Shout-outs to the team that developed Pi-Hole.  I just installed and
began using it, and I'm overwhelmed by how awesome it is.

I first heard about it on Hacker News.[1]  I have a Pi 2 hanging
around the house.  I'd used it for awhile as a Kodi box before I got
annoyed with how poorly it worked over the combination of my wifi
network and one of NFS/Samba, so it has been sitting around in a
drawer gathering dust.  I reflashed the device with Raspbian and began
playing around with a leafnode installation, which works and is fun.
But this pi-hole thing seemed like a great experiment.

Holy crap.  I installed it at 5PM tonight and the whole family is
already asking me why the network is suddenly faster.  The dashboard
shows it's already blocked many hundreds of calls to advert and
tracker sites - a full tenth of the DNS requests it's received.

Installing it was a piece of cake - really lovely work.

I'm still figuring it out.  Seems like it has cleverly packaged up an
installation of DNSMasq [2], who does all the heavy lifting in
managing a local DNS server and an auto-updating hosts file containing
over a hundred thousand shit sites.

Both sites have donate buttons on them - I'm going to throw some cash
their way later this week.  This device was a cool little thing even
before, but it's just found an extraordinary new reason to be plugged
into my network.

On the hacker thread [1] there's a huge discussion about how adverts
are a necessary part of keeping sites funded.  I disagree.  I buy
products from the manufacturers I want.  When I want.  If I want.  And
advertisers have royally f*cked up some sites.  Some popular news
sites are damned near unreadable these days.  Suddenly: all the
adverts are gone.  Good riddance.


[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857887
[2] http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05