Tag Archives: raspberrypi

Pi-Hole

In honor of Pi Day, I built and deployed a Pi-Hole server.

Pi Hole is software that acts as a caching DNS server and ad-blocker, by black-holing known advertising sources at the DNS layer.

You can obtain Pi Hole at https://pi-hole.net/

As the name suggests, it is optimized to run on a Raspberry Pi. I’m running it on a Pi B that was otherwise unoccupied.

It’s been running for a couple of days now, and tells me that it is stopping around 25% of traffic. And because it stops the traffic before the browser even connects to the server, that means that it is making my network faster as a result.

It took me very little time to get running, following the instructions on the website. Indeed, the longest part of the entire process was the initial Raspberry Pi operating system installation. The actual Pi Hole installation took maybe 10 minutes.

So far there has been no negative impact that I’ve noticed – no false positives, no pages I couldn’t get to that I wanted.

Recommended. Give it a try if you have a Raspberry Pi that has been sitting around since Christmas and you’re not sure what to do with it.

RetroPie

This weekend I set up my new Raspberry Pi with the RetroPie distribution, using the instructions and parts list from LifeHacker. I’ve been eyeing it for a while, and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

IMG_20160804_190526

It was very simple to get installed, but configuring the controller – I used an XBox360 USB controller – proved challenging. I ended up following the instructions in this Github issue to get it working.

Most of the games that I wanted are from the various Atari systems, and from the ZX Spectrum – systems that are long since obsolete, but the games are still a lot of fun.

 

Raspberry Pi, episode 1

I got a Raspberry Pi for Christmas. I’ve been meaning to get one for some time, because I wanted to play with home automation (x10) stuff again. So here we go.

I’d rather not mess with getting usb/serial stuff working again. That was a pain. So I’m going to get a CM19a instead and see if I can get that working.

Should be fun.

So far, I have the Rasberry Pi booted, and I’ve got some basic stuff installed on it. It’s running Debian 6 (Raspbian) and I’ve got a 4G card in it, which, so far, looks like it’s going to be plenty.