We just wanted to drive around NSW’s countryside and maybe visit a farm. Camden came up in the search, and the Airbnb there looked nice, and hence we settled on it. It was also perfect fir for the Easter weekend (4th and 5th of Apr) as it was a small town. Camden is not far from the city, so we planned to go to Wollongong on the Grand Pacific Drive via the Sea Cliff Bridge. That way, we get to ride on beautiful roads, too.
View from Sea Cliff Bridge
Panoramic view of Sea Cliff Bridge
Sea Cliff BridgeStuart Park at WollongongView from Sea Cliff BridgeSea Cliff Bridge
At Camden, we didn’t do much. We walked around the town
Camden post officeNoodle Place at CamdenView from AirBnB house
I am currently preparing for IIT Delhi’s internal test for Msc Economics. An hour ago I came across this question in the 2023 question paper.
It’s a simple question, but I was unable to do it because I keep doing some annoying calculation mistakes (which I didn’t notice at the time).
I started thinking that there must be some deficiency in my understanding of joint probability distributions, so I looked up a particular video that has been stuck in my to-view list for a few months. The first slide was this
Elections for the student council of Economics Department are currently going in my college. Out of all promotional images that are being flooded in college group chats one in particular caught my eye because of its poor economics, so here are some of the obvious issues I find with it.
Oh Gawd
For one the axes aren’t even properly labelled! It only reminds me of this
Due to this it is hard to understand what they mean by a continuous budget line. If it corresponds to candidates, then it should have been discrete. However, lets say that instead of comparing themself with other candidates they are comparing themself with the whole of India; in that case the size is large enough to warrant a continuous budget line.
What about the indifference curve? I think they want to say that that is actually a social indifference curve. However, this begs the question how did they calculated it? As anyone aware of basic utilitarianism can tell you, it is impossible to aggregate individual indifference curves without making some sort of philosophical basis. However, the image hasn’t specified exactly what constitutes this basis. Without these assumptions clearly stated it seems that the analysis was manipulated to make it tangent to the budget line exactly at their preferred point and this considerably reduces the legitimacy of their analysis. I suspect a case of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.
Another thing to note are the two axes. Why are there only 2, and not 3 or more? A decision as complex as deciding members of student council must take more variables into consideration. In my opinion, at the very least a 5 dimensional marginal analysis was necessary for this study.
Finally, the caption actually contradicts the whole graph given above. As the budget constraint shows there are other people on the line too. So how is it possible that the opportunity cost is 0? Are they trying to imply that all other candidates are not even on the budget line, perhaps even at origin? If that’s really the case then it should be regarded as a clear violation of “no personal attacks” rule and strict action must be taken against them. I recommend solving the 5 variable optimisation version of this problem by hand as punishment.
It wasn’t planned that she would walk all the way. I was ready to carry her at least three-fourths of the way. I would have been more than happy if she had walked a kilometer. But it so happened that she walked all the way, surprising us.
The platypus track is the smallest one at Bidjigal Reserve. We chose it so Uma could walk. The weather was good, and she was in a good mood.
I recently came across the fact that, at least in recent times, there has been 2 major strands of Atheism.
These are, in words of David Hoelscher, Scientifc Atheism and Humanistic Atheism. Now here are some of my own views of these cultures which have been heavily influenced by his article New Atheism, Worse Than You Think in CounterPunch.
Scientific Atheism corresponds to a philosophy with near religious faith in power of science and a very intolerant view of religions. However, the view is not as unbiased as it seems at first glance. Science has often been used in modern times to advocate for an eradication of the “lower class”, with its most popular example residing in eugenics under Nazi dictatorship. Similarly, the New Atheism Movement has also been accused of Islamophobic and Sexist tendencies. The “Science”, in fact, can be used to prove almost anything that your heart desires. An almost blind faith in the superiority of science is, hence, very dangerous for the functioning of any society.
Humanistic Atheism, on the other had, is more “humanistic” or tolerant of religions. Instead of simply rejecting religion because “there is no evidence a god exists” like Scientific Atheists would normally say, it actually engages with religious literature. It is also more conducive to discussions since the actual goal, after all, is to get good agreements on other contentious topics like climate change, monopolization of capital, poverty, and so on.
My thinking has always been very similar to one propunded by Humanistic Atheists. However, it was only recently that I came to realize its deeper implications.
Here are a few instances in my life of “unscientific” thinking: A believes in black magic, M believes in ghosts, T believes in Astrology, and RU believes in “cat crossing path is bad omen.” I usually have a very negative view of these stuff and on multiple occasions I have gone passive aggressive when talking to these people. But in light of the two distinctions that I just drew above regarding Atheism was this response on my part a sensible behaviour?
I contend no. Rage over minor “unscientific” abnormality like these is very counterproductive. It angers people with no change in the actual status quo. It can also be considered very demeaning. A better idea is to always move to other issues which are far more deserving of attention. Humans deserve dignity, even when their opinions seem pretty stupid.
We did a leisurely walk through Sydney’s city center. We will probably do one more walk. But this one was mostly around Uma’s need to walk in the park and see water, and that’s what we mostly did.
Diggy Doos Coffee
As soon as we landed in the center, we looked for a good coffee place, and found Diggy Doo’s Coffee on Sathya’s list. It was also close to where he worked as well. I messaged him. We got to meet him and have some good coffee, and only then we started our actual walk.
Anju, Thej and Sathya
The first place to visit was, of course, Hyde Park. I am kind of reminded again and again why all great cities have big parks in their centers. How much they add to the character of the city. Hyde Park in Sydney is one such. It’s beautiful. You can spend a lot of time just roaming around. Since it is also very close to water, it becomes much more attractive.
Hyde parkHyde parkUma at Hyde ParkUma at Hyde Park
At Sydney Opera House, Uma was in great mood, so we took lots of pictures of her doing various things. She loved the open space, cool breeze and the waters.
Uma at Sydeny Opera House.
Sydney Opera HouseUma at Sydney Opera HouseUma at Sydney Opera House
&
I was recently reading Demographic deposit, dividend and debt by Sonalde Desai. Following the Standard Operating Procedure, I looked up this Sonalde person and turns out she is a researcher at a research institute in Delhi called National Council of Applied Economic Research. The work of this organization felt interesting to me, so I had to pause my studies and see its location on OpenStreetMap.
Nothing. Looks like the place hasn’t been mapped yet. I searched for 11, Indraprastha Estate since that was mentioned on their contact page and this time I did find an object. A person called “n’garh” had added the address back in July 2014 and I am so glad that I was quickly able to push a changeset (#180878526). Another win for address mapping!
We are on holiday. The week before the holiday was mostly spent covering for things that can happen during the vacation. Of course, you can’t imagine everything and solve it. But I think the teams are doing okay. So all is well.
Uma loves bus rides. So we took buses everywhere. We walked around the city, Hyde Park, and the Opera House this week. We also met Sathya for coffee. Thanks to weekly notes we know quite a few things happening in each others life. So it was like continuing a conversation we recently had. It was good to see you, Sathya.
Today, she got to go around the farm picking strawberries. We do have a strawberry plant at home, which she is very fond of. Today she saw hundreds of them and picked many. I also got to drive on nice roads along the Hawkesbury River and ate some great pies. I will write more about that later.
No workouts or play this week. I have to make up once I am back in Bengaluru.
Busstop with eink display in SydenyUma at Sydeny Opera House.Anju, Thej and SathyaDiggy Doos CoffeeApples at farmIn HawkesburyPie in the Sky, BilpinUma feeding a KangarooQuantas on its way to SydenyUma picking strawberrys at Bilpin, Sydney
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Not just the usual “X person used a casteist slur” but rather “X person decided to create an Instagram page to make fun of other people in the department on the fucking basis of caste and community”. The elections are on 7 April. Let’s see if they actually win.
She saw Koala, Dingo, Wombat, Kangaroo, and Kookaburra from the book. She loved all them and also the bus ride to the park. Here are some short videos from the visit.
Uma feeding a Kangaroo at Koala Park Sanctuary, Sydney
Koala Park Sanctuary, Sydney
Uma feeding a Kangaroo at Koala Park Sanctuary, Sydney
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MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026 was held on 14th and 15th March 2026 at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Having a Debian conference in the North was something many folks wanted. Ravi started the discussion (with local IIT Kanpur folks) almost 7 months before the conference. Lots of folks from Debian India joined in organizing the conference, which was nice. All the meeting notes and discussions were posted on the Debian India mailing list, a first.
Despite all the efforts, the conference start was delayed due to logistical issues. Things went fine post Day 1 lunch. We had two days of almost full schedule. disaster’s Decentralising Indian Communication was an interesting talk, diving into decentralized communication.
IIT Kanpur is a huge campus with nice footpaths and greenery. We got the opportunity to explore their HPC at Computer Center post conference.
Work has been started for MiniDebCamp Kochi. More details can be found on the wiki.
Working to make this conference happen was different with all the challenges involved, but overall, everyone was happy with the outcome.
A few days ago, I came to know that Paul Romer, of Romer Model fame, actually has a more or less active blog since 1997! This was a surprise, considering that I thought that the guy must be old enough to die. So, I looked up YouTube videos on him and found a TED Talk with the title “Why the World Needs Charter Cities”.
“Charter Cities”? Huh. I have never heard of that term. However, A casual “research” soon gave me so much interesting information that my mind exploded.
The term Charter Cities was first coined by Romer himself in the TED Talk I mentioned above. Charter Cities are supposed to solve the problem of poor quality of institutional structures in least developed and middle income countries by allowing high income countries to develop cities and then giving them near absolute power to regulate everything there in a manner similar to how British controlled Hong Kong, with a few caveats.
The idea is fascinating, not least due to the massive amount of allegations of neocolonialism made against Romer’s idea. “Are Charter Cities Legitimate?” by Rahul Sagar discussed these problems in detail and concluded that it’s the practical issues, not moral ones, that make implementing Charter Cities difficult. I would recommend the interested reader to give it a read, though I do not fully agree with the essay.
Aside from the discussion on these problems, the thing that fascinated me the most was that Charter Cities have already been implemented by some countries, though not exactly in the manner Romer approves.
Prospera of Honduras was the first one. The city of around 2000 people is controlled by Honduras Prospera Incorporated, a company controlled by venture capitalists. The legal structure of the city is mostly defined by the corporation with the national government of Honduras having little control over it. Multiple attempts by the national government and judiciary has been made to destroy Honduras Prospera Incorporated, but some stakeholders from USA have lobbied enough to stop any repeals of its existence. Currently the corporation is suing the government for an amount about 1/3 of the country’s GDP. Now similar Charter City projects are being started in Africa.
All of this sounds super dystopian to me and it keeps reminding me of the fictional Night City from Cyberpunk 2077. In this world of Neoliberalism, what hasn’t been tainted? I don’t know.
We had a long weekend due to Yugadhi and Eid. I didn’t do much. Mostly spent time at home, sleeping. I feel rested after a long time.
Summer Pink flowers of Bengaluru.
On Saturday, I was at IndieWebClub/BLR meetup. I could help some folks with WordPress. Other than that, it was just fun to see and listen to so many bloggers. Beautiful Bangalore flowers.
It’s the season of birthdays; we celebrated a couple this week, and we will celebrate more next week. Sunday was Echos gotcha day. It’s already been five years. Time flies, and he is a senior now. Anju baked a cake for him and for Pathu.
I also met some friends for coffee and dinner during the week, but we couldn’t play. I was able to do two days of training at Stairs. I am progressing well.
Dave Winer and Kotke have blogrolls that might interest you. 404Media is one of the tech media I follow. I am not a paid subscriber yet, but one day I might. I use uv everyday. The company behind it, Astral, is joining OpenAI, which I think is not good news for uv users. But let’s see. If your kids are forced to be online for entertainment, then The Kid Should See This is a curated list of videos that you might find useful. In fact, even for adults. Nightingale looks like a great tool for creating karaoke songs. It’s FOSS as well. I have not tried it yet.
I thought courts would take a strong stance on Sonam Wangchuk’s illegal detention for 170 days. But I think I failed to realize that the S.C. doesn’t work in isolation; they are just part of this society, and they fail citizens just as other institutions do.
If I am forced to define what I like to do in three words, then it would be to learn, build, and teach.
Echo Birthday Celebrations, 2026
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Talking to your ex-friend long after breakup is supposed to be enjoyable. Both of you share updates on what’s happening in your respective lives and joke about the circumstances surrounding the breakup. Or so I thought.
In this case we did a normal civilised conversation, unlike the few times we met earlier where we both had our daggers drawn out. She told me how she definitely made a lot more friends after dumping me and how her dog died. I told her about my new username and its meaning. (Yup, I thought that might be a good point of conversation. I wonder if she will be able to find my new blog…)
However, I started to lose my control when she started speaking of something along the lines of ’this is the last time we are talking.’ I am totally aware about the fact but saying stuff like that really makes me emotional. Thank you. I managed to recover my composure and talked amicably till she and I split up at the bus stop. I was OK with how everything went.
But after 5-10 minutes I got a message from her which was like
BS BS BS. BS. BS BS. Goodbye.
Holy fuck that word again. At this point I was suddenly feeling a few emotions intensely, and had to choose between 2 options:
(Lie) Tell her I hate her to ensure that it leave a bad taste in her mouth
(Lie) Tell her I love her to ensure that she stay with me
So I of course chose option 3:
Just send her a goodbye
I think my usage of poetic license with the phrase “Sayonara Stranger” pissed her off and I was blocked again by the next day.
So, yeah. In the end it was me who felt terrible from all the talking and now I am too disturbed to continue watching random London School of Economics’ lectures on YouTube. I still want to be her friend.
My college life is going to end in about a month. I think this might be a good time to write about some of my experiences which might be useful for the future kouhai who will search “Is Hindu College Good?”.
The Student Council might be a good start. The Council, in theory, is supposed to represent the interests of students. However, it doesn’t seem like that it is happening right now. The last elections were a disaster with a person called A winning the president position. As far as I have heard from other people in the class, it seems like in their last position in the council A didn’t do much work, effectively resulting in K overworking the heck out. In the next elections K didn’t participate which automatically made A the winner. Around 160 votes were casted, of which 90 were for A and around 70 were NOTA.
The actual study isn’t going very well either. An important Economic Advisor was going to give a guest lecture on 12 March, but almost nobody from the department showed up. The Department Head had to make arrangements with the Science Department to get some supply of students to fill up the seats. A similar thing happened on 27 April. In fact hearing loud whispers during even the normal lectures is very common. The Head nowadays often complain about “this generation.” Maybe this is happening as a result of COVID-19?
I often ask my friends how much they think they have learned in the college and I often get the reply “nothing.” Education is supposed to be liberating, and here we have a bunch of people who are mostly preoccupied with keeping up with the assignments.
The relations between students isn’t very rosy either. Casteism and Sexism for one are prevalent. For instance, I once joined a small Maths group of my friends and had to exit soon when they started sending videos of girls dancing in Sanganeria Auditorium and GIFs of masturbating stick figures.
An important demonstration of this classism is the “department trip.” A department trip is supposed to include most, if not all, students. Now see for yourself how many of the 90 students in my batch actually attended the trip:
Why are there so few people you ask? The cost per person is ₹8000 and I don’t think even the people from Economically Weaker Sections get a discount. The 6 page PDF description of the trip has even a size of 73MB! How is any of this inclusive?
Finally I would like to end with an important suggestion for my future kouhai: don’t choose Hindu College just because it is Hindu College. I once met 5-6 Philosophy Department students who chose Philosophy because they can’t get Economics, even though they had the excellent option to study Economics at Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College. How idiotic!
I removed the screen from my laptop—and it’s now more useful than
before.
Anyways, I recently got my hands on a used thinkpad X230 for around
60$.
The machine is great, the keyboard even better, but the TN panel is
genuinely unusable.
For a while, I used it like a laptop as intended, but I can only do
so much with a TN Panel whose max brightness is my Pixel’s 10%
brightness.
Instead, I decided to cut my losses and just remove the display
altogether, and use the thinkpad as a keyboard with my monitor.
The Hardware
Doing this was pretty simple, I just had to open up the back of the
laptop, remove the hinge screws, and then slowly disconnect all the
wires before removing the display assembly.
Additionally, I changed the Wi-Fi card to an atheros one for good
measure. (God bless Libreboot)
Main issue with this, was that the Thinklight is literally impossible
to remove from the casing, so I kinda had to snap that wire out.
I also removed the two wifi antennae that are glued to the display
casing, and kept it outside so wifi continues to work properly.
I kept the webcam too, removed from the case and double tape’d to my
monitor - since somehow this ancient laptop seems to have a better
camera than my modern laptop.
After doing all this, and very-safely electrical taping all the extra
wires if i ever decide to put a new display on this, I got a think-slab
:D
After shot of my setup
However, I had to add a few cmdline arguments on grub to make it
work.
The first 3 are common grub parameters that you always have, while
the last 2 are the special ones you need to add the :d parameter
disables LVDS-1 (internal display), and the :e parameter enables VDA-1
(in my case, the external display)
An update-grub later, everything magically started
appearing on my monitor!
The software
This worked great for research and other random stuff I did, but a
laptop from 2012 can only do so much in terms of computing.
To remedy this, I decided to just use the thinkpad keyboard with my
modern laptop using software KVM. Since my monitor has both VGA and
HDMI, I was able to connect my modern laptop to the HDMI port, and the
thinkpad to VGA.
Though I was just planning on using barrier like I did year’s ago, I
decided to go with Lan-Mouse this
time.
It is a rust-based application similar to synergy and barrier, but
with a proper gtk UI and supposedly better performance.
Now, since I have a wireless card that’s older than me on the
thinkpad, I had to do some ethernet magic for lan mouse if I wanted any
sort of real performance. Software KVM is a high-bandwidth task after
all.
So I connected an ethernet cable between the two laptops, and set it
up as follows
# On Modern laptopnmcli con add type ethernet ifname enp2s0 ip4 192.168.50.1/24# On Thinkpadnmcli con add type ethernet ifname eno0 ip4 192.168.50.2/24
And magically, I have a Gigabit connection between the two laptops
for Lan-Mouse to work through. Lan mouse is pretty intuitive to setup,
so im not covering it here.
In conclusion, this one day’s work turned out pretty well for me. I
now have a speedy “slabtop” for any research or minor work that I have,
and it doesn’t even take 5 minutes for this setup to convert into a
high-performance workstation either.
I’m still using the X230 without lan-mouse for home usage, when I’m
too lazy to get my laptop out of my bag, but this setup really helps me
when I need to get some real programming work done, which is 10x harder
without such a comfy keyboard like that of the X230.
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.
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.
It’s been another hectic week, but towards the end, it was a bit relaxing because of Ugadhi and Id breaks. Wish you all a happy Ugadhi and Id. The war continues. I doubt the folks who started the war know what they want or how they want it to end. This war is not just illegal but also foolish. I still think pushing India towards PNG (piped natural gas) is a bad idea. We should ideally move towards electricity, especially if you want to be energy-independent as a household, village, or state. Electricity is best suited.
Echo
It’s been hot and dry in Bengaluru. It’s been raining also, not a lot, but just enough to cool down a bit. I hope it continues. We have started using AC for roughly an hour every day. Just to cool the room before we go to sleep.
I played a game of pickleball with friends on Sunday morning. Now that seems like an ideal time for everyone. I also do two P.T sessions this week. I have started noting down the strength levels. Whenever I cross a milestone, I will try to add a record there.
There are lots of interesting things happening in the world of ActivityPub worth noting. Madblog exposes a bunch of Markdown files as a blog with full support for ActivityPub federation. It looks very easy to set up and run. Pubby is a Python library to manage everything related to the ActivityPub protocol. It makes it easy to bring AP to your Python applications. ap cli client is, as the name suggests, a command-line client to your AP server. And the most interesting one is holos.social, where you run the ActivityPub server on your phone (keys on the phone) and then expose it to the world through relay servers. Relay servers act as a middleman between your phone and the world. It also supports custom domains.
Note: This was written yesterday. But I forgot to post.
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One thing you should know is that I love bags, and I have quite a few of them, in different kinds. In my head, there are purposes behind it. But I am always looking for general-purpose bags. I have a couple of them, which are jack-of-all-trades kind of bags, which I love. Unfortunately, they are all getting old (5 to 10 years old) and are no longer available to buy again. For a long time, I didn’t have a motorcycling backpack; I have a small 10L Decathlon bag that’s probably a decade old. This works for short rides but is not comfortable on long rides. Also, it’s getting old, and I couldn’t buy it again :( So I started.
Requirements
Comfortable to wear the whole day
Good quality build
Big enough to hold enough water, phone, wallet, power bank, snacks, and maybe a multitool or additional pair of gloves based on need.
Ability to use it outside riding, say, while on a day hike or city walk.
Affordable
Solution
After quite a bit of research, I had the Navigator Hydration Backpack from Rynox, the Marine Neo Hydration Pack from ViaTerra, the Kreiga Trail 9, and the Wildcat 12L by Moskto Moto on the list. Both Kreiga and Wildcat are great on paper. But I think it’s too expensive ( > INR 20K) to buy without trying first. I will have to find a friend to try them out first. Marine Moto comes at a great price (INR 3399) and includes a hydration bladder. I found its minimal approach to being just a hydration backpack appealing. I wanted something more. So finally, I settled on the Navigator Hydration Backpack by Rynox.
Big LoopA selfie, Somewhere in the Ooty Ghat Section
Things I like
Total bag capacity is 4 Ltr. It’s not big, but it’s not very small either. I did buy a separate 2L hydration bladder (it can hold up to 3L). Depending on the situation, I fill 1L or 1.5L.
The water stays in the main compartment near the back; it’s quite stable. This compartment also has drainage holes. There are holes for the sipper; you can make it come out on the right or left side, as you prefer. This compartment can be fully opened for easy access, thanks to an all-around zipper. If you just add 1 L of water, you can easily fit a pair of additional gloves and some snacks. This also gives full access to adjust the shoulder harness so you can fit it nicely on your back. The main compartment also has a semi-transparent (plastic) pouch on the closing flap. Works well for a wallet or snacks, etc.
On the outside, there are two zipped pockets. One is deep. It can fit a power bank, phone, or camera. It is quite deep. There is a second zipped pocket; it’s not very deep, but it can still hold my phone and wallet together.
On the outside, there is an elastic cord-based compression storage. It has molle-like webbings for accessories as well. You can put your gloves, wet socks, etc., here. You can also attach accessories to webbings, though I don’t like it. I do have an LED blinker and a reflector clip that I attach here. However, I can use the Vioo Clip at the bottom for it.
The bag is sturdy and holds its shape. I also like how the back is designed for comfort and air circulation with enough sturdy foam. The backpack straps range from small to large, using the G-hooks from the main compartment. You can also make smaller adjustments outside using the straps. They have a Sternum Chest lock for effective load distribution, which I love. They have a standard waist strap. It is very comfortable to wear.
The build quality is good. It has YKK zippers, and I don’t think they have made any major compromises there.
Maybe a tidy bit bigger, 7 ot 9 Liters would have made it a bit more than the hydration backpack.
It doesn’t come with a hydration bladder. I think it’s always a good idea to sell them together.
At Rs. 5050 (3550 + 1500), it’s not cheap. I know it’s not as expensive as some foreign brands, but it is still expensive for many. But for the quality, I am okay to pay, I think. Only time will tell.
Conclusion
I have used it on the Big Loop, a 700 km single-day ride. I carried about 1L of water, Insta Go2, a Wallet, spare gloves, and a multitool. It was very comfortable. I didn’t feel much throughout the ride. Though I didn’t drink as much on the go (I would often forget), I think it’s a matter of practice. It was also easy to remove it and wear it. No fuss. It also fits well over my riding jacket. Zips were also accessible while wearing gloves—all in all, positive.
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National Knowledge Network (NKN) is one of India’s main National Research and Educational Network (NREN). The other being the less prevalent Education and Research Network (ERNET).
This post grew out of this Mastodon thread where I kept on adding various public graphs (from various global research and educational entities) that peer or connect with NKN. This was to get some purview about traffic data between them and NKN.
CERN
CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web (WWW) and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
India participates in the LHCONE project, which carries LHC data over these links for scientific research purposes. This presentation from Vikas Singhal from Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), Kolkata, at the 8th Asian Tier Center Forum in 2024 gives some details.
GÉANT
GÉANT is pan European Union’s collaboration of NRENs.
OK. Last year I wrote a short guide on mapping Indian addresses but I lost it in my tiny pursuit to delete myself. Today I suddenly came across the fact that the guide was actually used by mappers and, hence, as a result I am now writing this post to become a replacement for that old guide. Since this is a new one, I don’t want to just rehash the old stuff and instead this time I am going to take a simple problem and show how I would solve it from scratch.
A1, Tower 2, Sector 11, RK Puram, South West District, Delhi, India
A problem very similar to this one came up in OSM India’s XMPP channel today. So, how does one go about mapping this address?
As it’s usually the case we can ignore the district, state, and country part as they are all very well mapped in India. This leaves us with everything upto RK Puram.
If you are thinking that something as big as RK Puram should surely be already on the map then you are wrong; In my “career” I have actually seen larger areas without any nodes for them. So we will in fact check if it’s already on the map and, guess what, it actually is already mapped as a suburb, so that’s one less step for us! I should mention that in OSM there are three “neighbourhood” levels below the district: quarter, suburb, and neighbourhood in decreasing order of size. In most cases suburb and neighbourhood should be enough for you, but it is important to be aware of quarter for special situations.
Now let’s check for Sector 11. As of writing this, Sector 11 isn’t on the map. So I will put a neighbourhood node at the approximate centre of Sector 11. (Remember that neighbourhood is smaller than suburb.) We are making good progress.
Now let’s take care of Tower 2. It’s actually specifying a particular building, unlike the previous steps which were about specifying the area in which the building lies. In this case it should be “Tower 2” for housename and “Sector 11” for place. It’s important to specify the place because it could be the case that “Sector 45” node is actually closer to the building.
A small interjection: when mapping a building try to choose between housename and housenumber or place and street logically. If your address is “36, Shivaji Marg” then please please use 36 for housenumber and Shivaji Marg for street. If you do it incorrectly then there’s a 90% chance of divine punishment from OSM gods.
OK. The building is done. Now all you have to do is to add A1 to the unit tag as a separate node inside the building. Note that the A in this case does not refer to a block and so it should not be separated from the 1. Another important point is that even though A1 is referred to as housenumber in common language, in OSM it isn’t actually a housenumber since housenumber/housename are reserved for building. A1 is just a unit number which means that it is a part of the building. (In case you haven’t realized it yet, the given address was for an apartment.)
I forgot to mention but blocks are somewhat of a controversial topic. My method is usually to retain the blocks in housenumber if they are simple (such as the 1 in “1/265”) or move them into “place” if they are more complicated (like the Pocket E in “36, Pocket E”).
OK. Let’s see if you were reading carefully. Tell me how you would map
1/26/65EB, Gali Shanti, Near Phoole Wala Mandir, Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi
Were you able to do it? Here’s my answer:
Old Delhi is probably already mapped, Chandni Chowk would be a neighbourhood, I would ignore Phoole Wala Mandir, I would add Gali Shanti to the name of highway, then finally for the building I would add 1/26/65E as housenumber and Gali Shanti as street. Did you notice that I never actually told you that letters like E are allowed in housenumber? By that I wanted to show that this guide probably does not contain comments for each and every case, but it should work for the majority of cases. If you come across a difficult problem, then your best bet is always OSM Wiki. Just look it up!
I spend an embarrassing amount of time in cafes, though honestly, I like the whole concept of a cafe way more than the coffee itself.
I know it’s a bit like going to a bar for the water, but the caffeine isn’t really the draw for me. I’m just there for the faces.
I’ve been staying alone in Mumbai/Thane for almost two years now.
My social life is pretty much non existent by choice, I guess, but let’s not digress into the why of it all right now.
The point is, I love the ambience.
When I’m tucked away in a corner of a cafe, I don’t feel so lonely; it feels like a safe space.
I get to observe so many great personalities, some eventually become “regulars”, some I see every six months, while others just remain figments of my imagination.
I don’t know, man. I just like spending 5 to 6 hours with my laptop, expertly pretending to work. Once in a while, I actually do get some stuff done, but mostly I’m just there for the environment.
At this point, I’m basically part of the furniture (LMAO), and I’m on a first name basis with the staff.
Blue Tokai is the winner for me so far. It helps that there’s a branch barely a kilometer away from my place and the wifi actually holds up.
Since I’m not there for the beans, I usually just go for their hot chocolate.
My credit card statement is the only thing side eyeing my choices right now.
But hey, if the price of feeling ‘kinda happy’ is a daily hot chocolate, I think I’m fine with the trade off.
Back in December, I was working to help organize multiple different conferences. One has already happened; the rest are still works in progress. That’s when the thought struck me: why so many conferences, and why do I work for them?
I have been fairly active in the scene since 2020. For most conferences, I usually arrive late in the city on the previous day and usually leave the city on conference close day. Conferences for me are the place to meet friends and new folks and hear about them, their work, new developments, and what’s happening in their interest zones. I feel naturally happy talking to folks. In this case, people inspire me to work. Nothing can replace a passionate technical and social discussion, which stretches way into dinner parties and later.
For most conference discussions now, I just show up without a set role (DebConf is probably an exception to it). It usually involves talking to folks, suggesting what needs to be done, doing a bit of it myself, and finishing some last-minute stuff during the actual thing.
Having more of these conferences and helping make them happen naturally gives everyone more places to come together, meet, talk, and work on something.
No doubt, one reason for all these conferences is evangelism for, let’s say Free Software, OpenStreetMap, Debian etc. which is good and needed for the pipeline. But for me, the primary reason would always be meeting folks.
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!
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:
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.
I would have loved to include 4.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 with Lumen/Level 3 or 9.0.0.0/8 with IBM but parts of the address space have been handed out to other entities, like 8.8.4.0/24 and 8.8.8.0/24 for Google Public DNS and 9.9.9.0/24 for Quad9.
Then there were other famous netblocks like 18.0.0.0/8 with MIT and 44.0.0.0/8 which was with Amateur Packet Radio Network broken and brought up by Amazon. Amazon keeps on buying more and more of IPv4 address space. Right now, they’re the second highest IPv4 address space holder with 168+ million addresses under them, right behind the US DoD, which has more due to legacy reasons.
Note - HE’s list mentions addresses originated (not just owned). Providers also advertise prefixes owned by their customers in Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) setups. The number of address space owned by entity would “mostly” be more than their customer owned space (originated by the entity).
There’s also 126.0.0.0/8 which is mostly Softbank.
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.
