Planet FSCI

August 25, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Exploring 1-Bit LLMs

  My interest in LLMs has increasingly shifted towards smaller models, small in terms of size and their ability to run on modest local machines. For some time now, I have been using models with fewer than 40 B parameters on my machines in some quantized way. Then I came across BitNet, a project that introduced me to the concept of using just 1 bit per weight.

  Quantization

  Weights are represented by numbers in a model. A normal model might store each weight using 16 bits, i.e FP16 (half-precision floating-point). Quantization reduces that dramatically, where weights are represented using INT8 (8-bit integer) or INT4 (4-bit integer). They reduce precision but increase inference speed and reduce hardware requirements. Most of the time, quantization is performed post-training, which reduces model accuracy. But there is INT4 QAT (4-bit Integer Quantization-Aware Training), which does this during training, thereby reducing the extreme accuracy drops common with standard 4-bit quantization.

  Approach	Training	Inference weights
  FP16 model	Full precision	FP16
  INT8 post-training quantization	Train normally, quantize later	INT8
  INT4 QAT	Quantization simulated during training	INT4
  BitNet	Designed and trained around extreme low-bit weights	ternary or binary

  1 bit weight

  1-bit goes one step further and asks: what if the weights were just one bit, and if that were done during training? With exactly 1 bit per weight, each weight can have only 2 possible values. 0 or 1. 0 represents -1 and 1 represents +1. i.e., instead of storing numbers like 0.72, -0.13, 1.24, -0.56, we will store +1, -1, +1, -1. That is at least 16 times less storage for weights theoretically.

  1.58 bit weight

  In 1.58-bit weights (ternary bit weights), there are three possible values: {-1, 0, +1}. Theoretically, we need log2(3) bits of information to distinguish between 3 possible states : 2^x=3. i.e. log₂​(3)≈1.585. Hence the name.

  For our interpretation and understanding:

  • 0: the input is effectively ignored for that connection. i.e., no influence at all, which also gives you built-in sparsity.
  • +1: the input contributes positively to the output. i.e., an increase in the input pushes the weighted sum up. This is “same-direction” influence.
  • -1: the input contributes negatively. i.e., an increase in the input pushes the weighted sum down. This is “opposite-direction” influence.

  1.125-bit weight

  1.125-bit applies different logic for compression and calculation. One can’t literally allocate 1.125 bits per weight. The way this works is that the average bit allocation is used when they are packed. For example, it takes 9 bits to store 8 weights; thus, the average number of bits per weight is 1.125. One important distinction here is that bits per weight doesn’t necessarily tell you how many values each individual weight can take. 1.58 has a clean theoretical connection to three states, while 1.125 bpw usually describes the overall encoding/storage scheme. The table below should make a bit clear

  Format	Possible basic values	Approx storage / 1B weights
  FP16	~65,536	2 GB
  INT8	256	1 GB
  INT4	16	500 MB
  Ternary	3	~198 MB at theoretical 1.58 bpw
  1.125-bit	special packed encoding	~141 MB
  Binary	2	125 MB

  BitNet b1.58 2B4T

  This is the first open-source, native 1-bit Large Language Model (LLM) at the 2-billion parameter scale, developed by Microsoft Research. You can find the model on the hugging face, it needs a specific inference code called bitnet.cpp.

  Bonsai models

  Bonsai 1-bit models are probably the first set of production-ready binary/ternary models. They have 1.7B, 4B, 8B, and 27B parameter models.

  I have been running the 8B-parameter version locally. My experience with it has been positive. I have explored it for text summaries, code explanations, etc. I will try to install the 27B version and do some coding to see how it goes.

  # Install llama
  curl -LsSf https://llama.app/install.sh | sh
  # Serve the model using OpenAI-compatible API and a web ui
  llama serve -hf prism-ml/Bonsai-1.7B-gguf:Q1_0
  # or 8B parameter version
  llama serve -hf prism-ml/Bonsai-8B-gguf:Q1_0
  

  Note: Yes, I have moved away from Ollama and now mostly use llama.cpp. Also I sometimes Jan.ai along with OpenWebUI

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August 23, 2026

• aktsbot Mighty Dunkan

  Mighty Dunkan

  23 Aug 2026

  ---

  This post is in rememberance of our dear kitten Dunkan (ടുങ്കൻ). Although our family had quite a few traveller cats who decided to stay a while before they embarked on their journeys, Dunkan would always be remembered as the mightiest.

  He came to us at 4 weeks old on a very hot summer in May this year. Tiny, full of bounce and a shake that melts mountains, he quickly solidified his place as the newest member of our household.

  

  Surviving on formula for the first month, he started exploring the household. Little by little Dunkan found his signature bounce and his iconic voice. He found sardines more to his palette than kitten food. He had a habit of finding pieces of old clothes in our house and used to drag them where ever he decided to lie down. And when our mom scolds him, he would give a soul piercing bubbly eyed look that would make her forget his shenanigans. The cat had figured us all out!

  Finding places he "fits" was a hobby he found plenty of time for. And there was no place too high or too dark for his search. 3 months have passed in the blink of an eye.

  

  Two weeks prior, our parents found his walks a little wobbly. He would tilt to the side when he scoots. And very recently started taking rests between his walks.

  I met him in person last week and we took him to a new vet. They gave him a shot of subcutaneous Potassium infusion. That evening, we saw his iconic bounce back and we were in joy. Our boy has returned. The vet was a little cautious of him having worm infections, as there were signs. But Dunkan's progress made everything feel like it was all right again.

  The next morning he had his usual meals of cleaned up sardines. We saw him losing his balance every now and then, but we thought we needed to give the medication some more time to do its thing. We had to leave the house for a bit that day and when we returned, our boy was resting loafed up near his favorite box.

  We rushed him to the vet. His breathing became erratic. Every once in a while he would rise his head up to see the street lights and then lie down to rest. By the time we reached the vet, he could no longer stand up. They gave him oxygen every 15 mins and then warmed him up with a dryer. The vets hinted us that his chances of survival are very grim. But seeing our faces, decided to give it another hour for Dunkan to regain his strength.

  There was little progress and we decided to bring him home. We saw him for one last time on the morning of Aug 19, 2026 01:15 AM.

  Of all the cats who came to our home, Dunkan stayed the shortest. But he would be remembered as the mightiest. All the worries of the world can wait until he finished playing. He gave us plenty of good memories to cherish and in return made a cat-shaped black-hole in our hearts that some how time would have to heal.

  Safe travels, friend!

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August 21, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Weekly Notes 34/2026

  With the Peppo team here in Bangalore and other commitments, the week was crazy busy. I met at least half of the Peppo team in person for the first time. We have a great team at Peppo. As Mohammed said in one of our conversations, the Peppo team is not only talented but also filled with good human beings. We’ve been very lucky as a team. It was so much fun being around everyone, having conversations, and sharing a few meals.

  

  

  • I played host for them; actually, a few team members did all the work. I was just present, that’s all. That said, that kept me busy during the week. We booked a hotel on Church Street through a popular booking site, but they canceled at the last minute. Then we had to book the same hotel using a different aggregator site. This is the second time for me. So I think from now on, after booking a hotel online, I will call the hotel to confirm. The confirmation from the aggregator means nothing.
  • We had team lunch at Brik Oven and team dinner at Ishaara, both on Church Street. We also took some time out together to spend a day at Our Native Village near Hesaraghatta.
  • I ran a bit on Sunday; my calf muscles were hurting, so I stopped. But I was able to run on Monday and Tuesday at Hesaraghatta grasslands. It’s so different to run in the green surroundings compared to running in the city. I could do only one P.T session and one game.
  • On Sunday, I went to watch the Bengaluru’47 exhibition at RBNAM School. I loved it.
  • I wrote a simple web component called muscle-map to log the workouts here.
  • I have lots of image albums on my phone which are collections on random subjects. One of them is titled “Unidentified Urban Objects” in Bengaluru. This week I took an opportunity to upload to an Arena channel called Unidentified Urban Objects. It has lots of random pictures of manholes, electric poles, public sensors, toilets, and gods on the footpath, etc. You can also add to the channel. All Bangalore-focused.
  • I am probably one of the few paid Grammarly users who still use classic mode to avoid AI rewriting in their new interface. Also, the new interface is not writer-friendly; too many distractions. 1-bit, 1.125-bit, and 1.58-bit LLMs are very interesting and are capable. I have started exploring some of them and will probably productize some.

  

  

  

  

  

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August 18, 2026

• Arya Kiran My experience at YLAC High School Achievers Program @DEL - 2026

  When I first signed up for the YLAC High School Achievers Program, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to get out of it. I was interested in learning more about civic responsibility and finding better ways to advocate for FOSS beyond the usual “it’s free” or “it respects your freedom” arguments.

  By the end of the program, however; I ended up questioning the way I approached that problem in the first place.

  The program’s structure felt somewhat disjointed at first. Each day seemed to dive right in into a completely different topic, from our privileges and biases to social movements, NGOs, democracy, governance and the Indian parliamentary system. I couldn’t quite see how all of these pieces fit together.

  Looking back after completing the program, however, I think that was the point.

  The first few days were less about giving us answers and more about making us examine the assumptions behind the answers we already had. Through many of the interactive activities, we were encouraged to think about and re-imagine our privileges, biases and core beliefs. That made me realise how correct an opinion may feel to you when you have never had to question where it came from.

  The next few days gave us a way to apply that thinking to something bigger than ourselves. We looked at movements ranging from women’s suffrage and the US civil rights movement to the more recent RTI movement in India, along with the work of different NGOs. The interesting part wasn’t simply what these movements believed, but how they managed to convince other people to care.

  Even though these movements had very little in common with each other, there were certain things that kept repeating: clear demands, non-violent action, and, most importantly, the use of music, art and storytelling to make sure their message didn’t just get forgotten as another headline. YLAC made me realise that an argument’s strength and accuracy isn’t enough to create meaningful change; how that argument is conveyed can matter just as much or more. This is especially important in the realm of FOSS advocacy where most of us just use the same arguments of either philosophy or monetary benefit while promoting its use.

  The program also covered democracy, governance, and the Indian parliamentary system. While some of the civics content was familiar from school, hearing it discussed in the context of why institutions evolved the way they did and how ideas like the Magna Carta, the RTI Act, and citizen participation fit into a much larger story made it feel much more relevant. Additionally, through the guest sessions, I was able to observe public policy as more than just the buzzwords people use online. People in this field are able to make real difference in government, adoption of tech and so much more, and it was good to see how it happens.

  Looking back, YLAC wasn’t as much of cramming the basics of History and Civics into 7 days, but more so cramming the ideas behind what we are taught in History and Civics in the same 7 days, which is arguably a bigger feat. More importantly, it changed the way I think about advocacy: instead of just asking whether an argument is correct, I now think more carefully about whether it gives someone a reason to care.

  For something like the FOSS ecosystem, that might mean spending less time explaining why we believe software should be free, and more time showing people why having control over the software they use matters to them.

  PS: Thanks FOSSUnited for sponsoring my attendance of the program :D

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August 16, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Embedding Workouts using Web Component

  I wanted a way to represent workouts by the muscle groups they activate. Most applications where you log do it. I thought it must be easy with SVG images. It wasn’t as easy. First, I had to get an image that is remake-friendly. I used this drawing by OpenStax & Tomáš Kebert & umimeto.org, from Wikimedia Commons. Cleaned it up to reduce the complexity. Then tagged each muscle group, including separating left and right muscles, in case you focus on one side.

  After that, I wanted an easy way to embed it on any web page. I chose to use web components. It converts the given list of exercises into muscle groups, then applies styles to them within the SVG and embeds the SVG. I have verified it to the best of my knowledge and from available sources. It took a lot of battling with Claude to make it the way I want, that is, to make it generic and reusable. I still have to map a bunch of muscle groups, I have listed all the short comings in the readme.

  Finally, I created a WordPress shortcode to queue the JavaScript and embed the component. But that’s not really required. If you have a simple static site, then you can include SVG and a JS file and use the muscle-map tag in your HTML

  Wednesday Workout

  Run

  Calf raise, Tibialis raise

  Calf raise

  Happy workout and happy logging.

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August 14, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Weekly Notes 33/2026

  I ended the Netflix subscription. We have not been using it for a long time, and we were just paying; finally, this month I ended it. Sleep has won for me. If required, I can subscribe again. We still have Amazon Prime, mostly because of the free shipping it provides. That said, in general my online shopping has also come down. I need to take a look at all my digital subscriptions.

  

  • I have been using Tau by HF as the coding agent. It’s very simple but has been very good. It’s just enough. This one is different from Tau by dpc, which also looks good. I am yet to try it. It’s on my list to try. Work in general has been good, and I am happy about the progress I have been making.
  • They have started digging everywhere in Bangalore. Almost all the roads around our home have been dug up. I can see the work is getting done, but I don’t know why they had to do it on all roads at once. Now it’s an adventure ride to Uma’s school every day.
  • These days, every Tuesday is a cupcake Tuesday for Uma. We stop at Cafe Da Costa Bakery on our way back from school.
  • Saturday has become the rest day. Originally, I wanted to do a longer run on Saturdays, but it has not happened yet. Sunday was also mostly a rest day as it rained when I started running. Bangalore rains are unpredictable. So I immediately stopped and returned home. As usual, I did two P.T sessions during the week. I also started logging the main part of the workout on Strava for later reference and to measure progress. I also have a reliable partner to play now, so we played two games. I couldn’t run today as I was driving back home :( I do recognize that I can dedicate an hour each day to physical activity because I work mostly from home and save my commute time. A couple of months back, I got a pull-up bar for a door frame. Until now, it has been used mostly by Uma and me for dead hangs. This week I was able to do two proper pull-ups at home. I have been practicing assisted pull-ups during P.Ts, so it’s not a surprise. That said, I have not yet reached the goal (WN 23/2026) of 3 proper pull-ups.
  • I had an interesting conversation with Abhishek from OpenConsultancy about Frappe and related products. I know about Frappe; I have used their libraries but not their main product. But it was good to catch up with Abhishek and learn more from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
  • Tomorrow is a holiday, so only one class this week. I left at the wrong time today. At 5pm and it took me 3 hours to reach home :( that’s why no run.
  • Appa was here over the weekend for his dental treatment. My dental treatment is almost done! Maybe two more months :(
  • I have this book, Coders at Work. I was wondering: with AI and agents, does it still make sense? It makes more sense than ever. Get a copy or borrow from me. I have a hard copy. You would have seen GPX/Map animation videos in my previous blog posts; those are created using a FOSS tool called GPX Animator. It has lots of features to explore.

  

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August 07, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Weekly Notes 32/2026

  It’s been a hectic but active week. As usual, I continued with my two P.T sessions. I played a game of Pickleball on Thursday. I also ran twice. This week has been my most active week in quite some time. I took some time to write a blog post about return to running.

  My trail run training is progressing okay. It’s not spectacular, but I am on it, which is what I think matters. I am nervously excited about it. I am inspired by Soham’s posts about his trail runs. Hopefully, I get to run and complete in Coorg.

  

  • I met a bunch of IITM/Study students at IISc at a students’ gathering on Saturday. It was fun to meet them and have a conversation. It was drizzling a bit, and IISc was so pretty. Nothing can replace the trees.
  • I am teaching World of Computing this term at APU. The Sem/Term has started. So most Fridays and Saturdays I am working from the campus. It’s also a beautiful campus to run.
  • Both Uma and Anju have been down with a cold this week. There is also a lot of road repair (digging) work that’s going on around us. It has become very dusty. It has contributed a lot too.
  • License to Learn is a project by FOSSUnited on Indian academia’s expenditure on non-free software. Currently, it has data from NITs. Hopefully, in the future it will have data from IITs and other big universities like VTU. This reminds me of my failed effort almost two decades back, pushing VTU to use FOSS. FOSSUnited is offering a scholarship for FOSS developers to pursue the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Technology and Policy at Takshashila Institution. Do apply. ConstitutionOfIndia.net is a good site for educational material on the Constitution of India, including the Constituent Assembly discussions. I like the fact that the whole Constitution is available as an HTML document.
  • The Geological Survey of India (GSI) has published village boundaries for all the villages in India. They have published them in both KML and GeoJSON formats. I have downloaded it. I am yet to upload it to the archive.

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August 03, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Running Again

  I have not been running. The last time I ran anything serious was a decade back. The max I have been doing is walking. Though I must say I love walking, especially with friends and family. It’s a great way to have conversations.

  I tried running again a few years back and dropped it. I wanted to start running again. The best part of running is that one can do it alone or with company, unlike many other games. Last week, I started running. I was not sure how I was going to feel and how my body was going to react. So I didn’t stress much about it. I started slowly and paced myself, giving time to adjust.

  This also means I have to slot this between my workout days. I have fixed P.T. days; two days out of Mon, Wed, and Fri. Most weeks it’s Mon and Wed. So runs are going to be either Thu, Fri, or Sat. Though my initial plan was to run a week three times, I will be happy with two days.

  

  

  

  

  I have this grand plan of running The Coffee Trails 11KM in Coorg this Octbober. That is if everything goes well. It all depends on how the first few weeks go. It seems possible now based on Week 1. Fingers crossed.

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July 31, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Weekly Notes 31/2026

  This week has been good. It’s been a busy week, but it has been good except today. I typed a wrong Git command and pushed without verifying. Initially, it looked like I lost a couple of weeks’ work, but thankfully, since Git is distributed, we had a copy and recovered without much hurt. I lost a couple of hours and had to miss today’s P.T. I don’t like it a bit, especially on Fridays. This doesn’t happen to me that often, but when it happens, I am always in shock. I have to keep reminding myself, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

  

  • As long as Caste exists, reservation must exist. Even after reservations, big institutes have institutionalized caste-based discrimination; we have seen many cases of that. The rot is deep. So if you think caste-based reservation has to go, then you work on the root cause. Annihilation of Caste is the only way.
  • I have five or six Indian UNCLES (Some are five years younger than me and others are at least ten years older than me) on Twitter. They are very sweet and agreeable when you meet or talk to them. But full of venom on Twitter, once in a while I check their Twitter posts to see what troubles them. Gen Z seems to be troubling them a lot these days.
  • I wrote a blog post about my ride to Gandikota and the struggles. I am yet to test ride (long, like 100+KM) a KTM AdvX.
  • I continued with P.T, and no games. I had to skip today’s P.T because of an emergency. I have restarted running. This week I ran thrice. I ran today because I skipped P.T. Otherwise it would have been only twice. But the plan is to run three times a week if possible. I capture the path using GPSLogger and send it to my CouchDB. I am also logging it to Strava to find community, especially as I want to run a 10K in October. Hopefully I will be ready. I got myself a pair of Nike Stride Aero Fit. Usually all shorts give me chafing. But this one has been great. I do own Puma ForeverRun NITRO; it’s a good pair of running shoes that I have not used much. Sometimes you buy things in enthusiasm but never use them. This was one such buy. Just after that buy, I had neck issues, and I couldn’t jump or run much. Now at least they will get used. Also my 12 year old jersey from 2014 Tata 10K still works and looks great.
  • I have been using Impakto Barefoot Shoes to walk around and also use them inside the gym. Impacto has been a surprise; they have been very comfortable. They are affordable and very lightweight to carry. I will have to write a detailed review about them.
  • I registered myself at the Independent Director’s Databank. I am yet to go through their online course, but if you are looking for one, you can find me there.
  • I really like this CheapFoodMap. We have enough data for IDVC to build something similar. I used Claude to build it. It’s hosted with the data, and it’s live. Let me know what you think. You can contribute data to IDVC using a simple form. I review and approve it before it goes live. I love Pocket Bird. It’s a small bird that lives inside your browser that you can interact with. You can set it up on your site for your users to play, or you can install the add-on so you can play on any site.

  

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July 25, 2026

• Thejeshgn GN Ride to Gandikota

  Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are the least explored states in the South for me. I have been adding places of interest to my list. Gandikota has been on that list for a while. I wanted to do it post-summer and during monsoon so it would be cooler. Monsoon has not really arrived, though the heat has reduced. Initially we thought of doing it during the weekend, but both of us wanted to spend Sunday at home, so it was Friday and Saturday.

  That worked well; there was very little traffic on the road. What didn’t work out was my plan to ride the KTM 390 Adventure X (2025) model. I couldn’t get an acceptable bike yesterday. So I had to settle for a Suzuki V-Strom SX (250cc) instead of canceling the whole ride. That’s the closest I could get.

  

  

  

  The V-Strom is lighter but taller at 835 mm vs. 825 mm of the AdvX. But the AdvX is heavier at 181 kg vs 167 kg. They are both slim. On the V-Strom, my toe tips would touch the floor if I tried both feet, but I was comfortable with one leg. I struggled initially, especially inside the city stop-and-go traffic. I also struggled when trying to do sharp U-turns from the stop. I surely can’t lift it if it falls, at least for now. But after about 300 Km, I grew confident and used some tricks like a butt-scooch stop or a side-straddle stop, climbing on it to mount, turning on the side stand, etc. These tricks made it much easier. Finished 600+ km without any incidents. There is still a lot to learn about these tall motorcycles.

  

  The ride itself was good, except maybe a 70KM stretch which was bad with lots of under-construction roads and dust. It was also very windy, which made it difficult. But there was no traffic, and the other roads were really good. So, all in all, it was a good ride.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  Gandikota itself was pretty; the gorge is spectacular. You can also walk around in the fort. It’s a good weekend drive or ride from Bangalore if you plan to. Route we took are available in GPX and GeoJSON for you to download and use.

  &

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June 02, 2026

• aktsbot A guide to self-hosting web apps on a VPS

  A guide to self-hosting web apps on a VPS

  02 Jun 2026

  ---

  If you have not chosen a VPS provider, the following are what I've used

  • Digitalocean
  • Vultr
  • Hostinger

  So now you got yourself an account on a VPS provider and you plan to host your dream project(s) on it. Well done, fellow traveller. Let our journey commence!

  Table of contents

  1. Choosing a server
  2. Configuring our server
     1. tmux
     2. A new user
     3. Configuring ssh on the server
     4. Setting up a webapp on the server
        • DNS
        • Installing runtimes and dependencies
        • Application directories
        • Setting up nginx
        • Certbot HTTPS
  3. Finishing up

  Choosing a server

  Most VPS offerings start from a VM that has

  • 2 cpu cores
  • 25 GB ssd storage
  • 1 GB of RAM.

  This should roughly cost us around 5-6 USD a month.

  By all means this should be more than enough for most hobby projects. How much RAM and CPU are your projects consuming when they're running on your laptop/desktop? This should be the only deciding factor for choosing the specs of your VM.

  As for the operating system, if you are unsure, choose Debian GNU\Linux.

  Configuring our server

  When we provision a VPS, we get a public IP assigned to our VPS/server. To connect to the VPS we'd do something like this from our terminal

  dev$ ssh root@12.13.14.15 

  Digitalocean for example, enables root logins via ssh to our new server. For other VPS providers it maybe different. They may provide a normal user which can sudo to root.

  dev$ ssh admin@12.13.14.15 

  If you need to specify the private key file, the command would look like

  dev$ ssh admin@12.13.14.15 -i /path/to/private-key.pem 

  There's a handy config that let's you not worry about ips and usernames while connecting to a server. Create $HOME/.ssh/config if it does not exist and add the following at the end

  Host myvps Hostname 12.13.14.15 User admin IdentityFile /path/to/private-key.pem 

  And then you could do

  dev$ ssh myvps 

  and we are in our server. Please note that the .ssh folder and its content needs to have their permissions in order. If we screw up, run the following

  chmod 700 ~/.ssh chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_* chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config chmod 644 ~/.ssh/*.pub 

  I usually keep all of my private and public keypairs in the $HOME/.ssh folder, so that it becomes easy for me to do backups.

  Lets login into the VM and get cracking

  server$ sudo apt update server$ sudo apt upgrade 

  This updates and upgrades the installed software in our server. Now, we'll install a few handy tools to make our server management life a bit easier.

  server$ sudo apt install tmux neovim git curl htop 

  1. tmux

  tmux should be the first thing you run when you login into a VPS. Why? In the event that our ssh connection dies, any commands we were running on the server would still be running inside tmux. Let's configure it a bit

  server$ nano ~/.tmux.conf 

  Put the following in it

  # Index starts from 1 set-option -g base-index 1 set-option -g pane-base-index 1 # Renumber windows when a window is closed set-option -g renumber-windows on # no login shell set -g default-command "${SHELL}" # 256-color terminal set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color" # use 256 colors instead of 16 # Add truecolor support (tmux info | grep Tc) set-option -ga terminal-overrides ",xterm-256color:Tc" # Mouse set-option -g mouse on # Reload ~/.tmux.conf bind-key R source-file ~/.tmux.conf \; display-message "Reloaded!" 

  Ctrl+o and Ctrl+x to save and quit out of nano. If you roll with vim, use it to edit the files mentioned in the guide instead of nano.

  Now run tmux

  server$ tmux 

  We should see a green bar at the bottom indicating that we are in a tmux session. Here's a quick video on how to use tmux.

  Whenever I login into my server, this is what I do

  server$ tmux ls 0: 1 windows (created Tue Jun 24 23:19:42 2025) server$ tmux a -t 0 # or which ever session 

  2. A new user

  If your VPS provider sets you up with the root account by default, then its a good idea to create a normal user.

  server# adduser jim 

  Fill in the prompts that follow. The add our new user to the sudo group so that we can run sudo commands. Replace jim with your preferred username.

  server# usermod -aG sudo jim 

  Let's check if jim has powers by switching to the account.

  server# su - jim 

  Let's do something only root can do, like copying over the .ssh folder in /root to jim's home folder so that jim can login via ssh.

  server$ sudo cp -r /root/.ssh ~/.ssh [sudo] password for jim: 

  Provide jim's password and the command should have succeeded. Fix permissions of the new folder

  server$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh server$ chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys 

  Let's now try to connect to our VPS with this new user.

  dev$ ssh jim@12.13.14.15 

  All good?

  3. Configuring ssh on the server

  We need to make 3 changes

  • prevent root ssh logins
  • only allow ssh logins with private keys i.e no password logins
  • change port to something other than 22

  Have two terminals with ssh to our server open. And do the following in one of them.

  server$ sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.orig server$ sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config 

  Backups saves lives!

  Make the following changes in the file. Find the corresponding line and change it.

  Port 2202 PermitRootLogin no PasswordAuthentication no 

  If the line of interest has a # infront, remove it before saving. Otherwise, it'd be considered as a comment. For example

  #PermitRooLogin yes 

  should become

  PermitRootLogin no 

  Then save the file and exit. Restart the sshd service on the server

  server$ sudo service ssh restart 

  Logout from one of the terminals and connect to the server like so

  dev$ ssh jim@12.13.14.15 -i /path/to/private-key.pem -p 2202 

  If not able to connect, we have the other terminal from which we can debug. If all is well, make our lives easy by making the appropriate edits to $HOME/.ssh/config on our dev machine.

  Host myvps Hostname 12.13.14.15 Port 2202 User jim IdentityFile /path/to/private-key.pem 

  Check once again with

  dev$ ssh myvps 

  4. Setting up a webapp on the server

  It is hard naming things, so unfortunately the actual physical machine that runs our webapp and the software that it has to run to serve content - like our webapp, html files, images files etc is also called a web server.

  This guide will use a web server program called nginx. Almost all webserver software allows one to host multiple websites on a single vps/server. Apache pioneered this technique and this is exactly what we need to host multiple projects on a single VPS.

  Here's our hypothetical webapp

  • https://myapp.com is a react.js SPA.
  • https://myapp.com/api is a nodejs api that the above react frontend would consume.
  • https://api.myapp.com is the same nodejs api as above.

  Assuming, we bought the domain myapp.com ofcourse.

  4.1 DNS

  Head over to where you purchased the myapp.com domain(namecheap/godaddy/bigrock?) and add an A record with @ as sub-domain to it. Set the destination to our VPS's public IP.

  A @ 12.13.14.15 

  After this is done, all requests to myapp.com, foo.myapp.com, bar.myapp.com etc will all land on our new VPS.

  4.2 Installing runtimes and dependencies

  We are installing node.js here as our hypothetical webapp's backend needs it to run.

  server$ curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_23.x -o nodesource_setup.sh server$ sudo -E bash nodesource_setup.sh server$ sudo apt-get install -y nodejs server$ node -v 

  Refer nodesource for latest instructions on how to install node if you are reading this in the very future.

  Now lets set up our database.

  a. sqlite

  If your application can make due with sqlite, then please go with sqlite. Then as your application grows, switch over to an database system like postgres or mongodb. Most ORMs used in backend codebases support switching database systems. So, a switch like this would not pose a challenge.

  server$ sudo apt install sqlite3 

  Put the following in ~/.sqliterc

  .headers on .mode column 

  Then to open a database

  server:/var/projects/dbs$ sqlite3 myapp.db 

  b. postgres

  Just a side note, its a good idea to run database systems like postgres, mariadb/mysql, mongodb etc on a separate VPS. More on that later.

  Onto installing postgres. Latest instructions for doing that are available on the postgres website. Run the following one by one on the server.

  sudo apt install curl ca-certificates sudo install -d /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg sudo curl -o /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc --fail https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc . /etc/os-release sudo sh -c "echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc] https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $VERSION_CODENAME-pgdg main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list" sudo apt update sudo apt -y install postgresql 

  Next we setup a database user with which we can access the application database from the myapp backend.

  server$ sudo su - postgres -c "createuser myappdbuser --pwprompt" 

  The above prompts you for a password for the myappdbuser.

  Create the application database, if not done so already.

  server$ sudo su - postgres -c "createdb myapp_db" 

  Now we grant acces to myappdbuser to myapp_db.

  server$ sudo -u postgres psql psql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE myapp_db TO myappdbuser; 

  The connection string for your application would look like so

  postgres://myappdbuser:s3cr3tPass@localhost:5432/myapp_db 

  If you decided to host the database on a separate vps,

  server$ sudo cp /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf.orig server$ sudo vim /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/postgresql.conf 

  Look for the line that says

  #listen_addresses = 'localhost' 

  and change it to

  listen_addresses = 'localhost,10.2.3.4' # the above is the private ip for the database vps 

  Restart postgres

  server$ sudo service postgresql restart 

  Now the connection string for your application would look like so

  postgres://myappdbuser:s3cr3tPass@10.2.3.4:5432/myapp_db 

  c. mysql/mariadb

  server$ sudo apt install mariadb-server server$ sudo mysql_secure_installation 

  In the prompts that follow

  Enter current password for root (enter for none): Switch to unix_socket authentication [Y/n] n Change the root password? [Y/n] Y 

  Set the new root password and we're all set. Lets create a new database user instead of using root for our day to day.

  server$ sudo mariadb 

  Next, we'll create the user

  MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON announcing-litebb.md announcing-poof.md announcing-spb-lil.md autologin-sway-debian.md better-font-rendering-linux.md color-me-baby.md copy-paste-vim-slackware.md dwm-st-installation.md hello-lc230.md install-docker-linux.md javascript-callbacks-promises-async-await.md lubuntu-i3wm-awesomeness.md minimal-unix-setup-sowm.md multiple-ssh-keys-for-services.md no-more-blurry-fonts.md openbsd-getting-started.md polkit-thunar-mount.md self-hosting-webapps.md setting-up-neomutt-offlineimap-msmtp.md __skeleton.md__ slackware-install-lvm-luks.md slackware-kernel-patch-install.md slackware-post-install.md swaywm-on-debian-11.md vim-to-neovim.md xml.xml TO 'admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'p4ssw0rd' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; 

  Please note, what we did here was making a user similar to root. We'll create an application specific user next that we'll use for our myapp webapp.

  MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE myapp_db; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON myapp_db.* TO 'myappdbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'N3wp4ssw0rd' WITH GRANT OPTION; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> exit 

  The connection string for our application would look like so

  mysql://myappdbuser:N3wp4ssw0rd@localhost:3306/myapp_db 

  If we decide to run mariadb on a separate VPS, make the following edit in /etc/mysql/my.cnf

  ... bind-address = 10.2.3.4,127.0.0.1 ... 

  Then restart the service

  server$ sudo service mariadb restart 

  The connection string will now look like so,

  mysql://myappdbuser:N3wp4ssw0rd@10.2.3.4:3306/myapp_db 

  4.3 Application directories

  The following is just a convention I use. Feel free to put your application whereever you like.

  server$ sudo mkdir -p /var/projects/myapp.com/{frontend,backend} server$ sudo chown -R $USER /var/projects/myapp.com 

  Now get the code into the folders. Let's start by building and copying over the frontend project from our dev machine.

  dev:frontend$ npm run build dev:frontend$ ls ./ ../ dist/ src/ package.json 

  The dist folder is what we want to deploy. Let's make an archive of it, so that we can copy it over easily.

  dev:frontend$ tar -czf dist.tar.gz -C dist/ . 

  Now lets copy the archive over to our server.

  dev:frontend$ scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ dist.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/frontend 

  Let's extract the archive

  dev:frontend$ ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/frontend; tar xzf dist.tar.gz; rm dist.tar.gz; ls" 

  if all went well, we should see the built react project in that folder in our server. Here's a handy deploy.sh script that has all of the above. Put this in your project root and add to .gitignore

  #!/bin/sh npm run build tar -czf dist.tar.gz -C dist/ . scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ dist.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/frontend # or # scp dist.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/frontend ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/frontend; tar xzf dist.tar.gz; rm dist.tar.gz; ls" 

  Lets do the same for our backend code.

  dev:backend$ ls ./ ../ app/ .git/ node_modules/ package.json 

  Include all folders and files we need into the archive

  dev:backend$ tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules app package.json 

  Now lets copy the archive over to our server.

  dev:backend$ scp api.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/backend 

  Let's extract the archive

  dev:backend$ ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/backend; tar xzf api.tar.gz; rm api.tar.gz; ls" 

  Here's a handy deploy.sh for this as well

  #!/bin/sh # npm run build # - if its a typescript backend tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules app package.json # or if its a typescript backend # tar -czf api.tar.gz node_modules dist package.json scp -i ~/.ssh/private-key.pem \ -P 2202 \ api.tar.gz jim@12.13.14.15:/var/projects/myapp/backend # or #scp api.tar.gz myvps:/var/projects/myapp/backend # NOTE: tweak this as per your project. ssh myvps "cd /var/projects/myapp/backend; tar xzf api.tar.gz; rm api.tar.gz; ls" 

  To run the backend, I use pm2. Create a file called pm2.config.cjs in /var/projects/myapp/backend with the following. You can check this in with git.

  module.exports = { apps: [ { name: "myapp-api", script: "./app/index.js", }, ], }; 

  And then I check if my project secrets in the file /var/projects/myapp/backend/.env are all set.

  Then to run the backend, its a simple

  server$ npx pm2 start pm2.config.cjs 

  To see the logs

  server$ npx pm2 logs myapp-api 

  4.4 Setting up nginx

  This is the webserver that we talked about earlier. Install it with

  server$ sudo apt install nginx 

  Now on to setting up a vhost files for our webapp.

  server$ sudo nvim /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp_com.conf 

  Put the following in it

  server { listen 80; root /var/projects/myapp/frontend/dist; index index.html index.htm; server_name myapp.com; location / { default_type "text/html"; try_files $uri.html $uri $uri/ /index.html; } # assumes the backend is running on port 3000 location /api { proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade'; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; } } 

  Remember our hypothetical webapp's deployment plan?

  1. https://myapp.com is a react.js SPA.
  2. https://myapp.com/api is a nodejs api that the above react frontend would consume.
  3. https://api.myapp.com is the same nodejs api as above.

  1 and 2 are covered by the above nginx config. We need one more file for hosting our api in its own sub-domain.

  server$ sudo nvim /etc/nginx/sites-available/api_myapp_com.conf 

  Put the following in it

  server { listen 80; server_name api.myapp.com; # assumes the backend is running on port 3000 location / { proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade'; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; } } 

  Now to make nginx use these configs, we need to run the following

  server$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp_com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myapp_com.conf server$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/api_myapp_com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/api_myapp_com.conf 

  We can ofcourse create the vhost files directly inside the sites-enabled folder, but it wouldnt be best practise.

  Now we restart nginx

  server$ sudo service nginx restart 

  Anytime, we make a config change to nginx, check if there are any problems with the config with

  server$ sudo nginx -t 

  If all green, update nginx with

  server$ sudo service nginx reload 

  4.5 Certbot HTTPS

  By now, visiting http://myapp.com and http://api.myapp.com should have loaded our webapp and the webapp's api. But we need that sweet sweet https.

  server$ sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx server$ sudo certbot --nginx -d myapp.com -d api.myapp.com 

  certbot would ask a few questions and after that would give us the ssl certificates for our domains.

  Note: Let's Encrypt SSL certificates(the ones that certbot sets us up with) expires after 3 months. By installing certbot with apt, we get a systemd timer also installed for checking the certificates' expiry. We can find it with

  server$ sudo systemctl list-timers | grep certbot 

  Finishing up

  Always remember to keep you server patched with updates. A simple set of

  server$ sudo apt-get update server$ sudo apt upgrade server$ sudo apt dist-upgrade server$ sudo apt-cache clean 

  would be all thats needed to do this.

  Just a heads up, keep an eye on database software upgrades like postgres / mysql. apt will tell you the packages that are about to be upgraded when you run apt upgrade.

  P.S always backup your database before upgrading.

  And with that, well done webmaster!

  Happy Hacking & have a great day!

---

May 29, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi Budapest Travel

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

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

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

  

  

  

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

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

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

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

  

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

  

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

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

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

  

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

  

  

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

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

  

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

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

  

  

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

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

  

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

  

  

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

  

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

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

  

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

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

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

  

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

  

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

  

  

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

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

  

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

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

  Credits: Thanks Dione and Badri for proofreading.

---

April 28, 2026

• Abhijith PA Patience could've saved me time.

  If I had been patient, it would have saved me time. One such instance is following.

  From my early blogs, you might know I am using mutt to do email. Just after I get along with mutt, I started using notmuch. Because limit search in mutt is always a pain when you have multiple folders. And what better tool out there than notmuch-mutt to bind both these.

  notmuch-mutt provide three macros by default.

  macro index <F8> \
  "<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
  <shell-escape>notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search<enter>\
  <change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
  <enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
        "notmuch: search mail"
  macro index <F9> \
  "<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
  <pipe-message>notmuch-mutt -r thread<enter>\
  <change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
  <enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
        "notmuch: reconstruct thread"
  macro index <F6> \
  "<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
  <pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
  <enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
        "notmuch: remove message from inbox"
  

  One for search, one for reconstructing threads and one for manipulating tags, which I missed.

  Now my impatient part. I have already mapped f6 for my folder movements and in my initial days of notmuch, I only use just search. So I never cared about the f6 macro provided by notmuch-mutt. As time goes by I got very comfortable with notmuch. I was stretching my notmuch legs. I started to live more on notmuch search results date:today tag:unread than more on the mutt index. To the problem, since notmuch-mutt dump all results to a temp maildir location, can’t perform flag changes back to the original maildir which was annoying, because we need to distinguish what mail you read and what not when you subscribed to most of all debian mailing list.

  I was under the impression that, the notmuch-mutt is not capable of doing so and I just went like that without checking docs. I started doing all crazy hack to sync these maildirs.

  I even started reading notmuch-mutt codebase.

  Later, I settled on notmuch-vim. Cause I can manipulate flags sync back from notmuch to maildir.

  And while searching for something, I accidentally revisited the the the notmuch-mutt macro page and saw the tag manipulation. I was like :( .

  If I read about the third macro patiently when added that to config, I could’ve saved time by not doing ugly hacks around it.

  I think I learned my lesson.

---

• Ravi Dwivedi A Day in Vienna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

  

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

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

  

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

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

  

  

  

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

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

  

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

  

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

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

  

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

  

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

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

  

  

  

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

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

  

  

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

  

  

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

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

  

  

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

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

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

  

  

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

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

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

  Credits: Thanks to Dione and Badri for proofreading.

---

April 27, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman Weekly Notes

  Weekly notes is a genre where people chronicle their week on their blogs. Weekly notes are like a window. I love going through these, as they’re a steady stream of week on week happenings and progress in people’s lives. It shows people making efforts to improve: from basic things like learning to swim or drive, to planning long-term goals such as vacations, moving house, states, or even countries. In some cases, they carry internal monologues, thoughts, and anxieties. These are like a constant nudge for me to work on myself, like them.

  These are the weekly notes I read nowadays:

  • https://adhavansivaraj.xyz/tags/weekly-notes/
  • https://learningwala.in/tags/weekly-notes/
  • https://thejeshgn.com/category/weekly-notes/
  • https://shrayas.com/tagged/weeknotes
  • https://tracydurnell.com/category/weeknotes/
  • https://sathyabh.at/

  Most are there on Thejesh’s weekly notes planet which autoupdates when new posts arrive, usually starting on Friday evenings, and by Monday, almost everyone has posted.

  It reminds of a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - Kenaway :

  the longing to see how other people live their lives when they’re not in public; wishing you could tune in to the raw feed of another human existence, in all its messiness and solitude—shimmying in place while brushing their teeth, squabbling over where to put the shoes, talking out their problems on solitary commutes—if only to give you something to compare your own life against, and figure out whether you’re bizarrely normal or normally bizarre.

  Close enough.

---

April 21, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi LibreOffice Conference Budapest 2025

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

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

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

  

  

  3rd of September

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

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

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

  

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

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

  

  

  4th of September

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

  

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

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

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

  

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

  

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

  

  

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

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

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

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

  

  5th of September

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

  

  

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

  

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

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

  Credits: Thanks to Dione and Richard for proofreading.

---

April 16, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman What is Life (to you)?

  It started with a thought: to understand people’s perspectives on life and its meaning. So I texted folks, “What is life (to you)?”. Each of the following list items (-) is a response from a different individual, mostly verbatim.

  - A lot

  - Everyone has a few universal basic qualities, and some special qualities. To me life is pursuit of exploring world based on those qualities and maturing those qualities as one goes on about exploring world/life with those qualities.
  Discovering and enhancing experiences as one goes through them.

  - life is endless suffering

  - my answer might change daily, but this is what I’ve noticed and feel recently. Life is a spectrum with two distinct ends: what we control and what we don’t. At birth, the spectrum is largely tilted toward control, but throughout our lives, it gradually shifts toward the other side. Ultimately, as we approach death, we lose all control over any aspect of our existence, reaching the other end of the spectrum.
  tho this isn’t universal, privilege plays a huge part in what you control tho i believe it holds true for the majority
  but yeah man, meaning and purpose are dynamic, it’s in their nature to change i can give you a different answer this evening itself xD

  - Funeral Monologue from Synecdoche, New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9PzSNy3xj0

  - Zindagi ek nadiya hai, Aur mujhe tairna nahi aata
  (translation - Life is a river, and I don’t know how to swim)
  On a more serious note, Life is what you make it out for yourself. The only established truth is that it will end. We can never know if there is something after or if there was something before. So try to live a life that you feel aspired by? But this question was beautifully answered by that book which you had about that dying professor
  (Me - He was talking about Tuesday’s with Morrie)

  - My answer is 42

  - One, it’s living on your own terms, you define everything for yourself, success, normal, whatever. You get to curate your version of it no matter the societal norms.
  It’s an accumulation of experiences - friends, parents, work, activities, doing shit loads. Sab try karo- travel, zumba, art, music, workout, sports, dil kara ye karna hai karlo. (translation - If your heart wants to do it, just do it.)
  Then I think relationships - all that you’ve nurtured, people forget maintaining people because of work. It takes efforts to keep people in your life, everyone that comes has a place in yours, how well thats stays is upto you. You also get to curate your people, who stays who don’t. Family toh hai hi (translation - family is there) but everyone else that comes along can make it pretty good.
  So I don’t want to be 50 and be like chalo ab kuch apne liye karte hai… (translation - Come on, now let’s do something for ourselves) Do whatever shit you want today. Not everything costs money, and if it does get thrifty
  But do keep healthy while doing all of that

  - Being alive so that my daughter can grow up and i can help raising her kids as well. Raising kids without mother is tough :P

  - Definitively, I feel like Life is a by product of proteins and energy working together. But in a more personal sense, Life is a dumb joke played onto us. It’s a rat race. But rats exists because of life and then it becomes a chicken-egg problem
  Honestly, I don’t give good answers to life questions. I’m generally the one asking
  Life can be like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re gonna get untill you experience the chocolate(assuming the chocolates are heterogenous and contains a mix of everything)
  Camus once said, “Life is a revolt�, and one of his students added more spice to it like “Life is a revolt against the meaninglessness of existence"
  I kinda feel like Life is the pursuit of every person’s search for meaning

  - Imprisonment waiting for execution 😄
  I have one more thought while we are on the topic , game with pre defined starting position and predefined destination , path to reach is a maze

  - A phase where you can have a really good time or really bad one, usually the mix of both. A phase where you are prisoner to responsibility and materialistic wants.
  It’s a hell for you, where you try to create heaven for others. Being born was never your choice, but ending is always in your hands but you are a prisoner. You fear that leaving this world behind will destroy the heavens you created for others and they will be back to hell. But eventually everyone moves on watching the hourglass of their life.
  Once you are left with no desires or no one to create heavens for, you look arround yourself. You see everyone chasing something, everyone scared of their limitted life time sliping away yet you want it to end sooner.
  Doesn’t matter if it was all good till now, or all bad. The other half is waiting for redemption. If it was all good, it’s best time to die don’t wait for the bad to start. If was all bad, it’s still the best time to die what if it was the good one and more worst is waiting for you. We desire to be remembered, yet we want to free from this loop of suffering.
  Someone once said, life is a suffering, chose your sufferings.

  - Life to me is to live without regrets and live with freedom.
  Life is always unpredictable and this unpredictability makes it more interesting and worth it.

  - As of now, for the state of mind that I am in , I think for me life is about subtle struggle, subtle inconveniences and yet moving forward cause that’s all I know.
  I am not sure if any of this has any meaning, but sometimes I feel I was born of a purpose and that the universe has my back.
  For me it’s about raising my consciousness, understanding people to their depths, gaining moderate material success and helping people to some extend.
  I have tried to seek a grander meaning but I have failed.
  Life for me is what I make out it.
  In my times of great success i rarely think about life for I am busy enjoying it, whatever you may call that state of mind.

  - For me its the little things that you enjoy with YOUR people

  - Life to me is about living and loving, and doing it in a way that sustains. It’s the people who shape you, the work you get absorbed in, the quiet moments in between. There’s also the wanting, the drive to figure out what’s worth going after and how to get there, but that’s just one part of it, not the point of it. And none of it happens in a vacuum. I’m aware of the privileges that let me live this way, and I try to hold on to that gratitude. In the end, life has both a material and a non-material side, and a lot of what we do is chasing material things in an attempt to satisfy something non-material within us

  - Mere liye (translation - for me) life is staying at my home and studying random economics papers. That’s when I enjoy myself the most.

  - Very complicated
  Some days I wish this life never ended and some time I feel it would be better if it stopped at that moment.
  It all depends on the events that happen in the so called “life”.
  So life to me is a string of events that happen anyway and you get to make some decisions which can turn it in any direction and then you wonder how did that happen.

  - not forgetting to breathe, learn, eat, game, take a good shit, love, sleep.

  - To be honest it changed with time! At 19 it was about freedom, wasn’t sure what freedom meant but i wanted that! To be free from everything, maybe because parents still controlled a part of my life. Then came 22-24 where i was working, trying to figure out what i want, the meaning changed from freedom to living for myself. To earn more, to be greedy about myself and pursue whatever would help me gain more steps in my career.
  Came my mba life, switched my life from doing for myself to trying everything out to have no regrets. Life meaning was just about living with no regrets, invested, gambled, did everything to earn that tag of “yeah, have tried that�. Now it has all switched to, it was all just a fake facade. Life turned to having a meaningful life rather than finding meaning in what i am doing. Living for people around me, chhoti chhoti cheezo m khushi (translation - happiness in small things(?)) isn’t really a topic of conversation but more of happy thing for me. So it changed, and m quite happy to be honest. Life did show me a lot of failures, but was privileged enough to face those failures. Gained a lot of learnings if not money😂
  Hopeful for more learnings and change meaning of life with time

  - A task.

  - You have different answers at different times You learn different meanings at different times When you are studying, basically it is about job, finding a partner then it becomes, house, car other things based on your income in between, there can be passion too
  Free Software was a passion, electoral politics too, but both kind of faded and I want cooperative and user driven development now (prav - something that motivates me every day) and these days learning Chinese and watching Cdrama takes a huge part of my leisure time it is heavily subjective and also influences by previous experiences people around you, how much influence they have on you
  it also depends on if they had to struggle in their life or not, for some life did not give much troubles and trouble itself can be relative people who never had to struggle may find even smallest challenges as troubles like if you own a car, your worry is finding a parking slot

  - I am too young to think about lyfe

  - A ticket to see the show on earth, I guess 😀
  I guess life is different depending on the mood. It is a very broad question.
  (Me - What is it in this present mood?)
  Learning stuff (like I am learning a new language) and being happy but also to regulate emotions in a world where being optimistic is getting harder each day.
  Life is also having a unique set of glasses you wear. Both in terms of looking from your eyeballs and your psychological perspective. Both are unique and cannot be replicated.
  It is interesting what people on their deathbed think of life. If I know I am dying, my perspective would change a whole lot.
  Life is finishing reading books while we are alive 😉
  Life is sleeping after a good XMPP chat 😉

  - Dukh dard peeda (translation - surrow pain suffering)

  - uhh to word it? life is just like a journey from A to somewhere and its all about what paths you take and what line you get on to me, just a series of short adventures that all connect to a larger sequence until you can’t have any more adventures-
  (Me - eee, THE END. drop dead, like a coin)
  yeaaaah- I am not really for spirituality of an afterlife, to me life just ends at some point, after which point there fails to remain a discernable you, and some X time after which, you will be last remembered, try to make that last time a good one I guess?
  (Me - no soul?)
  uhhh not in the way most people think of it i guess?
  theres just a lot of yous, theres the physical you, there is the idea of you, there is the expectation of you, and one of the undefinable you I would label as the soul maybe? like the part thats not physically you, but also certainly you
  (Me - can’t say I understood part, but I get you in this sense)
  mhm- well its about just questioning who you are more so questioning what life is-, I have sadly spent way too much time trying to figure that out

  - Making the best of the time you have

  - living a full range of experiences and embracing the good ones, seeing all that the world has to offer. In the end we were always just stardust. Might as well enjoy it when we are stardust with a consciousness of our own.

  - For some reason or the Universe’s /dev/random I was born here as a biological being, and from my experience I understood living is hard and the best way to live is by embracing it. Loving everyone and everything around you. Be happy and joyful until you naturally say good bye to this world.

  - Life is being fucked by everything and you just have to figure out and try to stick to the things worth being fucked for

  Note: Following was transcribed from a audio message.

  - There are five conditions to become a life to survive in the environment. I think there’s five conditions by the biological definitions and reproduction is one of the factor virus is not considered a life form because it cannot reproduce on its own but technically it’s kind of a life because it reproduces using the DNA ability this is the biological definition. Do you want a philosophical definition?
  My definition is kind of the same except that you get life experiences along with it as a human. Extra benefits is that you are not an NPC. All other organisms are NPCs. But humans can interpret the world and change it to their liking. That is life in the case of a human. But then many humans are mostly NPCs. But they still can change the life. Okay, fuck this. Where is this even going?
  A human is an exception in the case of life, because human is not an NPC. Human can interrupt the world, human can change it to its liking, which is why we are such a successful organism on this planet. That is life to me. That’s a human. But all of this is kind of meaningless, because the biological impurity of a human being still exists, so you still have the urges to reproduce, which kind of makes it like just another organism. But then, humans are yet to evolve to overcome that biological imperative.

  I’m grateful for all the replies, outlooks, and subsequent conversations I got to have after this question with everyone. After all, it was a deeply personal question. It does fit in nicely with my definition of life:
  “Life is all about experiences and all the transient relationships one gets to have with folks we meet on the way.”

---

April 14, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi Hungary Visa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • My passport

  • Photocopy of my passport

  • Two photographs of myself

  • Duly filled visa application form

  • Return flight ticket reservations

  • Payslips for the last three months

  • Invitation letter from the conference organizer (in Hungarian)

  • Proof of hotel bookings during my stay in Hungary

  • Cover letter stating my itinerary

  • Income tax returns filed by me

  • Bank account statement, signed and sealed by the bank

  • Travel insurance valid for the period of the entire trip

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

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

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

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

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

  See you in the next one!

  Thanks to Badri for proofreading.

---

March 30, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026

  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 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 schedules. disaster’s Decentralising Indian Communication was an interesting talk, diving into decentralised communication.

  IIT Kanpur is a huge campus with nice footpaths and greenery. We got the opportunity to explore their HPC at the Computer Center post conference.

  Work has already 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.

  

  Group photo. Click to enlarge

---

March 23, 2026

• Arya Kiran Turning my Thinkpad X230 into a overpowered keyboardSlab

  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

  

  However, I had to add a few cmdline arguments on grub to make it work.

  /etc/default/grub:
  
  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet iomem=relaxed i915.modeset=1 video=LVDS-1:d video=VDA-1:e"

  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 laptop
  nmcli con add type ethernet ifname enp2s0 ip4 192.168.50.1/24
  # On Thinkpad
  nmcli 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.

---

March 21, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi Vietnam Trip

  Before reaching Vietnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Overview

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

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

  

  Ho Chi Minh City

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

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

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

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

  

  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.

  

  

  

  

  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.

  

  

  

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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!

  

  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.

  

  

  

  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.

  

  

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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).

  

  

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  

  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.

  

  

  

  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.

---

February 25, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman Publicly Available NKN Data Traffic Graphs

  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 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).

  • Graph - https://monit-grafana-open.cern.ch/d/XoND3VQ4k/nkn?orgId=16&from=now-30d&to=now&timezone=browser&var-source=raw&var-bin=5m
  • Connection seems to be 2x10 G through CERNLight.

  India participates in various CERN projects, for which data is carried 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.

  • Graph https://public-brian.geant.org/d/ZyVgYFgVk/nkn?orgId=5&from=now-30d&to=now
  • NKN connects at Amsterdam POP.
  • From the 2016 press release from GÉANT, NKN seems to have 2x10 G capacity towards GÉANT. Things might have changed since.

  LEARN

  Lanka Education and Research Network (LEARN) is Sri Lanka’s NREN.

  • Graph https://kirigal.learn.ac.lk/traffic/details.php?desc=slt-b1-new&data_id=1788&data_id_v6=&sub_bw=1000&name=National%20Knowledge%20Network%20of%20India%20(1G)&swap_inout=
  • Connection seems to be 1 G.

  NORDUnet

  NREN for Nordic countries.

  • Graph https://stats.nordu.net/stat-q/r-all?q=all&name=NKN

  I couldn’t find any public live data transfer graphs from NKN side. If you know any other graphs, do let me know.

  Update (26/04/2026) - During WLCG-India Monthly meeting in December 2023, “The NKN: Past Present Future” talk was presented, which shows, among various other things, VLCC, TIFR and other institutions’ traffic usage patterns via NKN.

---

January 24, 2026

• Arun Mathai The 300 Rupee Subscription to Feeling Happy

  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.

---

January 20, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman Conferences, why?

  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?

  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.

  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.

  Having more of these conferences and helping make them happen naturally gives everyone space 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.

---

January 17, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi My experiences in Brunei

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

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

  Thanks to Badri for proofreading.

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January 07, 2026

• Ravi Dwivedi Why my Riseup account got suspended (and reinstated)

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

  Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  After I explained myself, Riseup reinstated my account.

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

  Issues with suspension

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

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

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

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

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

  Room for improvement

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

  • Even if Riseup can’t provide notice to blocked accounts, perhaps they can scale back limitations on the inviting account which wasn’t even involved—for example, by temporarily disabling invites from that account until the issue is resolved.

  • In this case, the person didn’t impersonate Riseup, so Riseup could have just blocked the aliases and let the user know about it, rather than banning the account outright.

  • Riseup should give blocked users access to their existing emails so they have a chance to migrate them to a different provider. (Riseup could disable SMTP and maybe incoming emails but keep IMAP access open). I know people who use Riseup for important things such as bank or train tickets, and a sudden block like this is not a good idea.

  • Riseup should factor in the account profile in making these decisions. I had an account on their service for 5 years and I had only created around 5 invites. (I don’t remember the exact number and there’s no way to retrieve this information.) This is not exactly an attacker profile. I feel long-term users like this deserve an explanation for a ban.

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

  Signing off now. Meet you in the next one!

  Thanks to Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing this blog post

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January 04, 2026

• Sahil Dhiman Full /8 IPv4 Address Block Holders in 2025

  Here, I tried to collect entities that owned full /8 IPv4 address block(s) in 2025.

  A more comprehensive and historical list can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks.

  • 3.0.0.0/8 - Amazon
  • 6.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 7.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 11.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 12.0.0.0/8 - AT&T Services
  • 17.0.0.0/8 - Apple Inc
  • 19.0.0.0/8 - Ford Motor Company
  • 21.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 22.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 25.0.0.0/8 - UK Ministry of Defense
  • 26.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 28.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 29.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 38.0.0.0/8 - Cogent Communications
  • 53.0.0.0/8 - Mercedes-Benz Group AG
  • 55.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 73.0.0.0/8 - Comcast Corporation
  • 214.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense
  • 215.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense

  Some notable mentions:

  • 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. Both IBM and Lumen have started handing out this IP space.

  • 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.

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December 31, 2025

• Ravi Dwivedi Transit through Kuala Lumpur

  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.

  

  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).

  

  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:

  1. Kuala Lumpur to Brunei,
  2. Brunei to Kuala Lumpur, and
  3. 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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  

  Stay tuned for our experiences in Brunei!

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

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December 28, 2025

• Balasankar C Granting Namespace-Specific Access in GKE Clusters

  Heyo,

  In production Kubernetes environments, access control becomes critical when multiple services share the same cluster. I recently faced this exact scenario: a GKE cluster hosting multiple services across different namespaces, where a new team needed access to maintain and debug their service-but only their service.

  The requirement was straightforward yet specific: grant external users the ability to exec into pods, view logs, and forward ports, but restrict this access to a single namespace within a single GKE cluster. No access to other clusters in the Google Cloud project, and no access to other namespaces.

  The Solution

  Achieving this granular access control requires combining Google Cloud IAM with Kubernetes RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). Here’s how to implement it:

  Step 1: Tag Your GKE Cluster

  First, apply a unique tag to your GKE cluster. This tag will serve as the identifier for IAM policies.

  Step 2: Grant IAM Access via Tags

  Add an IAM policy binding that grants users access to resources with your specific tag. The Kubernetes Engine Viewer role (roles/container.viewer) provides sufficient base permissions without granting excessive access.

  Step 3: Create a Kubernetes ClusterRole

  Define a ClusterRole that specifies the exact permissions needed:

  apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
  kind: ClusterRole
  metadata:
    name: custom-access-role
  rules:
    - apiGroups: [""]
      resources: ["pods", "pods/exec", "pods/attach", "pods/portforward", "pods/log"]
      verbs: ["get", "list", "watch", "create"]
  

  Note: While you could use a namespace-scoped Role, a ClusterRole offers better reusability if you need similar permissions for other namespaces later.

  Step 4: Bind the Role to Users

  Create a RoleBinding to connect the role to specific users and namespaces:

  apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
  kind: RoleBinding
  metadata:
    name: custom-rolebinding
    namespace: my-namespace
  subjects:
    - kind: User
      name: myuser@gmail.com
      apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  roleRef:
    kind: ClusterRole
    name: custom-access-role
    apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  

  Apply both configurations using kubectl apply -f <filename>.

  How It Works

  This approach creates a two-layer security model:

  • GCP IAM controls which clusters users can access using resource tags
  • Kubernetes RBAC controls what users can do within the cluster and limits their scope to specific namespaces

  The result is a secure, maintainable solution that grants teams the access they need without compromising the security of other services in your cluster.

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December 20, 2025

• Sahil Dhiman MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai 2025

  MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai 2025 which was MiniDebConf Mumbai, which in turn was the FOSSMumbai x MiniDebian Conference, happened on 13th and 14th December 2025, with a hotel as Day 1 venue and a college on Day 2.

  Originally planned for the 8th of November, it got postponed to December due to operational reasons. Most of on-ground logistics and other heavy lifting were done by Arya, Vidhya, MumbaiFOSS, and the Remigies Technologies team, so we didn’t have to worry much.

  I gave a talk on Basics of a Free Software Mirror (and how Debian does it) (presentation URL). I had the idea for a while and gave a KDE version of it during KDE India Conf 2025. The gist was to explain how Free Software is delivered to users and how one can help. For MDC, I focused on Debian mirror network and who hosts mirrors in India and trends.

  

  Me during mirror talk
  Credits - niyabits. Thanks for the pictures

  At the onset, someone mentioned my Termux mirror. Termux is a good project to get into mirror hosting. I got into mirroring with it. It has low traffic requirement, (usually less than 20 GB/day) with high request count and can be done on an existing 6 USD Digital Ocean node. Q&A time turned out more interesting than I anticipated. Folks touched upon commercial CDNs inplace of community mirrors, supply chain security issues, and a bit of other stuff.

  We had quite a number of interesting talks and I remember when Arya telling me during CFP time, “Bro, we have too many talks now”.

  Preparations are underway for MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026, scheduled for March 14th and 15th at the IIT campus. If you want to help, see the following thread. See you in the next one.

  

  Day 1 group photo. Click to enlarge

  
  

  

  Day 2 group photo. Click to enlarge

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