Recent content on Ravi's Blog
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Last Updated: October 7, 2025 Welcome to ravidwivedi.in. My name is Ravi Dwivedi and this website is operated by me to host my blog posts. This privacy policy documents what data is being collected when you visit this website. Data Collection This website doesn’t collect any visitor data. It is run on Nginx. The access logs have been turned off to protect your privacy. This means personal…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
List of my online profiles Mastodon/Fediverse: @ravi@toot.io . If you do not know what Fediverse is, check out this short 3-minute video. jointhefediverse.net is a good resource to learn about it and creating an account. Pixelfed . gitlab.com . salsa.debian.org . Codeberg - ravidwivedi . Peertube - videos.fsci.in .
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…
My social profiles My Talks Free Software Hardware Freedom Books
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…