was fun. After the ID check and verifying your key fingerprint, they sign your keys. Tobi helped me in configuring caff so that I can easily sign keys, rather than doing it manually.

Goodbye Kosovo

All in all, it was a great trip to Kosovo and a very unique one. I am already out of Kosovo as of writing this. I would like to visit Kosovo again in my life. It was so good. Thanks a lot to all the organizers, sponsors and people who made my time fun at the DebConf 22 in Kosovo.

Attending a DebConf is a learning opportunity on many fronts, be it the diversity among the people, cultures, food, opinion, or the software side of Debian. Writing about my experience has been a challenge in itself. Hopefully, I was able to pin down my experience as there was lot to share.

Looking forward to see you all in the next edition of DebConf which will take place in my country India.

Update on 06-August-2022: I got the reimbursement of all my travel expenses related to DebConf22 in just 4 days of filling the reimbursement form. So quick!

Trip to Prizren Bridge

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I went to Prizren stone bridge, which is in Prizren, Kosovo. Prizren is often referred to as the cultural capital of Kosovo.

I am staying at the venue of DebConf 22 from where it is walkable distance, around 1.5 km.

Prizren Stone bridge.

I was going with my friends who were also attending the DebConf 22. We reached the bridge at around 20:30 hours time (Kosovo follows Central European Time). It is in the city center and the views were very beautiful. Lumbardhi river flows below the bridge with beautiful mountains surrounding on all sides.

Sinan Pasha Mosque

The bridge also gives a nice view of Sinan Pasha Mosque , which is a very important monument of the Prizren city, built in the Ottoman architecture style.

Near the bridge, a person was roasting corn which costed €1 per piece. The corn was soft, but did not have many kernels.

A street-side vendor roasting corn near the Prizren bridge.

Found this beautiful take home souvenier in the shape of Prizren stone bridge.

Souvenier from Prizren Bridge.

Complicated Kosovo Visa

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 18:04:50 +0200

DebConf is the annual conference of the Debian community. This year’s DebConf was held in Kosovo, a European country from the Balkans.

DebConf22 logo

Debian sponsored me for the conference. Indian attendees needed a visa to enter Kosovo, which got complicated due to Kosovo not having any embassies in India (India doesn’t recognize Kosovo as an independent country). The organizing team came up with a solution - to send the required documents by email to Kosovo embassy in Tirana, Albania (neighboring country of Kosovo) and collecting the visas later by visiting the embassy in person. This was possible because Albania was granting visa-free entry for Indians during that time period. However, this was not the standard way to get a Kosovo visa and it was an exception made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kosovo for us.

The conference was to begin on the 10th of July. So, I booked my flight tickets from Delhi to Tirana for the 6th and bus tickets from Tirana to Prizren for the 10th of July. Further, I transferred the visa fee worth 40 Euros into the embassy’s bank account using wise.com. On the 9th of June, I emailed my documents to the Kosovo embassy in Tirana for my visa application. Here is the list of documents I sent:

Filled and signed Visa Application form
Scanned copy of my passport
1 photo of myself
Invite letter and proof of travel, food and accommodation bursary.
Confirmed return flight ticket from Delhi to Tirana
Bus tickets from Tirana to Prizren
Bank statement (last 3 months)
Health insurance valid throughout the territory of the Republic of Kosovo
Receipt of payment of 40 Euros for visa fee

I did not receive any acknowledgement of the receipt of my email from the embassy. On the 22nd of June (13 days after submitting the application), I wrote a follow-up email to the embassy asking for my visa application status. The embassy responded by saying:

Your name is not in the list of approved names to apply remotely. Therefore your case cannot be processed.

A couple of other Indian attendees reported getting the same response from the embassy. However, Utkarsh from the bursary team confirmed that our names were in the list. On the 27th of June, with 9 days to go before our flight to Albania, Praveen (a Debian Developer) sent an email to the Debian Project Leader Jonathan Carter, CCing all the prominent DebConf team members and Indian attendees, sharing our frustation with the process. He proposed Debian to reimburse tickets if we don’t get a response from the embassy.

On the other hand, Arianit Dobroshi from the organizing team was fairly confident about the approval and suggested us not to panic. In the same email, Praveen also proposed Debian to include visa fee in the bursary by default for the sponsored attendees, for which Jonathan shared his views in a public mailing list here.

As the travel date approached, I was panicking. I asked my travel agent to check on the cancellation fee for my flight. They told me it was around 15,000 INR. However, repeated assurances from Arianit made me stick to my plans. On July 3rd, he sent us a letter from Kosovo’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stating that our visas were being processed in Tirana.

I wasn’t confident that the document was sufficient for boarding the flight. If I went to the airline staff at Delhi Airport and told them I was attending a conference in Kosovo, they would want to see whether I had a valid visa. Otherwise, they would refuse me boarding.

Therefore, I told the airline I was going to Albania. To my surprise, the airline did not ask me for a Kosovo visa upon seeing my conference invitation letter. Maybe they didn’t know about Kosovo, as India doesn’t recognize it?

After grilling me for some time, the airline gave me my boarding pass. The next stop was immigration. However, the immigration officer only asked me where I was going, to which I replied, “Albania,” and they asked me to show a visa. I told them that Albania was visa-free. So, they only checked whether Indians required a visa to visit Albania. I was elated after clearing immigration. This was followed by boarding the flight.

I had a connecting flight from Dubai. Here, I met other DebConf attendees coming from Kochi and Mumbai. Before boarding the flight, we were asked once again about our purpose for visiting Albania, to which we showed our invitation letters. Again, they didn’t notice that the conference was in Kosovo.

On the 7th of July, while we were in Tirana, we received the following email from one of the conference organizers, Arianit:

For Tirana applicants,

We got notification that visas have arrived in Tirana. Please show up at the Consulate tomorrow at 08:00 to get them stamped. They work until 13:30 tomorrow. We are trying to find a solution for people arriving in Tirana at 14:00 apparently.

Regards, Arianit

Next day, on the 8th of July, we went to the Kosovo embassy early in the morning and got our visas. On the 10th, we had a scenic morning bus trip from Tirana to Prizren.

The Innovation & Training Park (ITP) in Prizren, Kosovo was the venue of DebConf 22.

I am at ITP Prizren—the venue of DebConf22—writing this post. It feels like a miracle to be here in Prizren attending DebConf. Looking forward to working on some projects and meeting nice people.

Lastly, I would like to thank the organizing team and the country of Kosovo.

First Impressions of Albania

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I landed in Tirana, Albania today, which is a country in the balkans region of the Europe.

My first impressions are:

Tirana is neat and clean city with beautiful landscapes surrounding it.

Beautiful views at the Tirana airport just after landing.

Tirana International Airport.

Taxis outside Tirana International Airport.

Beautiful views on the way from Tirana airport to city center.

Locals are very patient and hospitable.
Streets are not very crowded and footpaths are wide.

Wide footpaths in Tirana.

Tree-lined sidewalks in Tirana.

A bus stop in Tirana.

The city has bars and cafes all around the place.

A bus stop in Tirana.

It is a well planned city.
It is cheaper than most of the places in Europe.

My first impression is that this is a very beautiful and hospitable place. Although, people who don’t eat meat can have some difficulties in finding good vegetarian food.

I hope to have fun in this Albania trip.

Is GNU/Linux hard to use for beginners?

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 17:47:49 +0530

GNU/Linux operating systems (if you heard about Linux operating systems, I am talking about the same. Read Why GNU/Linux if you are curious about the details.) have a reputation of being hard to use for non-techies. Some of the popular examples of GNU/Linux distributions are: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora etc. I repeatedly hear that they are hard to install or knowledge of command line is necessary to use them and therefore only advanced users use GNU/Linux. This is not true. Depending on your requirements, you can choose a distro which does not require a lot of technical skills to use.

First of all, I would like to point out why I advertise GNU/Linux operating systems. I promote the idea of Free Software and when I suggest people to use freedom-respecting software, the obvious choice for a desktop operating system is a GNU/Linux operating system. There are many non-GNU Linux based operating systems as well and I am fine with people using them, but since I never used them, I suggest what I have used.

What I think is that GNU/Linux is for everybody. There is so much choice here that it is practically never ending. Whether you want to use as a normal user who just want a stable operating system or you are someone who likes to hack around and break things while learning something new, GNU/Linux is for you. Proprietary operating systems are full of malware, so it is good time to switch to a GNU/Linux distro, which are usually built by a community, everything is public and open for all to see, respect users’ freedom and privacy, plus they are usually far more secure than proprietary software, by design.

Whether it is school labs, a company’s production machine, personal computers, servers, Raspberry Pi, human right defenders, journalists, GNU/Linux is for everybody. The choice of the GNU/Linux distro depends on your use case and threat model. It is not like Windows that everyone is using the same thing with same appearance. Different people choose different distributions with very different appearances and customization, depending on their taste.

How to choose a GNU/Linux distribution for yourself

There is a huge number of GNU/Linux distros to choose from that it can be overwhelming to research all the choices. Librehunt website can ease your search by asking a few questions on what type of distro you want and then suggests you with a few distros matching your criteria. Popular GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, has a lot of user support by the community. If you use Ubuntu, for example, and you are stuck with some technical problem, chances are it is already answered on their Askubuntu forum. If not, then you can ask your question there. Many Free Software communities provide technical support. GNU/Linux distros usually have large communities behind them and work on the operating system of their choice in collaboration. Here are a few suggestions of mine for a user-friendly distro to start with: Debian, Ubuntu, Zorin OS, GNU/Linux Mint, Fedora. I haven’t tried all of them but I have heard good feedback about Zorin OS, Linux Mint and Fedora.

After you have selected a distro, the next step is to choose a Desktop Environment. These differ in their appearances and philosophy. For example, if you are planning to run GNU/Linux on old hardware, then XFCE is a suitable Desktop Environment, which is lightweight and does not consume a lot of resources. GNOME and KDE Plasma are very popular Desktop Environments with large communities behind them.

Debian 11 with GNOME desktop. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

KDE Plasma desktop. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Installation

The installation of a distro depends on your hardware and the distro you choose. The distro you are installing might have installation guide on its website. For many distros, the installation is kind of the same. Arch Linux is for a bit advanced users where the installation differs from, say Ubuntu.

You will find tons of blogs and video tutorials to install distro of your choice.

Many laptops ship with GNU/Linux preinstalled. Some examples are: Indian vendor Mostly Harmless, Purism devices, Ministry of Freedom project in the UK, Lenovo selling laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed and Fedora pre-installed, Clevo selling laptops with Debian pre-installed, Manjaro has also partnered with some hardware manufacturers to ship with Manjaro out of the box, System 76 laptops, etc.

I suggest you to do some research and choose a computer with GNU/Linux preinstalled for the next time.

Learning about the GNU/Linux operating system

Many blogs and Youtube channels exist where you can learn about the distros. If you are curious to learn the command line, you will find tons of resources on the internet for learning. There are many books written on the command line which you can choose for your learning. Whatever distro you are using, Arch Wiki can be a handy guide.

I started with Debian as a beginner and I learnt some command line just for fun and curiosity, but it is not mandatory for a Debian user. I found the operating system easy and intuitive to use. I have used Manjaro for a couple of months and PureOS for around half a year. Whenever I am stuck, I usually get help from the internet.

Conclusion

All in all, GNU/Linux distros are highly customizable and give users choice and freedom to use what they want. There are user-friendly distros like Ubuntu and Debian with good user support and large communities behind them so that you can always ask for help. I hope this will post will strike down any fear or doubts you might have in starting using GNU/Linux.

What is Debian

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 13:55:52 +0530

Debian as an operating system

Debian desktop.
Credits: Juliette Taka. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0. Source: Debian wiki.

Debian GNU/Linux is a Free Software (software which respects user’s freedom to run, study, modify, share and share the modified versions) operating system. Debian is committed to Free Software philosophy, as software freedom is deeply embedded in its social contract. Debian’s official image ships with only free software including firmware, and the official repositories also contain only Free Software. If users need nonfree drivers, then separate images with nonfree firmware are also available on the Debian website.

Debian's tagline is 'The Universal operating system.'
Credits: Juliette Taka. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0. Source: Debian wiki.

Debian operating system has three branches: stable, testing and unstable. Debian explains that the main goal of the project is to develop the stable branch. Other branches are only a means for that end. Of course, many users might still find it suitable to install testing or unstable, keeping in mind that these might break.

Debian is known for its stability and its universality. The stability of Debian stable branch comes from the fact that it is extensively tested before the release as the testing branch. The three branch system allows the user to choose the desired stability. The stable branch gets only security updates and mission critical bug fixes. So, the packages in stable branch might not be the latest version, but they are tested thoroughly before putting there. Debian Stable users can download recent releases of some software from the Debian backports repository. Stable branch is a recommended one for a company’s production machine or school labs and personal computers too.

Debian can run on all types of hardware and supports 9 CPU architectures and some others unofficially as well. It can run on your personal computer, a school computer, old hardware, servers, Raspberry Pi and similar devices, IoT devices, etc. Whatever piece of hardware you have, you can put Debian on it, and that is why Debian’s tagline is ‘The Universal Operating System’. This is far more than is available for any other GNU/Linux distribution.

Many popular GNU/linux distributions are based on Debian. Examples are: Ubuntu, PureOS, Tails OS etc.

People behind Debian

Debian’s biggest feature is the community behind it and how that community makes decisions. The guiding principles of Debian community are the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software guidelines.

DebConf19 group photo.
Source: Debian Pics.
License:MIT License (Expat). Debian license page.

In short, the Debian Social contract promises the following to its users: 1) 100% Free Software; 2) Debian project will give back to Free Software community; 3) Problems won’t be hidden; 4) Users are priority; 5) providing support for nonfree packages to users, if required.

The track record of 29 years of the project says that these promises have never been broken. It is an independent project made by volunteers all around the globe. It has a democratic decision-making structure as directed by its constitution.

Companies or individuals sponsoring Debian project do not get any say in the decisions of the Debian project just because they gave money to the project.

Debian project’s democratic decision making along with software freedom of the operating system makes it one of the most secure operating systems, since Debian does not have a single point of failure.

This works as follows:

Every Debian Developer’s gpg keys are signed by at least two other existing Debian developers. It is a decentralized trust model and forms a web of trust. Every package uploaded to Debian is compiled from its source code and signed by the private gpg keys of a Debian Developer. Only the owner of the keys can have their private keys. A maintainer of a Debian package abusing their position to upload malicious code intentionally will harm their own reputation in the society as every upload is public and it will stay there for lifetime. Compare this to a centralized corporation where they can upload malicious code in the packages but this commit is not public.

How can we make sure that the binaries match the source code? Debian is also working on reproducible builds, so that users can build the package on their own and verify that the binary actually matches the source code. Purism explained the concept very well in their blog post.

Debian has a separate LTS team which provides support to Debian stable releases for at least 5 years. This can be helpful for companies and organizations who want support in their Debian usage.

In conclusion, Debian is a freedom-respecting operating system maintained and developed by its users around the globe. It is not controlled by a single entity and this makes it hard to compromise, making it one of the most secure operating systems on the earth.

My experience

I started using Debian in August 2021 and I have tried all the branches of Debian: stable, testing and unstable. I was not using only Debian in this time frame and have switched to PureOS for around 6 months. Personally, I faced no problems in using Debian. I found that even testing branch is stable enough to be my daily driver. Currently, I am running the stable branch of Debian Bullseye, along with adding backports to my sources file. The Desktop environment that has suited me the most as of now is KDE Plasma. I love it and whenever I switch to any other Desktop Environment, I do not feel at home.

Debian with KDE Plasma desktop. Released under CC-BY-SA-4.0

Read further

Want to install Debian in your computer? or curious about how to contribute to Debian? Please check:

Get Debian for your device.
Contribute to Debian.
An Indian shop sells hardware that can run fully free version of Debian.
Buy a computer with Debian pre-installed.
Clevo is shipping laptops with Debian out-of-the-box.
Librem hardware(like laptops and mobile phones) can run Debian.
If you have any technical questions, please feel free to ask any of the Debian user support channels or Free Software Community of India.

Free Software Community of India will Do 'Ask Me Anything' on Reddit

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 02:01:36 +0530

Free Software Community of India will be doing an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on r/India subreddit. One of the moderators of the r/India reached out to us via filling the contact form on the website as well as in our chat group. As soon as I saw that the person filled the form, I replied it by email. It took some time for the community to arrive at a date and time for conducting the AMA, but now it is finalized to be 12 April 2022 17:00 IST.

Akshay created a Reddit account for FSCI and shared the credentials. Me, Praveen, Akshay and Arya will be answering the AMA. Hopefully, this will raise awareness about Free Software in India and the existence of our community. Our community is always in the ‘Ask us Anything’ mode because of our welcoming nature and our active lookout for new people to get involved. So if you miss the AMA due to some reason, then you can just ask us in our chat group. AMA is just one more way to ask us questions.

So, tune into r/India subreddit on 12 April at 5 PM IST. Ask me anything. See you there.

The Selfish Gene Book Overview

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 11:39:20 +0530

Yesterday I finished reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The book reminds me of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which explores how the human brain makes decisions. In contrast, The Selfish Gene puts forward how genes make decisions and manipulate our decisions for their own benefit, keeping in mind that ‘selfish’ is just a metaphor and a gene has no motive or will of its own. The book presents some very great ideas by other scientists and by the author himself, and for this reason I suggest you to read it.

The larger the percentage of genes shared by the two individuals, the higher the chance of them behaving cooperatively towards each other. Each gene in a human body, and in many organisms from the animal kingdom, has a 50% chance of being in any of the person’s sibling. The same goes for the parents, i.e, Each gene in a human body has a 50% chance to be in each of its parent’s body and 50% chance of being in each offspring’s body. Interesting questions raise from the gene point of view, why then a human body care more for their offspring than its siblings? Why there is an asymmetric relationship between parental care towards the offspring and offspring care towards the parent? After all, genetically, the investment in each individual of that organism is the same.

The book also asks whether parents should invest equally in all their offsprings? How offsprings compete for resources provided by the parent? Parents also try to minimize their effort and investment in the offspring and instead try to manipulate their mate to take more responsibility for the offspring. Why females have a sudden menopause, while males do not go through such a thing?

There are even more interesting questions, such as, why we should look an organism as a whole unit? Why not consider a pack of wolves as a single unit? An organism, like me or you, is made up of complicated parts, each acting somewhat in unity. But what is so special about an organism to treat it as a single unit? Why did the genes or replicators chose to live in complicated bodies like animals?

The arguments and the selfishness surrounding them might make you cynical, but the author is optimistic that humans can be taught to be altruistic, and that gives us one more reason to teach children to be altruistic.

How To Read Wikipedia Offline

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 12:56:27 +0530

Recently I came to know about freedom-respecting Kiwix app and I found it cool. It is a reader for offline reading knowledge sources like Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg. There are many projects which you can download for offline reading, like AskUbuntu, sections of Wikipedia– like, Chemistry, History, Sociology, etc. RationalWiki (my favorite), Ted Talks, Khan Academy, ArchWiki, etc. You can download Wikivoyage and have travel guides for offline reading, as you might not have good internet access on the go. The files are downloaded in the free format .zim which are readable by the Kiwix reader. The files are compressed, which saves disk space and internet data while downloading. Further, the zim files make it easy to index, search, and selectively decompress. It can also export files into HTML and PDF formats.

Screenshot of Kiwix Android app. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

The app is available for download for all the major operating systems– Android, GNU/Linux, iOS, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi. In the Android app, you can download content by going to the download section and clicking on the website you would like. For Desktop, just download a zim file from the Kiwix library and open it in the Kiwix app. The project also has a nice wiki documentation.

Screenshot of Kiwix app in PureOS, with offline Wikipedia. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

The features make the app very usable for viewing the content offline. Getting the Wikipedia knowledge at one place, while clicking the links referring to the respective pages inside the same offline directory makes it very convenient to use. Check the features page for more details.

As much as I like offline reading due to internet being a distraction, other use cases are even better. The zim files can be downloaded and taken to places which are cut off from internet access, and spread knowledge there. Defector NGOs use Kiwix-desktop to smuggle knowledge of the outside world to North Korea, where internet is almost non-existent with extreme amounts of censorship. In Ghana, where schools have access to computers but not internet, a project downloaded Kiwix and the full English Wikipedia and Wiktionary on a portable hard drive and transferred it to school computer labs. Quoting the project, “Fewer than 10 percent of students had ever accessed Wikipedia before the training took place. Now half the students say the new resource has influenced their studies.”

You can use a Raspberry Pi to create a local server which can be used to access the downloaded content from 25 devices, which is another cool feature.

When I downloaded the 87 GB Wikipedia zim file, I ran into an immediate problem: I couldn’t copy it into my USB drive due to FAT32 filesystem which can’t store files bigger than 4 GB. So, I backed up all the data on my USB drive and used this tutorial to format my USB drive into exFAT format, which supports larger file sizes.

A drawback in the current form is that incrememtal updates are not available, which means if you download Wikipedia on 1 Feb 2022, and now you want the changes till date, then you cannot just update the changes, you need to download from scratch. The project is working on such features.

I already started using Kiwix app almost exclusively for offline reading. Try it and I am sure you will find something useful for you.

The project relies on user donations, so I would like to urge you to support the Kiwix project by making donations.

Finally, I leave you with some more screenshots of Kiwix. Enjoy :)

Me reading AskUbuntu forum offline in my machine. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

Kiwix Desktop homepage. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

Reading RationalWiki on Kiwix Android. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

Wikimed on Kiwix app. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

Announcement: Became a Member of Indian Pirates

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that I became a permanent member of Indian Pirates a few days ago. Indian Pirates is a decentralized group which aims to be a political party someday and contest elections to form a government. I hope to bring some change politically to improve our lives. The group seeks long term change which means that we are not thinking that we will change the world in day or in one year, but rather understanding the roots of the problems in society and how it is structured and solve the problems by the root itself.

It is only an announcement post and I want to keep it short. Good Bye. And see you in the next post.

Hindi typing in Debian-based distros

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, I was contacted by IT for Change to make a video presentation on importance of Free Software in education to teachers in Hindi. When I was making slides in LibreOffice Impress, I saw some problems with Hindi typing. First, I was not able to set the input language to Hindi and second, the fonts in LibreOffice Impress weren’t rendering correctly.

So I asked my friend Raghu for help on how to type in Hindi and how to fix the issue, who helped me. I am documenting my findings here for future reference or helping other people.

I am using PureOS with KDE right now. The same should work in other GNU/Linux distros too, at least in Debian-based ones.

To type in Hindi, go to System Settings -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Layouts -> Add layout

To add the layout, fill the following details:

Limit selection by language: Any language
Layout: Indian (They have written ‘Indian’ as a language, which should be ‘Hindi’)
Variant: default
Label: in

Click ‘Ok’.

Tip: Ctrl + Alt + K keys is the shortcut for switching the input language.

That sets up typing in Hindi.

Mapping of inscript Hindi keyboard

Now for the problem of fonts, Raghu suggested me to download fonts-lohit-deva package which downloads Lohit Devanagari font. After downloading, run the command fc-cache -v | grep lohit to see if lohit is there. If it is there, we are good to go.

In LibreOffice Impress, I changed the font to ‘Lohit Devanagari’ and the problem got fixed.

At last, I made the slides and recorded the video, which you can watch here.

My Experience of running Snikket

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What is Snikket?

Snikket is a software that can be installed on a server to self-host an xmpp server. Snikket makes some choices for the person installing it on the server and therefore, makes it easy to get the features any XMPP server would usually like to have– audio/video calls, file sharing, etc. It is very convenient to set up and saves time. The downside is that you lose control over your setup, but you can choose to install plain XMPP on the server anyway if you want more control.

When Praveen told me the idea of Snikket a few days ago, I liked the idea and so I wanted to try and self-host it.

Setting up on the server

Sahil and I first tried to get Snikket running on a server with nginx running on it, but we failed to do so. Snikket’s guide assumes that there is no reverse proxy running on the server. Then I thought that we should try deploying Snikket on a server in which there is no other service running. Sahil allowed access to a server that he was abandoning anyway. He gave a fresh Debian installed on the server. After that, we followed the Snikket self-hosting guide which was very simple and within a few minutes, the server was up and running.

Experience as a user

I created an admin invite link for myself. Then I scanned the QR code in the invite link using the Snikket app. The app asked me to set a username and password, after which my account got created and ready to go. Every user on Snikket needs an invite to join. The admin creates an invite link and shares with the person. The link gives various ways of joining and links to app stores to download the app as well. Then I created an invite link for Sahil. He joined using the Conversations app, which shows that you can use any xmpp app to accept the invite and use your account. we tried texting, file sharing, audio/video calls and it was working very well. Snikket gave 95% compliance to my server out of the box, which usually takes a lot of work in plain XMPP, but Snikket made it easy. On this occassion, the founder of Snikket project, Matt replied to me on Mastodon reminding us not to take compliance measure too seriously:

While generating the invite link, the admin can choose the circle of the person they are inviting. People joining the same circle are automatically added as contacts. They don’t need to add manually. For example, you might have a circle called Family. So, everyone in the Family circle will know each other. You might have a different circle called ‘College’ and so on.

What I like about the Snikket is that it is very good quality out of the box. The audio/video call quality is superb, file sharing works like a breeze.

Further goals

The next step is to configure Snikket on a server running a reverse proxy like nginx. Me and Sahil tried but didn’t get success. If that is successful, I can run the server in long-term. For now, it is only experimental and temporary.

Goodbye for now.

Update on May 15 2022

After a week of writing this post, I could set up Snikket on nginx. It’s been almost 5 months now and the service is very smooth. I only had to update once and that was very easy. I faced no issues as of now on the server side. The uptime has been 100%.

I found Snikket project chatroom as very helping and welcoming. They try their best to help newbies in self-hosting, which usually takes a lot of patience.

How I got into Free Software

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Before I forget my journey, I hastily record it here.

It is a long series of triggers and questions raised in my mind after I met Richard Stallman in 2016 which were responsible for this.

I thought on the issues that he raised but didn’t act for years. Occasionally, thoughts about WhatsApp spying on me came to mind. Thoughts about Google recording my whole life. I told one of my friends about Facebook surveillance, and they said they have nothing to hide. Another friend I told about Uber tracking us. Another friend I told about the music app tracking us, and they responded by saying that they used it for their benefit by getting recommendations related to their music taste. All this time, I didn’t think hard enough. I merely knew about tracking, and I gave up my rights in exchange for convenience.

But many of the times, there were search results logged by Google which I didn’t want to share with them. The question was what should I do? What should anyone do to browse the web who doesn’t want to sign some arbitrary terms and conditions set up by a company who is not even accountable for their actions. So, I used a proprietary VPN app from the Play Store to “protect” myself. But Google still showed the search results in my profile. Now I really don’t want to tell Google where I am or what I search for, but on the other hand, services like Google search and Google Maps do give convenience. Also, not having a single person sharing this view in my immediate friends circle also discouraged me constantly, even if I wanted to do something about it.

In this time period, I also saw some ads by DuckDuckGo on Quora which constantly reminded me about me being pissed off with Google and their surveillance. Thanks, DuckDuckGo :)

Now, in June 2020, my master’s degree got over, and I got some time to think about the issue. I took the challenge. And as it was, it started with this challenge. I thought switching a little software or using Tor or Brave will give me privacy. I thought I will probably do it in 2-3 days. As it turned out, that thought was really stupid! The so called Dunning-Kruger effect was at work, which says that beginners in a field of study tend to overestimate their knowledge.

Initially it started as a challenge and not a quest to change the world or anything. Then I stared searching in DuckDuckGo and felt happy about it. It felt cool because nobody I knew had DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. I also used to search Reddit for information on the issue. I came to know about browser fingerprinting technique used by websites like Google to track users. As depressing as it was, using a VPN does not magically make the user invisible and there were so many complexities involved in making decisions on how to be private or anonymous.

I came across Glenn Greenwald’s book ‘No Place To Hide’ and I read it fully which was about Snowden’s revelations of massive surveillance by NSA. I felt so much for Snowden. His courage also inspired me. He risked his life to tell the world about NSA’s secret spying programs. Whenever I talked to someone about the surveillance, they seemed reluctant to change or even admit that there is some threat. And I thought that this person named Snowden risked his whole life by standing for us against the powerful US Government, but we cannot even compromise on a few conveniences for our privacy.

I didn’t had a framework to think on how to go about this. I wanted digital privacy but it is a complicated thing. I didn’t even think at that time on a threat model. I also used to think ‘What if the replacement services or software are spying on me?’. How do I verify?

This is where I took a page from Richard Stallman’s book, perhaps, I took many pages. It occured to me that ‘if we cannot even inspect what the software does, how can we be sure that the software respects privacy?’ I realized that users do not control a nonfree software. I took some time but I got convinced about the free software being necessary but not sufficient for privacy. So, the replacements I started using, like VLC Media Player or other software, were free software and this was a big difference. Now I had an answer to why use this software and how is it different. At least I was not trusting blindly on the software. I also realized that all the freedoms of free software are important and privacy is not the only issue.

At the time, I didn’t had any idea on how to think about messenger apps or search engines or anything server-based which you do not even install in your own computer.

By September 2020, I already boycotted most of the software/services by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and started using Free Software as much as possible. Back then, I had a Macbook so boycotting Apple would take more time. In September 2020, I came to know about FSF India and immediately wrote a volunteer request to FSF India. I wanted to meet like-minded people from India. Till that point, I was doing things all alone, by myself. After a few days, Pirate Praveen replied my volunteer mail. So that is how I joined the community and get in touch with others. I also participated in Software Freedom Camp 2020 where I got to meet more people from the free software movement.

In the camp, I met many people. Sahil and Arun were in my group and we had meetings late night to discuss about privacy and teaching each other. In the later stage, I met Akhil, Anupa, Bady, Akshay. And then Karthik who taught some Hugo and command line to me.

After interaction with the community, I realized that centralization of services is another problem and decentralization, federation of services is necessary for user’s freedom, in addition to free software. That enhanced my thinking, and now I could think on ‘Freedom in the cloud’. I also realized how free software community works in practice. Earlier, I only knew the philosophy of free software.

Fast-forward to April 2021, I left FSF India due to their support for Richard Stallman at the event of him being re-elected as a board member of FSF. After that, I focused on campaigning for free software on behalf of Free Software Community of India(FSCI). I became an activist by this time. I think the main reason I became an activist is that you cannot use Free Software or have privacy/anonymity in isolation. Whatever the majority of people use is usually forced upon the minority. Free Software users who care for philosophy of free software are in minority, and therefore we have to constantly fight, for example, against the social pressure of using WhatsApp. I also realized that the real way to solve the problem is raising awareness on the issue and help people in switching to Free Software. User boycott of nonfree software is a powerful way to defeat the companies who exploit users for using their services.

Naturally, I wanted to switch to fully free software, which means not using any proprietary software. I bought a Liberated Computer which can run exclusively free software, thanks to Abhas. Abhas also taught me how to install a custom ROM in the phone so that I can get rid of proprietary apps. Now I could do my computing without giving away freedom, which is a unique accomplishment in today’s world. This way I switched to free software and my Macbook passed on to someone else who seems happy to be imprisoned by it(but I am not happy that I did this to someone).

Thanks to all the people who made it possible. First of all, huge thanks to my parents for cooperating (to an extent). Without them supporting me, it wouldn’t have been possible. There are many people who took time and effort to teach me many things. Also, there were already technical solutions for freedom. Free Software movement has existed for long. Thanks to all the people for their contributions to the software I rely on. Thanks to the Free Software Community.

I would like to take the opportunity to say that we do not really lack in technical solutions for these problems, but rather the willpower of people to use them.

In the end, I would like to say that the journey has not ended, it has only started.

Quicksy: Privacy with convenience

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What is Quicksy?

Quicksy app logo

Quicksy is a chatting app for Android which is available on Google Play Store and F-Droid.

Quicksy offers the same convenience, i.e., signup using phone number, as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Signal respects users freedom and privacy, but Quicksy, in addition, is interoperable while Signal is not. iOS does not have Quicksy but Monal or Siskin IM on ioS are compatible with Quicksy.

Here is a video tutorial to get started with Quicksy.

Welcome screen of Quicksy app

List of a few features of Quicksy:

Available on F-Droid and Play Store.
Quicksy supports encryption by default and due to software code being available, we can verify that it does encrypt messages (without any cheating!). Encryption means only the users exchanging messages can read them. Quicksy respects users privacy in this way. The Quicksy server cannot read your messages.

OMEMO Encryption in Quicksy app.

Very good video/audio call support.

Video calling in Quicksy app. Credits: F-Droid Quicksy page

Sharing of photos/videos/voice message, in encrypted form.

Sharing pictures in Quicksy app.

If any of your contacts register with Quicksy service, then Quicksy automatically detects and shows them in your Quicksy contact list.
There are many apps and services compatible with Quicksy, like Conversations, Blabber, Monal etc and therefore, you are not locked into one service provider, unlike WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
One server goes down does not imply that the whole XMPP communications goes down. This is due to the decentralized nature of XMPP which Quicksy is a part of.
Easy migration: If Quicksy does something in future that you do not agree with, you can just use another XMPP service and still be able to talk to your contacts.

Why is Quicksy different?

Popular messenger apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal have problems that users do not control them. For details, please check this article. WhatsApp uses the control over its users to put them under surveillance. Telegram and Signal are free software but centralized. WhatsApp is nonfree software as well as centralized. Centralized services are easily suspectible to backdoors, can be compromised later on due to change of privacy policy or terms and conditions, are easily for government to ban etc. The owner of the platform dictates the decisions of a centralized system, so even if it is good for now, it cannot be trusted to remain good forever.

Quicksy is free/swatantra/mukt/libre software (‘free’ as in freedom) and therefore users can inspect, modify and share the software. If users want to add a feature, fix a problem with the software, they don’t have to beg the developer. In other words, the software is under user’s control.

Quicksy is a part of XMPP protocol which decentralized and federated. To understand federation, we give example of mobile telecom operators. A person using a BSNL SIM can talk to a user having Vodafone SIM, by call and SMS. WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal do not give you that freedom. Your all the contacts need to be registered with the same service provider. These apps have a fundamental problem of vendor lock-in – that if you uninstall WhatsApp, for example, you lose all your contacts. With federation, it is like changing SIM. If you have a problem with a telecom operator and you buy a new SIM of another company, you do not lose all your contacts. You can still call and message your earlier contacts. This way we can control our communications rather than relying on a single entity for our communications.

Let’s choose Quicksy for a free society rather than being locked by WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal.

A word for Free Software Community

Dear Free Software Community, let’s raise awareness about Quicksy. We don’t have to recommend our geeky solutions to everyone. If some people switch to free software, decentralized and federated app like Quicksy, that is better compared to them finding xmpp/matrix/IRC difficult to use and not using it. We need to work to advertise this option and raise awareness about it.

How I choose my distros

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you don’t know what a distro is, I will explain that in a minute.

First, I would like to ask you a question

Which operating system do you use?

Do you use Microsoft Windows?

Do you use MacOS?

or do you use Ubuntu?

Why do you use whatever you use?

In this post, I will share the reasoning behind choosing the operating systems I use and why it matters.

What is a distro? There are many operating systems known as GNU/Linux (actually they are known erroneously as “Linux”, please read this article for an explanation of why we call it GNU/Linux and not Linux). The members of the family of GNU/Linux systems are called distros.

I don’t use Microsoft Windows and MacOS because they are nonfree/proprietary software. And the symptoms of them being nonfree software are that they are malware and mistreat their users in many ways.

I do not want to use any nonfree software. So, for example, Ubuntu has nonfree software in its repositories and the version of Linux, the kernel, included in Ubuntu contains firmware blobs. That is not an ideal distro I would like to run.

Right now, I am using PureOS because it does not have any nonfree software in its repositories, does not ship with any nonfree firmware, follows Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) and so it is a GNU/FSF endorsed distro. Also, PureOS is ideologically inclined towards Free Software and values user’s freedom and privacy.

Further, PureOS is maintained by Purism, a company which is very committed to freedom and privacy of users. Purism is developing hardware, like mobile phones and laptops, which can run exclusively on fully free software. I support their work and when I say I use PureOS to someone, they might want to search about it and so it will raise awareness about Purism and their work.

Another distribution I use and endorse is Debian GNU/Linux as it does not ship with any nonfree firmware, it does not have any nonfree packages in its main repositories. I know GNU does not endorse Debian, but I think Debian is a good freedom-respecting distro. Like PureOS, Debian is also ideologically inclined towards free software philosophy. Debian adheres to Debian Social Contract as well which is committed to free software. Plus Debian has an inclusive community which is very welcoming to all. The decision-making of Debian Community is democratic in nature.

Further, I occassionally use other distros endorsed by GNU because they are committed to Free SOftware philosophy and contain no nonfree/proprietary software by default.

Summarizing the above discussion, I choose distros if they match the following criteria:

It should respect my freedom and privacy;
It should be ideologically inclined to free software philosophy.

A distro being a free software is not enough. When I use PureOS, other people will learn about Free Software and Purism. This is not the case with, say, Fedora or Ubuntu as they are not committed to free software (shipping with nonfree firmware by default is one example of this), although the operating systems are themselves Free Software. I suggest you the same if you support free software.

Covid Vaccine- A Case Of Prioritizing Greed Of A Few Over Public Health

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Look at the image below:

Source: Wikipedia's version of the file uploaded on 3-December-2021

What does the above image illustrate?

The image demonstrates how unequal the Covid-19 vaccine distribution has been across the countries.

Quoting the official data on Covid vaccines,

54.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Only 6.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.

(on 4th December 2021)

Why is it so?

Is there a scarcity of vaccine units, or is the vaccine being developed at a slow rate?

No!

In fact, the vaccine production is accelerating, but the wealthy countries are restricting the access intentionally. Also, developed countries have preordered more number of vaccines than they require and there are only a few companies developing these vaccines, which means that people in low-income developing countries may not receive vaccinations from these manufacturers until 2023 or 2024.

Why this is so? This is where the profit of Pharmaceutical companies comes in and Bill Gates too.

Basically, the covid vaccine is patented (Patent is a legal right given to someone which excludes others from making or selling an “invention” ) and pharma companies other than companies who hold the patent on the vaccine cannot produce the vaccine.

When Oxford planned to allow all companies to manufacture its Covid vaccine, Bill Gates convinced them to cancel this plan. Another article. This is because Bill Gates prioritizes his profit over people’s health.

Next, Bill Gates came up with a scheme named Covax which, instead of removing the artificial restrictions from the vaccine and allowing independent companies to develop the vaccine, plans to charge high amount of money to wealthy countries and then donate the vaccine using to poor countries.

Companies participating in Covax will be able to set their own prices, without any transparency and accountability. They won’t have to face any legal liability for any potential damages caused by the vaccine made by them. This is what companies want– to earn as much as possible without any transparency and accountability of their actions.

So, basically, what is going on is that the taxpayers of rich countries are paying for higher prices set by pharma companies so that they can donate the vaccines to low-income countries rather than allow local manufacturers in poor countries to develop their own vaccine. The vaccine distribution could have been better in low-income countries if the local manufacturers were allowed to develop the vaccine. Poor countries are doomed to suffer because of the greed of corporates. Here is a good article explaining how patents are a barrier to vaccine distribution. Additionally, this scheme would also affect rich countries’ economies.

Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit

In fact, executive of one vaccine manufactuer said there would be a chance for them to raise prices for the vaccine when COVID moves from a pandemic state to an endemic situation and the virus circulates continually in pockets around the globe. When everyone is safe, the Covid will be over. Instead the company wants the opposite, so that the virus spreads and they can earn more profit.

The scenario is not special to Covid vaccine. Billionaires like Bill Gates have a large influence on public health policies. The root of the problem is capitalism– profit over people or in other words, the system which incentivizes greed over everything else. It is a customary practice for rich to invent schemes like this to remain rich at the expense on others. No surprise that they wouldn’t treat Covid vaccine any different.

Articles for further reading:

How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines
How Pfizer Silences World Governments in Vaccine Negotiations

The article mentions:
- Pfizer silences governments through the use of nondisclosure provisions in many of its contracts. Brazil, for example, is prohibited from making “any public announcement concerning the existence… or terms” of the contract or commenting on its relationship with Pfizer without Pfizer’s prior written consent.
- Pfizer can disallow governments from accepting additional donations of the Pfizer vaccine.
- Pfizer exempts itself from liability for patent infringements, shifting the financial risk of Pfizer’s actions to government purchasers – despite Pfizer’s opposition to similar exemptions for manufacturers proposed at the World Trade Organization.
- It gives the power to secret private arbitrators, not public courts, to decide issues on contract disputes.
- Pfizer requires some countries to waive sovereign immunity, so it can go after state assets in case of a dispute.
- Pfizer gives itself sole power when it comes to making key decisions, including how vaccine deliveries will be prioritized if there is a supply shortage.
Another article for more information.
Pressuring low-income countries.
Moderna not sharing its technology stopping the poorest nations to produce the shot themselves.

Free Software Explained Simply

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The article was updated on 03 December 2021 to illustrate what source code means.

Let’s say your refrigerator has some problem, and it stopped working. You don’t know how to repair it. There is a repair shop in your town. The components of the refrigerator are sealed and there are no components available in the market. Every company makes their own components which are not compatible with other company’s refrigerators. That means you need to go to the same company to get it repaired, even though the mechanic in the shop near your house could have repaired it if it was not intentionally locked by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, it is weekend and the company services are not available on weekends.

Then you book an appointment on Monday and wait for a few days for your turn. When your turn comes, the company takes the refrigerator and “diagnoses” it for a few days. Then it returns you a call saying that it will take ₹ 50,000 to repair it, and you can get a brand-new refrigerator for ₹ 60,000. So, you got frustrated and buy a new refrigerator.

The story tells us the importance of freedom that we enjoy in our daily life. In the above story, if you had the freedom to see what’s inside your device. But it didn’t happen just because of the company making it intentionally locked and making sure that only they can repair all the products they sell.

Think of the same scenario in software. Let’s say you found a problem in the software you are working on. You are not a programmer, but other people who know programming can fix that problem. Every software is made of some human-readable code, which we call source code, which is then compiled by the computer. A software receives instructions from the code, and it does whatever the source code commands it to. You realized that the code on which the software is working is not available to you by the developer of that software. This leaves other programmers, except for the developer, in no position to fix the problem or even inspect what is wrong with the software. Similar to the refrigerator story above, the software source code is intentionally kept a secret from you and due to that restriction, you cannot get the problem fixed.

You try to contact the developer and report the problem, but there is no response. Now you try to switch to some other software, but then those software lacks some other crucial features which the previous one had. Now you are thinking that if you had the code, then there was a possibility to fix that problem. In this situation, you have to wait for the developer to fix the problem or use some other software or make your own and that too from scratch just to fix a problem, which would have surely been less hassle than to write the software from scratch.

Also, as we discussed earlier, a software takes commands from the source code. That means, whoever has the source code, has the full control over that software. If the user does not have the source code, then the user does not control the software.

What is source code?

Well, what is source code? To illustrate, I would like to show you a simple code. Don’t worry if you do not understand the code. I am only showing it to make my point.

See the following HTML code:

	<!DOCTYPE html>

	<html>

	<body>

	<h1 style="color:Red;">Hello World</h1>

	<p style="color:Blue;">I am Ravi</p>

	<p style="color:Purple;">What color is this text?</p>

	</body>

	</html>

When I write these lines in a text editor, save this file as test.html and open test.html in a browser, it looks like the following image:

	<!DOCTYPE html>

	<html>

	<body>

	<h1 style="color:Green;">Hello World</h1>

	<p style="color:Blue;">I am Ravi</p>

	<p style="color:Purple;">What color is this text?</p>

	</body>

	</html>

Now, if I change the color from Red to Green in the heading of the code above, save the file and open in the browser again. The heading becomes green in color.

See the below screenshot for this code:

Notice how change in code changes the color of the heading in the screenshots. You can do all sort of changes in the code and make the text whatever you like. Try copying the code in a text editor and save it as filename.html, where you can replace ‘filename’ by any name of your choice, and make changes in the text or color to play around and see it for yourself.

The conclusion here is: The person/entity having source code of the software controls the software. For example, Microsoft has the source code of Microsoft Windows and therefore the software is in the control of Microsoft. The source code of Whatspp is with Facebook, so Facebook controls it. Users do not control the software if they do not have the source code.

Defining Free Software

With the above discussion, I wanted to illustrate that you cannot repair a software if you do not have the source code. You do not control the software if you do not have the source code. So, the user must have the source code so that they can inspect and modify it according to their needs. In the above example, if the source code were available with you, then you also require the freedom to share the software with people who know programming. It is analogous to you showing the refrigerator to a mechanic in the above example so that they can repair it.

Now let’s say you have the source code of a software and the freedom to share it with others. There is a problem in that program you would like to fix. Someone who knows how to fix the problem, will modify the source code and give you their modified version so that your problem gets solved.

When the software guarantees all the above-mentioned freedoms and, in addition, the freedom to run the software for any purpose, we call it Free Software. Free Software is a matter of liberty, not price. So ‘Free’ in ‘Free Software’ means freedom and not price. It is also called Libre Software or Swatantra Software or Mukt Software to emphasize that it is about freedom and not price. Think of free as in free speech not as in free meal.

The following poster gives the definition of Free Software:

Credits: Jeison Yehuda Amihud
Source: https://www.gnu.org/graphics/amihud-4-freedoms.html
LICENSE: CC-BY-SA 4.0

Examples of Free Software

Check my Free Software List for some examples of Free Software.

An example is Scribus, which is a desktop publishing software used in publishing newspapers, magazines etc. Scribus only supported publishing in Latin languages. Oman government funded adding a feature to Scribus, due to which Arabic support was added. Due to this, Scribus got Malayalam support and many newspapers now use Scribus to publish. The full story is here. It goes to show the value of freedom. Scribus is free software, which means it respects all the four freedoms mentioned in the poster. Source code being available, developers could add a feature and then used freedom 3 to share the modifications with others so that everyone, including nonprogrammers, benefitted from this.

Another example is a free software named GNUKhata. Its development is funded by the Kerala government. Due to the freedom given by Free Software, GNUKhata is customizable. Due to its customizability, it now supports many Indian languages and many features like GST-compliance were added. Since many proprietary software for accounting are very costly and cannot be bought but can only be used against a license fee paid annually or periodically, many small businesses cannot afford them. GNUKhata can be downloaded for free-of-cost and users, businesses do not have to pay any license fee or ask for permission to use it.

Think of what the world would have been without Free Software. What would have happened if there was no Free Software in the above mentioned examples.

Updated on Sunday 28 November 2021 to add suggestions by Praveen and Snehal.

Credits: Thanks for Ravish, Praveen and Snehal for reviewing the article and giving suggestions.

What Does The Facebook Outage Teach Us

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On the 4th of October 2021, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp were down for more than 6 hours. This had a huge impact on many of its users, with devastating effect to many. During the outage, many users flocked to Twitter, Discord, Signal, and Telegram, resulting in disruptions on these apps’ servers.

Many businesses, which rely on Facebook’s services for their business, were down. In many countries, Facebook is synonymous with the internet and therefore their communications, business, payments, humanitarian work got disrupted. The outage temporarily broke the ability for some Facebook employees to access company buildings and conference rooms with their badges. And every third-party site that relies on “log in with Facebook” didn’t work as well.

What does this teach us? That Facebook’s services are centralized (they are controlled by a single entity). They are the single point of failure and control. A single company like Facebook controlling a large part of communications is no different from a dictator. You are at a mercy of them.

This tells us that the whole world relying on a single company for all their communications, businesses etc. is not sustainable.

In addition, such a service can be sold to any other company, like WhatsApp was sold to Facebook. So, even if the service is good today, it can become bad in the future– like, by selling it to another company or by changing privacy policy. Also, it is easier for governments to ban such a service.

Facebook is so bad for many reasons that my advice to you is to delete your Facebook account.

Now, what can we do about it?

I do not use or be user by any centralized service, be it Signal, Twitter, Telegram. I use decentralized and federated services. Email is an example of federation. A @gmail.com user can write mails to @yahoo.com user and vice-versa. This gives a choice of service providers, and therefore the entire communication systems of the world do not depend entirely on one service. If one service goes down, then this won’t disrupt the communications of the whole world.

Examples of decentralized networks are : Jitsi Meet(a video-calling software), Searx search engine etc. They can be self-hosted by anyone in their server. This gives users a choice of service providers.

Examples of federated networks are: Fediverse, XMPP, Matrix etc.

XMPP is a chat protocol. There are many services which a user can register with and still talk to another XMPP user who is registered on another XMPP service. This choice of service providers ensures that users are not locked into a single provider.

To get started with XMPP, you can use Quicksy on Android, whose onboarding process is similar to WhatsApp and Telegram. However, Quicksy users can talk to users registered on other XMPP providers, and so they are not locked-in to the service. If one service on XMPP shuts down or changes their policy, users can switch to other provider without going to the trouble of convincing every contact to switch to a new service. Compare this with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. If they change their policy or you disagree with these providers in future, you need to convince every contact to switch to that new service.

The bottom line is that Facebook’s outage is a reminder that they are a single point of failure, and other centralized services are no different in this aspect. Switch to decentralized and federated services instead, rather than being locked into a single provider for all your needs.

Scribus: When Freedom-Respecting Software Saved The Day

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Janayugom is a newspaper in Kerala, India, which publishes news in Malayalam language. Earlier they were using Adobe Pagemaker for publishing which supported only ASCII encoding. They considered using a better software for publishing in Malayalam. Many suggested them to try Adobe InDesign, but they realized that they need to pay a hefty subscription fee, which they could not afford. They came across community members of FSCI (Free Software Community of India), who suggested them to use Scribus for their publishing work. They don’t have to pay for any subscription fee to use it. Plus it supports Malayalam.

The developers of Scribus only added support for Latin languages, like English, Spanish, etc. Oman government funded adding support for Non-Latin languages in Scribus with Complex Text Layout feature, because they wanted support for Arabic language. This made is possible to add Malayalam support to Scribus.

This was done independent of the developers of Scribus. It is because Scribus is Free Software (free as in freedom, not price), which means anyone can adapt Scribus according to their needs. Such a thing is not possible with those Adobe software as they are proprietary and only developers can make changes.

What will you do if the developer of a proprietary software does not care about the feature you want to add? Maybe the developers don’t care about supporting your language. In the case of Free Software, such changes are possible, independent of developers’ wish. Further, the funded project by the Oman government helped people in India to publish in their language. It is because users get freedom to share the modified versions of Free Software. And thus, any addition of feature helps the whole society.

The Importance of Communities

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wikipedia defines ‘Community’ as:

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity.

Communities can be of many types and they might exist for different set of goals. In this post, I will share my experience with the free software commmunity that I am part of and its importance in my life. The topic has been touched in this blog post by FSCI earlier. The point was that communities can self-host and maintain free software powered services for the benefit of all because every individual self-hosting their services is not possible(for, say, people who do not know how to do) and not sustainable. Therefore, people can collaborate and run services.

That aspect is very important and that helps me greatly in my use of free software. In this post, I will touch on another aspect of the importance of communities, that is– the psychological boost that we get by being in a group which shares our goals. I continually say that I use only free software for my computing. But how is that possible in the era where proprietary software dominates? First comes my realization that software must respect user’s freedom. Then, my willpower to use only free/swatantra software. Then I also rely on the aspect touched earlier in the post about community-run services. I use community-run services(like the ones by FSCI) for my daily use. Abhas’ services helped me largely too. But one of the most important aspects is: that I am a part of the community which has a goal of promoting freedom-respecting software and full of people who understand the value of privacy. I think that if I was doing it all alone, I would probably would have been demotivated. I don’t know if I were able to keep it up. I keep getting demotivated but when I see that I am not alone in this activism, it definitely helps. Then I have friends from Free Software Communities outside of FSCI too. Many of them I know from Mastodon.

Also, I like how our community is inclusive and welcoming to all. Plus, it is nonhierarchial too. This aspect has made me hate hierarhical and centralized social structures as well(more on this later ;) ). We are also working on increasing the diversity in the community too. I hope that that people from all backgrounds (and not only privileged) get benefit and freedom that freedom-respecting software provides to the user.

I wanna thank you all for making this possible :)

Similar read: Arun Mathai also has a post on why he likes communities.

Contribute to Wikimedia Commons

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you have an image or a photo that you have taken which is useful for informative purposes, you can upload them to Wikimedia Commons.

All users of files found on Wikimedia Commons must be given the Four Freedoms:

The freedom to use the media.
The freedom to study the media and use information gained from it.
The freedom to make and distribute copies of the media.
The freedom to make changes to the media and distribute derived versions.

I publish my images under a copyleft license, which means if you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original, thus protecting every user’s (whoever uses that image) freedom. One such license is CC-BY-SA 4.0.

You can upload your images to Wikimedia Commons as well. Whenever you have some photo you shot and want to contribute it to public so that others can use it in their work, upload it to Wikimedia Commons.

A federated and decentralized version of image sharing Wikimedia Commons would be good. Currently it is centralized and all the images are on one server. We can store these images at many places to avoid single point of failure.

Thanks to sahilister, who suggested me to upload there.

Why Free Software and decentralization are necessary for privacy

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Free Software means software which respects user’s freedom. It does not mean that the users get software without paying or for free of cost. Free Software is a matter of liberty not price. I sometimes call it swatantra/mukt software to clarify this point.

Precisely, Free Software gives users the following freedoms:

Freedom 0: Freedom to run the software;
Freedom 1: Freedom to study and modify the software. Users must have the source code of the software to exercise this freedom;
Freedom 2: Freedom to share the software;
Freedom 3: Freedom to share your modified versions;

A software which lacks any of these freedoms is called nonfree/proprietary software. Most of the well-known proprietary software are malware.

If we do not have the source code of the software, we cannot inspect it for whether it has malicious functionalities. In particular, we cannot inspect whether the software has spyware or not. Even if we get the source code, we cannot remove the spyware unless we can modify it. In view of this note, freedom 1 is a precondition to user privacy.

If users cannot share the software, then they need to inspect the software themselves to know whether software has some spying functionality or not. Sharing the software allows us to give a copy of software to someone who can inspect. For example, nonprogrammers can share a copy of the software with someone to get the software inspected for malicious functionalities, maybe, in exchange for a fee. When we don’t know how to repair a fan, bicycle or a car and we give it to a mechanic who repairs for us. Similar is the case for software.

Let’s say someone removed a spyware from a software, then they can share their modifications with others if Freedom 3 is granted. If Freedom 3 is not granted, then everyone need to modify themselves which is a lot of redundant work.

These freedoms give users collective control over the software. The collective control is necessary for users to get privacy. A nonfree software cannot be trusted for privacy. Please note that Free Software might not be sufficient for privacy. It is a precondition for privacy.

For example, Ubuntu operating system is a Free Software and it contained spyware in older versions. With Free Software, users have a defence to remove those malfunctionalities. With proprietary software, there is no such chance.

Another factor is decentralization. What I mean by decentralization is that network-based services allow self-hosting and federation. Please read this article by FSCI for details on how decentralization in combination with Free Software and end-to-end encryption can give you privacy.

I will summarize the article for you here. Basically, when we use software installed in someone else’s computers(called servers), like Google Docs, we lose control over our computing. This is because all communications, say, in case of Google Docs will go via Google’s servers. Since, we are using Google’s computers for our computing they can log our activities and put us in surveillance. If the server is in our control or a trusted one, then this is not a problem but services like Google Docs does not allow users to deploy it on their own server(even if it would it would not be advisable due to Google Docs being nonfree software). So we need the freedom to self-host, which means freedom to run our own servers. This does not mean we have to run our own server. Granting users the freedom to self-host gives rise to many service providers. Then we can choose one which we trust, or pay someone to deploy our server.

Federation means two users using different service providers can communicate. This is required, otherwise when we switch the service provider, we need to make effort to switch every contact to a new service provider. Federation allows us to switch service provider without other contacts switching the provider.

Example of free software powered federated systems are Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon. Searx search engine is an example where self-hosting is allowed but the concept of federation does not apply.

To illustrate, we take an example of Matrix chat system. A user registered on service provider 1 can contact with users on service provider 2 on Matrix. All messages are end-to-end encrypted. And since the servers are under user’s control, they can control the policies and what data is being collected.

The conclusion is: Free Software and decentralization are necessary for privacy. Proprietary Software and centralized services cannot be trusted for privacy.

Story of creation of this website

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the story of creation of the website you are reading and how it was created.

I always wanted to create a website from as far as I can remember. This is because I wanted autnonomy over the content that I can post. Social media posting format is not suitable for website like this. Also the website has a cool domain on my name which feels really good.

In the Software Freedom Camp 2020, I met Sahil and Arun. Sahil already had a website, while Arun purchased a domain name around that time. I got inspired from Arun and bought this domain from gandi.net in October 2020.

Then I took the project in Free Software Camp 2020 to learn Hugo. Didn’t learn much from there as I didn’t put a lot of time and effort into it.

After the domain purchase, the website wasn’t up for 9 months. Finally, in July 2021, Sahil helped me set up this website. And after tinkering with the website, I learnt enough Hugo and git to maintain the website. And here I am, writing the story of the website.

My experience as a learner in Free Software Camp 2020

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Index

Introduction

I participated as a learner in Free Software Camp 2020 organized by FSCI and FSF India. This is a post about my experience of the same. If you don’t know what free software is, then you can read my article on the same. I have never attended any software-related camp other than this one and therefore I have no idea what other camps are about and so I cannot compare this camp with any other camp of technical nature or one which involves introducing free software philosophy to the participants. Since the camp concluded a long before I am writing this post, there is a chance I forgot a lot of things about it or my feelings/opinions of many things at that time.

What is Free Software Camp

This is my takeaway for what free software camp means. I think that the camp had two goals:

To acquaint the participants with free software philosophy.
To connect the learners with mentors and contribute to free software projects. These contributions don’t have to be technical in nature but they must contribute to free software in some way.

The camp was divided into the following phases:

Ice breaking sessions.
Introduce the learners with free software philosophy.
GNU/Linux Installation phase.
A phase where we get to meet people who earn their living from free software.
Projects phase.

Motivation to join the camp

I was already introduced to free software philosophy and started caring about the idea in 2020. The main thing I was looking at the time around September 2020 was: How does free software actually work in reality? I was not aware of communities that power free software. Curiosity to know how free software works was one motivation to join the camp.

Also, before the start of the camp, I already started shifting to free software but I needed help on: 1. Which software do people from free software community use? ; 2. To try and test these software.

For example, I came to know about BigBlueButton from the camp. It is a videoconferencing software which respects freedom and allows self-hosting.

Another motivation was to meet with like-minded people because usually people don’t get excited about free software and therefore, one can get demotivated.

To sum up, my motivations were:

To understand how free software communities work.
To know what software free software proponents use.
To meet like-minded people.

My motive was not really learning anything technical.

How I came to know about the camp

The camp was announced in mid September 2020. And a few days ago, I filled the volunteer form for FSF India. Due to that group’s announcement, I came to know about the camp.

Experience as a learner in the camp

I registered for the camp and started joining the sessions when the camp commenced. In the first stage, the learners were divided into small groups based on their language preference. I was added to Group 6 which was a Hindi group and Sruthi was assigned to our group from the organizing team as a co-ordinator(Sorry I cannot find a word for this).

I mixed up well with this group. We used to have regular meetings and shared what we think about various issues. People used to feel autonomous in sharing their thoughts. And we also helped each other in various things, for example, I helped people in setting up their gpg keys and taught how to send encrypted emails. So, it can be said that Group 6 ice-breaking session really broke the ice or maybe the ice was not even there to begin with. Groups were also given an activity to present on a topic assigned by the organizers. Our group decided to have an audio presentation on the topic. The topic was something related to democracy and digital rights(how surveillance, censorship etc. affects democracy). We all rehearsed it many times, suggested each other of points and finally completed the recording and submitted it for the presentation in a camp session. I found that overall, be it my group, other learners, organizers, or mentors, people were very helpful, kind and inclusive. This ended our ice-breaking sessions.

Next was GNU/Linux installation phase. I used to have Macbook at that time. I could boot GNU/Linux in my Macbook but the touchpad didn’t work. So that was a bit sad. I badly wanted to run a GNU/Linux distro on my Macbook. Maybe external mouse would have worked. But I didn’t try that. Therefore, I proceeded in the camp with MacOS installed.

Next was the phase where we met people who earn their living from free software. I attended sessions by Abhas and Nagarjuna. They were good and gave me some insights. Abhas has a way of making sessions interactive which I would like to do in my own sessions(not only in camp but anywhere). Nagarjuna raised issues about copyright mainly and was very interactive, which I really liked. He was in no hurry but asked questions from us and patiently waited for our responses and cleared doubts.

Now came the projects phase. Initially, I was not excited to do any technical project. So I thought of choosing a non-technical project. I ended up choosing a technical one because I wanted to learn how to create website so that I can create my own wesbite. I chose the project offered by Karthik to learn Hugo Static Site Generator to create websites. The project was to create and maintain Privacy Yathra website. I took the project as a long-term work rather than just set up the website as a part of the camp and run away.

I didn’t work a lot on the project and I could not learn Hugo within the deadline set by the camp. But later on, I set up this website you are reading, with the help of Sahil. From there on, I learnt from different people about different things about creating and maintaing the website. The Privacy Yathra website(which was the project of the camp) is not yet created but as now I know how to work with Hugo and git(actually I still don’t know much), I would one day be up. Keep looking for Privacy yathra website, folks :) It can be up anytime.

Shout out to all the people who made this work so smoothly. Especially organizers were always available for any help I needed and were very welcoming.

Aftermath

After the conclusion of the camp, I am integrated with FSCI as a campaigner. As mentioned above, I set up my website after the camp. Also, I am a part of the organizing team of the succeeding camp named “Software Freedom Camp Diversity Edition 2021” organized by FSCI. This year(2021) we are looking for diversity. We are focusing on reaching out to groups underrepresented in the free software community. Registrations for learners are open till 15th October. Please register if you are interested and from an underprivileged backgroud. Please help us raise awareness about the camp so that we can reach the needy. You can share the camp poster on social media(even on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, if you use them anyway, then why not?), with your contacts in chat, emails etc.

Word for learners of the upcoming camps

If you are participating as a learner in any of the editions of the camp, then I have some advice for you. Hopefully, the above text gave you some idea on what happens in the camp. I think the best way to contribute to the camp is to contribute to free software. You might be surprised that the best way to contribute to free software is not about adding code or features to free software, although they are very good contributions. I think it is not a good idea to improve the code of some free software or work on a free software project for a few months and then forget about free software. I would suggest you to understand what free software philosophy is, why free software is important, use free software in your own lives for your own work and the hardest part, try to convince others to use free software and avoid proprietary software. If you are committed to free software philosophy, you will develop free software and contribute to free software as a side effect. If you are not committed to free software philosophy, then you will only contribute code to free software as a part of the camp and then forget about it. Take it as a lifetime project to contribute to free software to switch to free software and writing code to develop or improve the free software. Also, avoid proprietary software.

Are Free Software and Open Source Software the Same Thing?

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 03:40:00 +0530

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between the terms “free software” and “open-source software?” Perhaps, you think they are the same. It is often misunderstood that “free” refers to free of cost. The term “FOSS” is also very common. It expands to Free and Open Source Software. In addition, I have heard people say that since the software is open source and available free of cost, therefore it is denoted by the term FOSS. In this post, I’ll illustrate the difference between the two terms.

Free Software refers to software which respects users freedom to run, study, modify, share and share the modified versions of the software. For example, VLC media player, Firefox browser, and Emacs. “Free” in Free Software refers to liberty, not price. The software I just mentioned also qualify as Open Source. The definition of Open Source can be read on the opensource.org website by visiting this link. Since it is a bit too long, I didn’t include it here.

Practically speaking, the terms “free software” and “open source software” refer to the same class of software. However, the main difference between the two terms lies not in the actual software, but the values behind the respective movements. Free Software movement campaigns for users’ freedom and that users must control the software running in their own devices. On the other hand, Open Source movement does not put the issue in ethical terms like users’ freedoms or rights, but more of like a practical choice.

The term “free software” existed since 1984, while the term “open source” came into existence in 1998. Let’s look at why this new term was introduced even though the term “free software” was already there.

Quoting Open Source Initiative on coining the term open source,

The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. The strategy session grew from a realization that the attention around the Netscape announcement had created an opportunity to educate and advocate for the superiority of an open development process. The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

It is apparent from the above-mentioned quote that the term “Open Source” was coined as a way to market the same idea represented by the term “Free Software” in a way detached from philosophical or moral considerations. It was promoted as a superior model of software development, not as a matter of user rights or freedom.

My friend and fellow Free Software activist Praveen has put this difference into a nice quote, which is very relevant to distinguish the two:

Open Source wants to create better software, Free Software wants to create a better society.

Quoting Richard Stallman from his famous article on the difference and the dangers that the approach open source movement has in avoiding the ethics part:

When open source proponents talk about anything deeper than that, it is usually the idea of making a “gift” of source code to humanity. Presenting this as a special good deed, beyond what is morally required, presumes that distributing proprietary software without source code is morally legitimate.

This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use, and even develop, free software, which has extended our community—but only at the superficial, practical level. The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it. That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, some even offering copies gratis. Why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, to value freedom in and of itself rather than the technical and practical convenience of specific free software. To spread this idea, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but it is dangerous if it becomes so common that the love of freedom comes to seem like an eccentricity.

The difference between the two movements is best illustrated by an incident in which TiVo - a video recorder - used a software which was free/open-source and gave users legal right to modify it, but the hardware won’t allow users to run their modified versions. This restriction was fine for Open Source proponents like Linus Torvalds, but Free Software proponents like Stallman opposed such restrictions. A new version of GNU General Public License was written by the Free Software Foundation to address this issue. For more details on this, I would suggest you to read this page on the GNU website. Moreover, you can read the Wikipedia page too by clicking here.

Personally, I use the term “Free Software” and not “Open Source” due to my opposition against proprietary software. Furthermore, I agree with the ethical values associated with the term “Free Software”. Using this term helps me spread awareness about the difference and propagate the ethical values.

Feel free to use the term you prefer, but it is important to understand what the term means.

What is DRM and how it threatens your freedom

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ever used Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix or Hotstar? Ever wondered why you cannot copy the files from them and share it with someone? Ever wondered why you cannot download the files in your device and transfer in another device or play them in any other media player? Let’s be clear on this: Downloading means that the file is now in your device and you can play/view it in any app of your choice. Download does not mean that you can only view the file in that particular app(like Spotify or Netflix) for offline use.

The answer is DRM.

DRM is usually known as Digital Rights Management by publishers, record labels and streaming dis-services. The long form Digital Restrictions Management is closer to reality.

DRM basically means digital files(any form of artwork, PDF, music files or software) are encrypted in such a way that users cannot copy them. This threatens user’s freedom because technology allows us to copy files and share with others. What is the point of “technological progress”(being able to copy files is an example of technological progress) if you cannot even use it?

Copying is an inherent nature of digital files to the extent that it reminds of the quote by Bruce Schneier, “Trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.” Also, since we can copy files without any marginal cost and share it to everyone, it raises a fundamental moral question, quoting Eben Moglen, “If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay?”

The usual logic in favor of DRM is that artists lose money when someone copies a file and share it with someone. This argument assumes that everyone who has a copy of the file would have paid for a copy if sharing was prohibited. In reality, a lot of files would not even have been sold. Imagine a friend shared a book with you and you read it. Would you have read all such books shared with you if sharing was prohibited? When someone refuses sharing a book or a music file with you, do you go to market and purchase that thing? Also, when the marginal cost of copying is zero, nobody is losing money when you copy the file. Compare this situation with physical objects like chairs, noodles, clothes etc. Every piece of that physical object has a production cost while for software and digital files,the cost is only in the development of that file or software but every copy is effectively free-of-cost(given that computers and mobile phones are household items that people use for personal use anyway, so the cost of device is not included in the copying).

Note that in the current system, only well-established artists really make money. Usually, the artists do not get fair compensation and the streaming companies are the one earning from artists’ work. These DRM imposing dis-services act like a middle agency between users and artists, effectively robbing user’s freedom and artists’ pay.

Should we prohibit users from copying files and sharing them OR should we change our business model and allow them to share the files? Since, DRM benefits only publishers, streaming services, record labels and the like, while others receives discrimation, exclusion and lack of freedom to use technology, I think the the business model needs to change rather than restrciting users from sharing.

DRM is also being used in educational resources now-a-days which excludes people who can’t afford them or people who value freedom and won’t use files containing DRM.

DRM is already being used to discriminate against the poor in many ways.

When a DRM imposing service gets shut down, users lose access to all their data they purchased from that service. For example,Yahoo music used to distribute music files with DRM and when it shut down, users could not backup their files and lost access to all the music they purchased. Another example is when Microsoft’s ebook store closed, all the users lost their ebooks purchased from there.

Should we wait for the companies to eliminate DRM from the files? No. Companies might never remove DRM from their services. Rather, we can refuse to use services which impose DRM. You can use youtube-dl to download music files from many sites. You can use Newpipe Android app to download music and videos from YouTube. For educational resources, we can use Libgen or Scihub to download the books and academic papers. Check the DRM-free guide by FSF for websites which provide DRM-free content.

Everytime you pay for a DRM product, the companies building such products get funds, either by your data or you pay them directly. The measure of refusing to use DRM services brings change to an extent– that we do not fund such practices. But the real change is to have a model for authors/creators to get funded and they release the content without DRM.

We can fund artists without DRM. Fans can directly fund artists for their work. A lot of YouTubers get money from their Patreons and people do directly fund creators.

Here are a few examples to demonstrate that the model can work:

Louis C.K. released copies of his film without any restrictions or DRM and the film got profit in 12 hours.
Diesel Sweeties released a DRM free webcomics and had huge success. They started releasing DRM-free payment optional model since then.
The band Radiohead released an album on their website without any restrictions with listeners allowed to pay nothing or any amount they would like to.

Therefore, we can fund artists directly and copy creative works will freedom. It is possible to have both freedom and creative work. What do you think?

Book Review: Phantoms in the Brain

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, I finished reading the book Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran. The topic covered here is fascinating, interesting, mysterious, disturbing and shocking. The cliche “Reality is stranger than fiction” comes to mind.

The book covers many disorders and tries to explain them in concrete naeurological terms.

One of the cases presented in the book was that majority of amputees who suddenly lost a limb in an accident feel pain in the lost limb. Many patients feel that the fingers of the lost limb (fingers are not even attached to the body) are clenched tightly and this leads to unbearable pain (called phantom pain and hence the title of the book).

In the past, neurologists regarded such cases as mental problems and handed over the patient to psychiatrists. The book holds the view that due to damages in specific portions of the brain leads to loss of functionality which that portion carries. This is fascinating because when trying to understand these cases, it seems like we are only looking at exceptional cases, but at the same time, they do tell a lot about the normal human brain. Ramachandran brought a fresh appraoch and looked at how phantoms (the patients still feel that the lost limb is attached to the body and such a limb is called a phantom limb) are generated and how the brain can be tricked into unlearning a phantom. Would you like to look at the solution/treatment of the phantom pain? It is here. The solution is interesting as well.

Human brain can easily be tricked. Our brains carry so many cognitive biases, delusions, denial of the obvious facts. Quoting Oliver Sacks from the preface of the book, “The deeply strange business of mirror agnosia, and that of misattributing one’s own limbs to others, are often dismissed by physicians as irrational. But these problems are also considered carefully by Ramachandran, who sees them not as groundless or crazy, but as emergency defense measures constructed by the unconscious to deal with sudden overwhelming bewilderments about one’s body and the space around it. They are, he feels, quite normal defense mechanisms ( denial, repression, projection, confabulation, and so on) such as Freud delineated as universal strategies of the unconscious when forced to accommodate the intolerable or unintelligible.”

The topic presented here aligns very well with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which says that there are two modes of thinking – System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, effortless and jumps to conclusions. It cannot be consciously controlled by us but we can change our habits to feed them into System 1 (like driving, walking, playing a cricket ball are in System 1 of the person practicing enough). System 2 is slow, effort and resource consuming. Heavy cognitive tasks are done using System 2.

Overall, Phantoms in the brain urges neuroscientists to be more open in their approach, while at the same time being fun to read, engaging and accessible to the general audience.

I rooted my Samsung Galaxy S9+

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

(Warning: Installing a custom ROM on your device will void your warranty and there is a risk that it can brick your device)

(Note: In my case, I could afford to risk bricking my phone)

Index

What is rooting?

A user having root access of an operating system means they have the capability to make unrestricted changes in the system. Such a user is also called a superuser or an admin. Check out the wiki page for more details.

Mobile phones which ship with Android pre-installed in their devices do not give users root access by default. For example, the users have read-only permissions for /system/ partition on the phone. Therefore, users need to put effort into taking root access of their devices. This extra effort is what we call ‘rooting’. Check this Wikipedia page for a good list of advantages that rooting provides to users. This gives users full control over their devices.

Android phones are shipped with nonfree software preinstalled which users cannot remove without having root access. Apps like YouTube, Google Play Store and other malware by Google are usually preinstalled. I wanted to remove the nonfree software from my phone.

To read the issues of freedom in Android in more detail, please check Richard Stallman’s article on this topic.

My experience of rooting

I have Samsung Galaxy S9+ phone and I searched on the internet for ROMs that can be installed in this device. I found the information on internet very confusing and unorganized. Since there was a risk of bricking my phone which would make it not usable, I thought of consulting someone who has installed custom ROM many times and can give some of their time to guide me. I consulted Abhas for this who is a hacker and has a lot of experience in installing custom ROMs. We were on a video call and Abhas gave me instructions.

The steps we did are listed here in this text file. Note that I used Debian, which is a GNU/Linux based operating system in my laptop. Depending on your phone model and laptop operating system, the steps mentioned at the URL will differ.

First, we tried installing Carbon ROM but it failed somehow. Then Abhas suggested me to try iode OS and I installed it. The XDA page for iode OS for my phone is here.

Check iode OS Screenshots taken by me after the fresh install (I may have installed a few apps before taking these Screenshots)

Important Note: After the install, the Jio sim does not work because iode OS (and many other custom ROMs) do not have Volte support.

For gaining root access, I flashed Magisk using TWRP.

After this, I learnt flashing a ROM myself and I successfully installed an older version of Lineage OS myself on Moto G4 Plus.

How much free software does iode OS have

iode OS is a free software operating system which does not have any Google apps pre-installed. Infact, the only nonfree software app pre-installed is Magic Earth. I immediately uninstalled that app. I suggest iode OS team to remove Magic Maps. If they would like to add any maps app, my suggestion to them is to add Organic Maps which takes data from OpenStreetMap.

The phone still contains nonfree firmware which is necessary for some hardware, like WiFi, to function properly, and the nonfree firmware itself is a serious issue in terms of user freedom. Even though the phone does not contain 100% free software, it is still a big step towards my freedom. There are no Google or Samsung apps in my phone which were pre-installed in the phone.

Nonfree software in iode OS: Magic Earth + nonfree firmware.

List of a few pre-installed software in the iode OS:

F-Droid, modified to give priority to iode repository;
QKSMS
iode Browser
microG
pep
Geometric Weather app

How to install a custom ROM

You can also install a custom ROM if you have an Android phone. If you have an iPhone, I don’t know anything about flashing a custom ROM there as of now. Perhaps ditching the iPhone is the only step towards freedom.

To find a custom ROM built for your phone, first check if Lineage OS has an official support for your phone. If Lineage OS is available for your device, then go for it. Also, check Lineage OS website for instructions to install custom ROM on your phone.

Steps for choosing a custom ROM:

Visit the XDA Forums.
Scroll down to All Categories section.
Choose your manufacturer from the All Categories list, for example, Samsung, Redmi etc.
Choose exact model of your phone, like Samsung Galaxy S9+. For my phone, this leads to this page.
Choose ROMs, Kernels from the list. This leads us to this page for my phone model.
Check for posts with OSS and OFFICIAL tags. Also check if gapps (Google Apps) are included or not. I suggest you to not include gapps.

If you click on a post, it will also contain instructions on how to flash a custom ROM.

Now the steps involved in installing custom ROM on your phone are:

Unlock the bootloader of the phone.
Run the phone in download mode and flash a recovery project like TWRP into the phone.
Use TWRP to wipe all the data– Dalvik Cache, system, cache, data. Flash the downloaded ROM image.
Reboot to recovery.

Depending on your device and the operating system in the laptop, the way to perform these steps would differ.

I know that these steps can be overwhelming for nontechnical users or users who haven’t done this before. Therefore, I am planning to make a video tutorial on rooting a phone in the future.

Ethical issues regarding firmware

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Index

What is firmware

Firmware is a software which provides a way for hardware to interact with the operating system. It runs on a secondary processor and not on the CPU. For example the WiFi chipset will run this code directly instead of the main CPU. Firmware files aren’t used by the kernel, they’re loaded by the kernel onto other pieces of hardware.

Quoting Debian wiki on what is Firmware:

Firmware refers to embedded software which controls electronic devices. Well-defined boundaries between firmware and software do not exist, as both terms cover some of the same code. Typically, the term firmware deals with low-level operations in a device, without which the device would be completely non-functional.

For example, remote control of a television uses firmware to convert your button presses into infrared signals so that the television can understand. For more examples of firmware, please check this wiki page.

Let’s suppose you are able to boot and install a free software operating system, like any GNU/Linux based Operating System and you did not install any nonfree software. You might be tempted to say that you are running only free software but you might still be running proprietary firmware. For example, Ubuntu comes pre-installed with nonfree firmware. Depending upon your laptop, you might need to install nonfree firmware in addition to the operating system for some hardware to work properly.

Problems with proprietary firmware

The problem with propietary firmware is the same as any propietary software– users do not control it and we cannot trust it. It does not give users the freedom and therefore users do not have a defence against any of the bugs or intentional malfunctionalities being introduced in the system.

Quoting Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical which develops and maintains Ubuntu,

If you read the catalogue of spy tools and digital weaponry provided to us by Edward Snowden, you’ll see that firmware on your device is the NSA’s best friend.

Following are some known examples of insecurity issues due to bugs or adding intentional malfunctionalities at firmware level:

A researcher broke into Apple’s firmware and caused the battery to overcharge
NSA adds spyware into firmware of many devices.
Wikileaks revealed that several CIA projects infect Apple Mac firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed). Basically, EFI/UEFI is essentially a backdoor for taking control of a computer without user’s knowledge. Further, the attacks described in the leaks are very widespread.
A vulnerability in the EFI/UEFI firmware is used by CIA to write to NVRAM or persistent storage of the computer without the users knowing about it. It cannot be detected easily by the users and it can survive a complete OS reinstall.
CIA documents leaked by the Wikileaks note that the UEFI level exploits can compromise the whole system. The ExitBootServices Hooking page notes, “At this point, you can do whatever you want.”

Keep in mind that if a backdoor is installed at the firmware level, it can gain full access to your computer. Such a control of the system means that the applications running on your machine are also fully compromised.

Importance of free firmware

In the previous section, we explored that the issue of firmware being propietary and hence, not controlled by the user, is not a light issue at all. It is a very serious issue and the well-known exploits in these firmware can make you a prey to NSA or any third-party spying without you even knowing.

The firmware should be free software as any software so that the users have freedom to detect and fix bugs, remove any backdoors put into the firmware, and other problems that can arise with proprietary firmware. For this, the manufacturers need to publish key technical specifications sufficient to write free firmware for their hardware. Even if you are running proprietary firmware and ditch Windows or MacOS or any proprietary operating system to switch to a free software operating system, like GNU/Linux, I welcome your move as one more step towards freedom.

A very important example of a firmware is BIOS, which starts your computer when you power it on. Libreboot and Coreboot are free software BIOS.

Liberated Computer (the laptop I use) runs on Coreboot and the only nonfree software it has is the Intel ME blob which is disabled.That means it runs purely free software.

The following devices have only free firmware installed at the time of shipping:

Devices which can run Replicant OS (Note: You might have to use external hardware/dongles for WiFi, Bluetooth to work)
Devices that have Libreboot support
Devices which are RYF certified by FSF

Unfortunately, proprietary firmware is not even considered a problem by many people who care about software freedom. Perhaps there is a lack of awareness of the issue. If that is the case, then hopefully I have now made you aware of the issues with proprietary firmware.

(Credits: Thanks to Pirate Praveen for proofreading the article and correcting some factual errors.)

For further reading:

Debian wiki.

Liberated Computer Review

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Added some pictures on 29-April-2022.

What is Liberated Computer

Liberated Computer is a computer sold by LibreTech Shop based in Bangalore, India, which can run exclusively on free software (which means it respects user’s freedom and not that it is free-of-cost) and does not ship with any proprietary software installed. Liberated Computers are basically old and refurbished Lenovo’s Thinkpad laptops, modified in several ways so that they can run purely free software (check the section “How is an LC230 assembled?” in LC 230 docs). In addition, it respects user’s hardware freedom as well– you can do whatever you wish to do with the hardware, with no locks or constraints imposed by the manufacturer.

The computer is liberated by replacing the BIOS which won’t let a chip run which is not in its allow list. Further, the Intel ME backdoor has been disabled.

It has Coreboot whose code is 100% free software. The x230 BIOS contains the Intel management engine - which is then neutered using me_cleaner. That is a blob (A blob means a device driver whose source code is not published, only the binary is published; blobs are nonfree software) but that blob is inactive during the course of normal working of the operating system. There is no other blob in Liberated Computer. I will explain why free firmware matters in the next post. This makes Liberated Computer run on 100% free software.

Here is a screenshot of a tweet by Leah Rowe, the founder of Libreboot project, on Lenovo x230(Remember that Liberated Computer is just refurbished Lenovo’s x230) and Coreboot.

Why I bought Liberated Computer

I bought a Liberated Computer and the reason is simple: the attitude that freedom comes first and features are secondary. Free Software provides users the freedom to run, study, modify, improve, share the software. If the software lacks any of these freedoms, it is called nonfree/proprietary software.

I think free software is necessary for:

privacy and security of users, though it might not be sufficient;
learning and doing things ourselves;
having a defence against the mistreatment by proprietary software.

There are many other reasons to use free software.

I also think that the freedoms provided by free software are every user’s rights. I am not of the opinion that we use any software that works, but the software should respect user’s freedom. Naturally, I would like to run only free software and eliminate all the nonfree software from my life.

My Purchase

I used to have Apple’s Macbook which is a very locked system and you don’t own it even after purchasing it. After I got convinced that software freedom is important, I tried to use only free software and avoid proprietary software as much as possible. However, a lot of free software for my use was not available for Macbook. And I doubt if Macbook can run without any proprietary software. Therefore, I was looking for a computer which can run exclusively on free software, without requiring any proprietary software. I knew that Librem laptops can run purely free software and they satisfied my requirement. I didn’t know about any Indian vendors selling such a laptop. One day, I asked in the FSCI matrix room whether there are Indian shops selling such a laptop. I came to know about Libretech Shop based in Bangalore which sells free software powered laptops and calls them ‘Liberated Computer’. A few months later, I decided to buy a LC 230.

I ordered LC 230 using the Mostly Harmless website, with 16 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD, and a new 6-cell battery.

Item Description	Amount (INR)
Base Price	₹ 27,000.00
RAM (16 GB)	₹ 3,500.00
SSD (480 GB)	₹ 2,500.00
New Battery (6-cell Battery)	₹ 3,500.00
Subtotal	₹ 36,500.00
Shipping (Flat Rate)	₹ 1,200.00
GST	₹ 6,786.00
Total	₹ 44,486.00

I placed my order on a Saturday. Abhas shipped it to me, three days later, on Tuesday via DTDC priority shipping and I received the laptop on Thursday.

My experience with LC 230

The laptop had KDE Neon pre-installed but Abhas (the owner of the shop where I purchased Liberated Computer) suggested me to re-install any OS of my choice on my own. I re-installed KDE Neon using a bootable USB. I explored KDE Neon and liked it. I found it user-friendly and got comfortable in a few hours.

Then I booted PureOS, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Manjaro KDE, Solus Budgie etc. Finally, I settled on Debian 11 KDE and I am using it as my main OS right now.

The new battery lasts around 5 hours from full charged state to zero.

The low speaker volume is somewhat offputting. Instead of a backlit keyboard, it has a Thinklight which flashes light on the keyboard to work in the dark.

It has hardware kill switches for microphone, audio and wireless connections. It has a webcam too.

Switched to GNU/Linux

Finally, I switched to GNU/Linux. The GNU/Linux operating systems are free software and are fully under user’s control and this is exactly my reason for the switch. Nonfree software macOS and Windows are full of trackers. Debian, on the other hand, does not have any trackers or spywares. It respects my freedom and privacy.

Happy Hacking!

Pictures

Following are some pictures of Liberated Computer taken by me. All of them are released under CC-BY-SA license.

Liberated Computer running official ISO(which has free firmware) of Debian GNU/Linux with Mate desktop.

Liberated Computer running PureOS.

Liberated Computer running Coreboot.

Liberated Computer keypad and touchpad.

Tails OS running in Liberated Computer.

Fedora 35 live USB running in Liberated Computer.

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS live USB running in Liberated Computer.

Ubuntu Desktop in Liberated Computer.

Manjaro KDE 21.2.1 running on Liberated Computer.

Trisquel 10 desktop in Liberated Computer.

Manjaro running in Liberated Computer.

Trisquel 10.0 running in Liberated Computer.

My Meeting with Richard Stallman

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing about a meeting which happened more than 5 years before writing this article. This is the best recreation from memory I came up with.

At the time this happened, I was a student at Acharya Narendra Dev College (also known as “ANDC” in short), New Delhi. On the 1st of March 2016, the principal of my college, Dr. Savithri Singh, was addressing all the students in a common hall (for some reason I don’t remember). During the address, she told us that the founder of Linux was visiting our college that day. She invited interested students to meet him to her office at 4 PM. I was sitting with my friend, Shivam Rai who was excited for the meeting. I am from mathematics background and hardly knew anything about Linux. I had heard the word “Linux” and knew that it is a kernel of some operating system. So, I wasn’t very entusiastic.

Around 4 PM, I was a bit tired and wanted to go back to my room to take a nap. I was not completely sure about the point of the meeting. Furthermore, I thought they discuss programming or coding like mathematicians discuss theorems and proofs. I almost forgot about it. However, my friend reminded me of the meeting, so I joined him.

We went to the principal office and after waiting for some time, the visitor arrived along with a person from Kerala. My friend and I shook hands with the visitor, and he said, “Hi, my name is Richard Stallman”. We also introduced ourselves. The person from Kerala also introduced himself but unfortunately, I forgot his name. Immediately, Richard Stallman asked us a question in a joking manner, “If I were to start a company in India, what should I name it?”. We were silent. Then he said, “Mahadeva” followed by a big laughter. It turned out that, even though the principal invited the whole college to meet Richard Stallman, only two of us actually went to meet him. Next, since the principal said that he is a founder of Linux, we started the discussion something along the lines of “You are the founder of Linux?” Listening to this, he got angry and said, “You should ask that question from Linus Torvalds.” I was confused at this point, and so was my friend.

Then we asked, “What do you work for?”. He responded, “I work for GNU.” I asked, “What’s that?” He said, “GNU’s not Unix.” I got very confused at this point as I didn’t know what’s GNU, what’s Unix, and we already pissed him off by associating him with Linux.

Then, he said, “I work for free software.” This added to my confusion as I thought why would someone work for free-of-cost software. Then he explained what is free software, “Free Software is software that gives users four freedoms.

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software as you wish.

Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and modify the program. You need to have the source code of the program to exercise this freedom.

Freedom 2 is the freedom to share the program.

Freedom 3 is the freedom to share your modified versions.

The ‘free’ does not mean free of cost. It means freedom. Think of it like free speech and not free beer.”

At that point, I only knew that a lot of programs do not have freedom 1. I didn’t know that a lot of software do not give users the freedom to share or run. So naturally, I didn’t understand why he has to emphasize these freedoms and why they are important. Also, I used to think every software have freedoms 0,2,3. I remember having a (wrong) notion that the freedom to study and modify the source code is for the programmers only.

Then, he said, “Any software which does not give users these four freedoms is called a nonfree/proprietary software. A proprietary software is under developer’s control, and you are at the mercy of the developer. A free software is controlled by its users. I use only free software and reject all proprietary software and, you should do it too.”

His voice was quite passionate when he was telling us those things. Further, he told us that Microsoft Windows is an example of a proprietary software and mentioned that a backdoor was found in Windows in the past. I didn’t know what backdoor means and I don’t remember if he told us that.

He had hearing problems, so we had to be loud while interacting with him. My friend then asked about Apple’s software. Something like “Is Apple’s software secure?” Stallman replied something related to Apple’s locking of user and Apple’s software being nonfree. Bu I forgot a lot of at he said.

I remember that he also said that Google services are surveillance systems, and he does not use them. He insisted that we should also refuse to use them. I remember him mentioning that NSA spies on Americans as well as other countries’ citizens using Google services like Gmail, Google Maps. Poor me, I didn’t know what is NSA.

He also mentioned that Google Maps does not load if he disables the Javascript code sent by the site. Earlier, it used to load without Javascript. He kind of implied that sites should load without Javascript. And he probably gave a few more examples when disabling Javascript does not load the website. At that time, I didn’t understand why would someone disable Javascript when visiting a website.

Then, our principal reminded us to take photos with Richard Stallman. Stallman agreed with the condition that we never upload his photo on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, because that company is a surveillance engine, and we should not feed it. We agreed with the condition and clicked photos with him.

My photo with RMS

Richard Stallman was then treated with Dal Vada from our college canteen, and he really liked that.

This meeting planted a few questions in my mind about the software I was using. At that time, I didn’t have adequate political understanding to get his point. I also found it a bit sad that the person is known for “Linux” and “Open Source”, even though he despises those labels.

How I deleted Google, Samsung apps from my Android without rooting

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I will write how I deleted (yes, deleted, uninstalled, gone! not disabled) Google apps, Samsung apps and Facebook app from my phone. These apps are pre-installed and they only give an option to “Diasble” these apps which does not do anything, it only stops showing them in the app drawer. These apps are dangerous to user’s privacy and record their whole lives through their phones. You do not need to know anything about the command line to follow this guide. showTableOfContents: true

Sahil’s blog post on Mobile Made More Private was the one which guided me in this process. Be sure to check out that for more details and the adb commands cheat sheet that Sahil mentions in that post.

A fair warning and comment from Chris Titus Tech:

It is dangerous to remove system apps that you don’t see in the app drawer. It can lead to you doing a full system recovery.

On Non-Rooted phones some applications are installed as root and error with “[DELETE_FAILED_INTERNAL_ERROR]”. Type this to bypass:

adb shell pm uninstall –user 0

So, it is a “Do at your own risk” article.

How I did it

I have a Samsung Galaxy S9+ phone with Google and Samsung’s nonfree software installed in it. I did not yet root my phone to install a custom ROM. I have a Macbook which does not allow me to connect my Android using a USB cable, a step which is essential to run command line in your android to uninstall these apps.

So, I connected my phone to a laptop in which Windows 10 was installed. The steps are similar and commands are same (except for the grep command which works in GNU/Linux but not in Windows, which I will mention) if you using GNU/Linux or macOS.

These are the steps I followed in Windows 10:

Step 1 : Install chocolatey, a freedom-respecting command line program to download software in Widnows. The steps to install Chocolatey are here. You don’t need to visit that link, I will write all the steps for you.

Below are the steps for installing Chocolatey on Windows.

Step 1a : Press windows button on your keyboard and search for ‘PowerShell’. Right click on PowerShell and click on an option which says run it in the administrator mode.

Step 1b : In the PowerShell, run the command (which means, copy the following command and paste it in PowerShell and press enter on Keyboard):

Get-ExecutionPolicy

If it returns Restricted, run the command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned

Step 1c : Run the following command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

If you do not get any error message, congratulations! Chocolatey is installed in your system.

Type choco -? in the command line and press enter. If there is no error, it means that Chocolatey has been installed in your system.

Step 2 : We will install ADB Platform Tools. To install, run the command:

choco install adb

Step 3 : Setting up your Android phone

3a : Open Settings on your phone, and select “About”.

3b : Tap on “Build number” seven times.

3c : Go back, and select “Developer options”.

3d : Scroll down, and check the “Android debugging” or “USB debugging” entry under “Debugging”.

3e : Plug your device into your computer.

3f : On the computer, open up a terminal/command prompt and type adb devices.

3g : A dialog should show on your device, asking you to allow usb debugging. Check “always allow”, and choose “OK”.

Step 4 : Run the command:

adb devices

This command should list the Android phone you connected to your computer. If it lists your phone, you are ready to proceed. Otherwise, your phone isn’t connected and not ready to use adb commands.

Step 5 : You can list all the packages of Google in your phone by using the command:

In Windows: adb shell pm list packages | findstr google

In GNU/Linux or macOS: adb shell pm list packages | grep google

The following image has commands that can be used to uninstall Google apps.

Uninstall Google apps from Android using adb commands

Uninstalling the apps

Let’s try and uninstall the YouTube app. Check the image above for the package name. The package name for YouTube is com.google.android.youtube. The following command should be the one to uninstall YouTube (same command for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux):

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.youtube

If the command returns the message saying: Success, then you have successfully uninstalled YouTube.

Similarly, you can uninstall any other app using this command by replacing com.google.android.youtube by the package name of the app.

For removing Google Play Store, I used the following command:

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.android.vending

For me, it was no problem uninstalling Google Play Store but I have heard it can be risky.

I have listed all the commands that I tried in my phone in adb-commands-ravi.txt. Feel free to use some or all of these commands.

A trick to know the app ID for most of the apps is to visit their Google Play Store page. For example, visit the Facebook app on Google Play Store and look at the URL. Copy the part after id= which is com.facebook.katana.

To retrieve package name of an app

Therefore, the command to uninstall Facebook will be:

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.facebook.katana

That’s it for now.

Happy Hacking with (hopefully) less amount of tracking:)

A guide to set up your XMPP account

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guide to set up an account on XMPP, which is a federated chatting system.

You can watch this video tutorial to create an XMPP account without giving your phone number to the service:

I will use the freedom-respecting software Conversations app for demonstration. Conversations app is available for Android only. Conversations is a paid app on Google Play Store. If you would like to support the development of Conversations app, then you can download it from Google Play Store. Otherwise, you can follow the steps below to download Conversations app free of cost. If you would like to download a free-of-cost XMPP app from Play Store, then check out Blabber app.

Currently, Blabber app is very good for XMPP. It has some more functionality than Conversations app and these features are usually requested by users in the Conversations app.

Some examples of XMPP apps for other platforms are- Dino for GNU/Linux, Gajim for Windows and GNU/Linux, Monal for macOS and iOS. You can choose any XMPP app, and this guide probably works for all of them. A list of XMPP apps is here and all of them support OMEMO encryption by default.

You don’t need to give any personal details, like phone number or email, to create an account. If you would like to register an XMPP account using your phone number (similar to how you set up in WhatsApp), then you can try Quicksy app, which respects your freedom as you can still connect to people using any XMPP app and XMPP service provider (remember that XMPP is federated!).

Steps to set up an account on Conversations app:

Step 1: Download F-Droid from here.

F-Droid is a repository of free software apps. It is a privacy respecting alternative of Google Play Store. One difference is that F-Droid only contains apps which are freedom-respecting (they respect all four freedoms mentioned here) and verified by the F-Droid community for malicious features.

F-Droid will also ensure that your app receives all the future updates. F-Droid community also builds apps from the source code which ensures that the source code indeed matches the app you download in your system.

Step 2: Search for “Conversations” app in F-Droid and install it.

Step 3: Register an XMPP account on any xmpp server. You can choose an XMPP service provider from this URL. It will give you a list of 5 servers that you can register on, and then will give you 5 different random servers upon refreshing the page.

Step 4: Open the Conversations app and then click on ‘I already have an account’ option.

Step 5: In the XMPP address option, put your xmpp address, which will be of the format username@domain – depending on which site you used to sign up. Click ‘Next’.

Step 6: You can add a profile picture if you wish and then click ‘Publish’. If you do not want to add a profile picture, select ‘Skip’.

Step 7: Conversations app will ask you permission to access your contacts. You can click on ‘Deny’. And it will then ask to stop battery optimization for the app. You can enable Conversations to run in the background.

Step 8: Conversations app will then ask you to stop battery optimization for the app. I suggest you to allow Conversations to run without optimizing the battery. The developer of Conversations app has explained how this permission has virtually zero impact on battery life.

Step 9: To add a contact, press the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the Conversations app and click on ‘Add Contact’.

Step 10: Type the XMPP address of the XMPP user you want to contact. In the image, I have entered my own XMPP address - ravi@poddery.com - as an example.

Step 11: Just send an introduction message to your friend to exchange your OMEMO keys.

Congratulations on setting up your XMPP account. All the messages will be OMEMO encrypted by default – means that only you and the person you are exchanging messages with can read them. Conversations app also support voice call and video call to any XMPP app that supports the same.

My experience in volunteering for FSCI's Jitsi Meet Crowdfunding campaign

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

showTableOfContents: true Free Software Community of India(FSCI) is committed to promote software freedom and make privacy accessible to common people. Campaigning and raising awareness for privacy and urging people to not use Google/Facebook/Zoom and other proprietary services is not enough, users must also have alternatives to these services which were pretty much turned into necessity (for privileged people) especially in the pandemic time. Jitsi is a freedom-respecting video-conferencing software which gives users the control over the software. Jitsi allows anyone to run their own server, allowing them to fully control their means of communication. Since it is not feasible for everyone to run their own Jitsi server, FSCI decided to work on running their own server which would be open to all, can be used by anyone for their meetings, funded by voluntary donations and must respect user’s privacy.

To run a server funded by donations, we needed volunteers for: running and maintaining a Jitsi server, writing script for the fundraiser video, asking for donations in the fundraiser video, editing the fundraiser video, maintaining website, giving a bank account to accept donations, replying to emails regarding queries, taking initiative and coordinating all this.

I think it was around November 2020 when Sahil told me about FSCI’s initiative to run a Jitsi server and I agreed to volunteer for asking for donations in the fundraiser video. Arun Mathai guided me in the process. We had meetings and we rehearsed the script a few times and assigned the lines. I had some problems shooting the video of myself speaking in the camera. Talking to myself alone on camera is not exactly my plus point. After several attempts, I could make a clip which was fine to be included in the fundraiser video (thanks to mom for shooting the clip).

We thought it would be good if there is diversity among the people asking for donations in the fundraiser video. So, I asked my friend Ashutosh, who is also inclined towards free software, if he can help. Then he discussed the fundraiser with his friends and two of his friends volunteered to appear in the video to ask for doantions. This opportunity raised awareness about free software and existence of community-powered services among his friends – which furthers our goal. I also asked my friend Sayan for recording the Bengali snippet of the video and he agreed to volunteer for the same.

It took some months after that (we did all of the above by the end of December 2020) to finally release the website and the Jitsi server acutally operational. After the release, we, at FSCI, use meet.fsci.in for all our meetings. I use this server for all my personal meetings.

I am glad that the fundraiser is going strong – as of writing, we have raised 57% of the funds needed to run the service for 2 years. As of now, I think that drafting the privacy policy is a pending major task which I will try to do as soon as possbile.

You are invited to use the Jitsi server at meet.fsci.in for your personal meeting needs without worrying about someone prying on you. You can also host your classes. The server can handle around 30 participants in a meeting. If you would like to support the service, you can donate by visitng here or volunteer to help us in running the service by contacting FSCI. The transparency is ensured by listing all the contributors and their donation amounts publicly (you can be an anonymous contributor).

Please send your comments/suggestions on the fundraiser/meet server to FSCI (the contact option is at the bottom of the link.

Thanks to all the volunteers and contributors for making meet.fsci.in possible.

Apple's privacy trap

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Apple is a company which claims that protecting users’ privacy is one of their core values. Recently, they announced a new software update to their iOS with the idea that the apps made by independent developers have to request explicit permission from users before tracking them.

That means Apple cares about users’ privacy.

Or do they?

Sure, they are not involved in targeted advertising, and they don’t earn money from your data and therefore, do not track you, right?

And they encrypt all contents of iOS devices, making it impossible for third-parties to access your data, right?

They are working day and night to make your life better, convenient and at the same time, defend your privacy. What more can we ask for?

Well ….. we don’t know if any of these claims are true

because Apple’s iOS is a nonfree/proprietary program, and therefore these claims cannot be independently verified. Apple does not give its users the freedom to study how iOS works– it does not provide its source code.

Proprietary Software controls the user. Source: Richard Stallman's Ted talk slides released under CC-BY 3.0 license.

Even if Apple’s claims are true, this only means you get privacy from others and not from Apple. They might be encrypting all your contents stored in iOS, we don’t know, but they have also installed backdoors. This means Apple can make changes in your devices remotely without your permission. They can add any malicious features in the software at any time without you knowing. The backdoors were found in macOS as well as in the iOS. That means your computer isn’t yours.

While Apple says that it respects its user’s privacy, their track-record says exactly the opposite.

Snowden’s documents show that Apple is a part of NSA’s global surveillance program.

In China, it stores all user data on servers controlled by the Chinese government.

All the search queries made in macOS’ spotlight are send to Apple.

Apple uploaded private files of its user to iCloud without consent.

You remember who is Siri? Siri is Apple’s voice assistant. It is Apple’s voice assistant, not your voice assistant. You might think that Siri listens to you only when prompted, but it turns out that it listens and records all the time. Apple also hires people specifically for listening to users’ Siri recordings.

You can check out more cases of surveillance by Apple by visiting this link.

Cory Doctorow argues that surrendering your autonomy by moving to Apple’s fortress has the same problem as all benevolent dictatorships: it works well, but fails badly. Let me quote Cory Doctorow from this article,

Apple rightly points out that the world is full of bandits who will steal your data and money and ruin your life, and it holds itself out as your protector …. But when Apple sides with the bandits, the walls that once protected you now make you easy prey.

Overall, Apple claims itself to be the guardian protecting its users’ privacy, while their track record is exactly the opposite, they increased surveillance on users with the latest macOS update, they won’t allow third-party repair shops but their “authorized” technicians themselves leak users’ data. Apple’s privacy claims, at their best, only give users privacy from third-parties. That is what their privacy trap is– Redefine privacy to mean privacy from others and earn goodwill by advertising that they care about users’ privacy. Surveillance is just a symptom of proprietary software. The bigger problem is that Apple keeps tight control over iDevices and users don’t control them.

The only software we can trust is free software, which respects user’s freedom. Users have control over the software if it is free software. If the software is free, users can check for malicious code and remove the malicious functionalities.

Free Software respects your freedom. Source: Richard Stallman's Ted talk slides released under CC-BY 3.0 license.

A nonfree software, on the other hand, is malware. Apple’s iOS is malware because it is nonfree software. It is a black box. We never know what it is up to, so any trust on Apple respecting user’s privacy is a blind trust.

Accessing YouTube without giving away your privacy

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

YouTube is a platform where people upload and watch videos. I don’t think YouTube needs any introduction among the internet users. The thing that is not usually mentioned about YouTube is that it tracks its users. Further, YouTube’s algorithms distort the truth, it censors works that are fair use under the copyright law and doesn’t let you download videos in your device, even the ones you purchased.

An analysis of YouTube’s privacy policy is here.

In short, it is not YouTube, it is TheirTube. Knowing someone is always watching you has inhibiting effects. I don’t want to get tracked or get manipulated by YouTube’s algorithms. Fortunately, YouTube is accessible using free software in ways which respect your privacy. I will list some ways to watch YouTube videos using workarounds. All the software mentioned here are free software(which means they respect your freedom). Please read this article to understand why we must insist on free software.

In Desktop, YouTube videos can be watched using Invidious. You can visit any of the Invidious instances here from any browser and search for the video you would like to watch. Invidious also allows you to visit via Tor which hides your IP Address. You can use Privacy Redirect plugin in Firefox and Tor to automatically redirect YouTube links to Invidious. This plugin also redirects Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Google Maps, Google Translate links to their privacy-respecting front-ends. You can also check out a bunch of other freedom-respecting software that you can use to watch YouTube videos.

Piped is a free software which acts as a frontend to YouTube. You can watch YouTube videos using Piped in your browser by visiting this URL. Piped does not expose your IP address to YouTube.

FreeTube app can also be used to watch YouTube videos. The app is available for all the GNU/Linux distros, macOS and Windows. FreeTube respects your privacy as well. Please read privacy section of their FAQ for details.

Youtube-dl is another software you can use on Desktop to watch videos. It is a command-line program that downloads videos from YouTube in your system. It is my favorite, and I fell in love with it when I realized how capable it is. It is very powerful, and it supports downloading videos from many other sites as well. You can also download audio files by extracting audio from YouTube videos using YouTube-dl. It supports downloading playlists as well. I plan to write a blog in future on using command-line to download using youtube-dl for beginners.

For Android, Newpipe app can be used to watch YouTube videos. Newpipe app shows no ads, does not track you, can run in background, can download audio/video files in your phone. Newpipe can also stream videos which are being live-streamed on YouTube. In addition to YouTube, you can access SoundCloud, media.ccc.de, PeerTube instances ,Bandcamp using NewPipe.

For iOS, I don’t know any workarounds. If you know of any, please let me know. iOS is, in general, very hostile to user freedom, so the only way to freedom is to avoid iOS.

While these workarounds work well, we cannot rely on Google to let them work. The workarounds do not really solve the problem. The real solution is that the videos are posted on a platform which respects user’s freedom(which is a bit more complicated issue than the freedom of software installed in your system). You can upload videos on Peertube or your own website to respect user’s freedom and allow them to download the videos as well. I have a channel on Peertube on the instance set up by FSCI. You can set up a donation based model to earn money from your videos. Users can send you money directly in your account for your work. You can also earn money by selling merchandise. For this model to be successful, we need more people to join in rejecting YouTube and similar tracking services.

Choosing a privacy-respecting chatting app

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Which chatting app do you use to contact your loved ones?

Do you use WhatsApp?

Do you use Telegram or Signal?

What if you do not agree to the terms and conditions or privacy policy of these apps?

Well, either you need to accept their terms or switch to any other app and do the hard work of convincing every contact to move to your new chat app whose terms you can agree. What if you are a student and all the important notifications are sent to the WhatsApp group? Would you convince your school to avoid WhatsApp? What if they don’t care? Now you are forced to be on WhatsApp to make sure you don’t miss any important updates. So, when you click on ‘I Agree’ to the document which says, “We will put you in surveillance. It has a lot of benefits. Your life will be very convenient”, do you really agree, or you just gave in to social pressure? Or you did not care? Do you really have a choice?

Why SMS refuses to die. Source: https://xkcd.com/2365/

So, how do we control our means of communications? What does controlling our communications mean? If we control our means of communications, can we ensure privacy as well? I will go into details of what I mean when I say that the users control the software. If the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software, then the users control the software. Such a software is called free software, where ‘free’ refers to freedom and not to price. In this article, ‘free’ refers to freedom and never to price. I suggest you to read this article to understand why these freedoms are important and how this gives users control over the software. Examples of free software(freedom-respecting) chatting apps are Telegram, Signal, Quicksy, Element etc. If users lack any of these freedoms, then the software is called nonfree/proprietary and such a software cannot be trusted by the user. WhatsApp is an example of nonfree/proprietary software.

Image: Free Software respects your freedom. Source: Richard Stallman's Ted talk slides released under CC-BY 3.0 license.

Chatting apps usually have two components: 1. The app that you install on your device; 2. A server (we will call it a service provider)which transfers the messages from the sender to the recipient. If you control only the software, the service provider still has the power to impose unjust conditions on you. In the above-mentioned example, Signal is a free software which includes the freedom to modify the code but when a project modified the Signal app code, Signal refused to allow them to connect to their server or federate with any other server. This is not true freedom. So, to control our chatting system, software must be free but that is not enough.

Therefore, for full control, we need to have federated chat systems – to allow users registered on different service providers to communicate with each other - for instance a mail server run by Google federates with a mail server run by Microsoft when you send email from @gmail.com to @hotmail.com. So you can choose a free software and a trusted, community-run service-provider, and this is what I mean by having control over our communications. This control is collective control by community. Examples of such systems are Matrix and XMPP. Federation answers the question raised earlier: What to do if the service provider imposes terms and conditions you do not agree with? You can switch to another service provider or you can be a service provider and still communicate with your contacts. You don’t need to convince them to switch to a new provider. Examples of matrix apps are- Element, Nheko, Fluffychat etc. Examples of XMPP apps are- Conversations, Dino, Gajim, Siskin IM etc. Make sure that the app supports end-to-end encryption–which means only the sender and recipient can read the messages.

A graphical demonstration of how end-to-end encryption works. Credits: Cryptpad

Quicksy app is at the intersection of freedom and convenience. It registers the account with a phone number, which makes the app convenient and easy to use. It federates with XMPP so no one is forced to use Quicksy and so other people can use some other XMPP app(like Conversations) which do not require any personal details to create an account.

To get started with XMPP, you can use this guide or use Quicksy app if you don’t mind registering with your phone number.

Telegram and Signal apps are freedom-respecting but since they are not federated, the overall chatting system is not freedom-respecting.

Another way to freedom is to use freedom-respecting encrypted messaging apps which do not involve any servers. These are called peer-to-peer apps. The downside here is that both the users need to be online at the same time to exchange messages. You can choose to run the app in background to receive messages. Examples: Briar, GNU Jami, Tox.

TL;DR : Free Software app + Federated chat systems like Matrix or XMPP and free software peer-to-peer apps like Briar give users full control over their communications and therefore you can ensure privacy. Nonfree/proprietary software control the users and therefore cannot be trusted for privacy.