Ravi Dwivedi

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 a…

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 a…

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, E…

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 …

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 …

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…

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 creat…

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 night…

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 …

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 j…

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…

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…

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 …

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 on…

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 application…

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 inf…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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 Septemb…

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.…

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 purpo…

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 for…

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 De…

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 Mal…

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 Malaysi…

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 …

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 w…

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 wa…

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 an…

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 r…

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 l…

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 th…

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 cons…

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-…

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…

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 k…

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 p…

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…

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 n…

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…

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…

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 h…

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. Ta…

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: Ub…

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…

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 …

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…

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– li…

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. …

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…

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 ca…

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 abo…

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 Qui…

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…

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.…

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 a…

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 t…

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 Adob…

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 exper…

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…

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 Softwar…

Protonmail claims to automatically send end-to-end encrypted messages between all the Protonmail users. They claim that they do not have access to user’s private keys (Someone having access to your private keys can decrypt and read all your encrypted messages), by encrypting the…

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 li…

Index Introduction What is Free Software Camp Motivation to join the camp How I came to know about the camp Experience as a learner in the camp Aftermath Word for learners of the upcoming camps Introduction I participated as a learner in Free Software Camp 2020 organized by FSCI…

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…

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 cle…

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…

(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? My experience of rooting How much free software does iode OS have How t…

Index What is firmware Problems with proprietary firmware Importance of Free Firmware 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 chipse…

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 doe…

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…

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 …

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. Conver…

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 …

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.…

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…

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 h…