Provisioning Vagrant with Salt

Vagrant sports out of the box integration with Saltstack, which works very well with minimum effort. However under the hood the default way this integration works is via a 4000-line bash script that bootstraps Saltstack on the VM. This would all be well and good, however, even if you were to pre-install the salt-call and salt-minion binaries onto your Vagrantbox, the salt-integration uses the same bash-script to install the configuration provided in the Vagrantfile.
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Media services

I thought I’d write a little summary on current media services I use, and why. I have mostly stopped buying music pressed on plastic discs, and the amount of movies I buy on-disc has also gone down. However that does not mean I don’t pay for my entertainment. Well on to the services. Music Spotify I used to use Spotify actively, mainly due to their very good selection of EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and iOS-app, which has enabled me to completely stop syncing music from my computer.
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Gnome 3 adjustments and addons for a Gnome 2 user

As a long time professional Linux desktop user (since 2000 or so) I have used numerous desktop environments over the years. Initially Gnome1, then KDE2, then Gnome2 for a long time. With the advent of Unity and Gnome 3.x, the distro vendors primary focus has understandably switched to supporting the future instead of maintaining the past. I will not go into the discussion whether this has happened too fast, or just fast enough.
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Site moved

Moved to our new VPS running Ubuntu LTS, and in the process I migrated my blog from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal 7 seems great, but when it comes to simple blogging WordPress has the edge in simplicity, admin UI and maintainability. Maybe this means I’ll manage to blog a little more often, or maybe not, time will tell.
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Why I almost didn’t get an iPhone

<p> AppStore is cool, but Apples rules and rights of refusal are not. There are many stories of weird rejections and strict rules against improving on the experience with apps that cover basic functionality Apple itself already have developed solutions for. This means that nobody can create a better music player (with better codec support, integrated Last.fm scrobbling or other nice features), a better video player (again maybe including support for commonly used &#8220;internet-codecs&#8221;) or release a better browser or calendar.
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