Twenty Seven: New toy

Now that the holiday season is nearing its close, I have luckily found myself with a new toy to play around with once I get back to school. I now am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi!

Raspberry Pi’s, for those who don’t know, are really just mini computers. However, there is a massive online community of Raspberry Pi enthusiasts who make insane projects with them, from DNS-based ad blockers to home security systems. I plan to set up the former for my apartment at school.

The DNS-based ad blocker in question is called a Pi Hole. It basically is a DNS sinkhole for telemetry and advertisement domains. In other words, you point your DNS to the Raspberry Pi, and it acts as the intermediary so that any ad requests that your browser makes on behalf of the website is blocked. For example, xyz.com may make a request to ad-services.org to get some personalized ad for you. However, Pi Hole has a list of all of the domains that are popularly used to serve ads, so it simply blocks the request and the ad can’t come through to the user!

It’s genius, and I can’t wait to set it up. That is the tip of the iceberg for Pi’s, so I hope to also explore many of the other ideas already out there on the internet. Rest assured that I’m going to brag about anything I make on this blog.