This week I was lucky enough to enjoy a week off from work. I am half way thru the vacation and wanted to post a stats report on my vacation[summer, 2013] project. While I do love Crunch Bang, I would like move my MacBook (4,1) to Arch. I’ve been successful install Arch on my MacBook (2,1) yet before I wipe away my ‘stable’ install I must first resolve a few issues/bugs1.

I’ve had issues getting avahi (zeroconfig) to work properly on my first arch install. I was, I think, finally able to make everything work properly by doing the following. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and make the host line look like1: hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns Finally run: # systemctl enable avahi-daemon.service Testing metric: ping -c 1 `hostname`.local avahi-resolve -n `hostname`.local getent hosts `hostname` More info on what mdns4_minimal and mdns can be found on the nss-mDNS website.

I use hostsblock to block all the unwanted ‘annoyances’ online. It also blocks the Google Sync Servers for both Chromium & Chrome. The fix is fairly simple if you know the sync server address, just check the source code. # hostsblock-urlcheck https://clients4.google.com/ Yes I’m trying to move away from Google Services, yet I’m using Chromium with sync services.

Just in case I run up against this again…. sudo pacman -Syy sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux sudo pacman -Scc

A few months back I installed Ubuntu; shortly after that I moved to CrunchBang. For the most part I’ve enjoyed my experiences with CruncBang. The few things I haven’t enjoyed where directly related to it foundation, Debian. However, I stuck with it and even upgraded the Macbook (4,1) replacing the HD with an SSD and doubling the RAM. I enjoyed the experience even more. Yet I keep feeling like the Debian base was holding me back.

I’ve been going back and forth over this for the last week. I really want to do the the Wine & Dine for the 4th year in a row, I really want to tackle the Dopey Challenge. I only have the ability to do one of the weekends. I also don’t know if this how I wanted to spend a weeks vacation. In the end the bigger regret would be not doing the Dopey Challenge.

I just love the work the guys at Dark Sky have done. They now have a great, yes great, WebApp forcast.io with a nifty API. I’ve spent a good portion of my day playing with it learning a bit about ruby and json.

Spring is in the air and I’ve been feeling the need to give the site a bit more personality. Currently I’m working on matching a few fonts together that should help shape the look and feel. For this I choose to look at the Google Web Fonts (maybe I should look at Font Squirrel next), it seemed to provide the best way to get ensure my choices would be available to all visitors of the site.