There are loads of neat little projects out there for your Raspberry Pi from random little hacks all the way up to full scale home automation and more. In the past I’ve written about RetroPie (which is an awesome project that you should definitely check out!) but this time I’m going to take a moment to mention another really cool project: pi-hole.
Pi-hole, as their website says, is “a black hole for Internet advertisements.” Essentially it’s software that you install on your Raspberry Pi (or other Linux computer) that then acts as a local DNS proxy. Once it is setup and running you can point your devices to it individually or just tell your router to use that instead (which then applies to everything on the network).
Then as you’re browsing the internet and come across a webpage that is trying to serve you ads, pi-hole will simply block the DNS request for the ad from really resolving and instead return a blank image or web page meaning that the site simply can’t download the ad to show you. Voila! Universal ad blocker for your entire network and all of your devices! Even better – because you’re blocking the ads from being downloaded in the first place your browsing speeds can sometimes be improved as well.
You can monitor or control which domains are blocked all from a really nice dashboard interface and see the queries come into pi-hole almost in real time.
After running pi-hole for a week now I’m quite surprised with how effective it has really been with removing ads. It’s legitimately pleasant being able to browse the web without seeing ads everywhere or having ad blockers break certain websites. If that sounds like something you too might be interested in then pi-hole might be worth taking a look.
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