Jacob Salmela (Page 3)

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C.H.I.P. and Pi-hole Gets You Network-wide Ad Blocking for $9

It’s already easy to block ads network-wide with the Pi-hole [https://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/] on a Raspberry Pi, but now you can do it for even less money by running it on a C.H.I.P. microcomputer [https://jacobsalmela.com/how-to-set-up-a-headless-and-password-less-c-h-i-p-computer/], which you can buy for $9. There

Pi-hole: Reaching Critical Mass

The Pi-hole project has been growing steadily for quite some time now and is been becoming difficult to manage. I usually spend a few hours a night after my full-time job fielding questions and reviewing pull requests. Lately, it has been mostly responding to people instead of writing code, because

Pi-hole Stop/Start Button And LED Indicator Lights

I always have a lot of fun seeing what people do with their Pi-holes.This is one of my favorites [http://thetimmy.silvernight.org/pages/endisbutton/]: a case with a start/stop button and LED indicator lights for the current status of the Pi-hole. I think it would be a

Customize The Dropbox Syncing Icon To Whatever You Want

Customize The Dropbox Syncing Icon To Whatever You Want

You can create your own icons to replace the Dropbox badges that appear that the bottom-right of folders in your Dropbox. All you need is an image editor and an app to convert images to icons [http://www.img2icnsapp.com/]. Creating A Custom Dropbox Syncing Badge In the image above,

Turn Your Useless GameStick Into A Powerful Emulator

Turn Your Useless GameStick Into A Powerful Emulator

The GameStick I had high hopes when I backed the GameStick Kickstarter project [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872297630/gamestick-the-most-portable-tv-games-console-ever] . After finally receiving mine, it was underwhelming. The UI was slow and sluggish, there were not many games, and the controller had considerable lag. Many of the issues were fixed,

How To Set Up A Headless (And Password-less) C.H.I.P. Computer

How To Set Up A Headless (And Password-less) C.H.I.P. Computer

My C.H.I.P. computer [http://nextthing.co/] arrived yesterday. The first thing I did was take an obligatory banana picture [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer] as seen below. Next, I set it up as a headless machine [http://docs.getchip.com/#headless-chip] so I can mess

Ethical Ad Blocking: Have Your Pi And Eat It, Too.

The conundrum: Website content is supported by advertisements, but you don’t want to see them. But when you block ads, you are costing your favorite sites money. The solution: Soon, there will be a way to make everyone happy [http://www.businessinsider.com/optimal-launches-subscription-service-for-ad-block-users-2015-12] . Users can pay a subscription

C.H.I.P.'s, Raspberry's, Bananna's, and Pi's, Oh My.

My C.H.I.P. microcomputer [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer] just shipped, and as soon as I get it, I am going to try to to turn it into an ad-blocking Pi-hole! The C.H.I.P. is only $9 and I would like to get it

Pi-hole Mentioned On TekThing

It’s fun to see people finding out the Pi-hole and their comments always make me smile. Check it out below.

Give Your Work Phone A Custom Ringtone

Give Your Work Phone A Custom Ringtone

This may work for other devices, but the one I used was a NEC DT700 (original PDF instructions [http://www.southwesterntel.com/necpdf/newpdf/DT700%20Resource%20Manual_1-0.pdf] ). I have seen these models in several different workplaces. The process can probably be adapted for other phones, too. Download Or

Quickly Download Or Install Common Apps Without Going To The Website

Quickly Download Or Install Common Apps Without Going To The Website

While helping friends and family with their computers, I often need to download an app they don’t have or update it to the latest version–something I don’t really want to spend my time doing. This is definitely a first-world annoyance for me, but I always have fun

OS X Accessibility Command Line Tool Available On Homebrew

OS X Accessibility Command Line Tool Available On Homebrew

I’m happy to announce that tccutil.py [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/tccutil#tccutilpy] is now available [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/4b27e526afdbb28b0de0a9623c787b6346179c71/Library/Formula/tccutil.rb] on Homebrew [http://brew.sh/]. A tool for modifying access to assistive devices from the command line. You can install it like

Whitelist And Historical Stats In The Pi-hole Web Interface

The updated interface on it’s way. The coding is 90% done, but I have some bugs to fix first [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Abug+] . I prefer to make the software stable before adding new features. If you

Visualize Ads Blocked In Real Time Using Pi-hole And Logstalgia

Visualize Ads Blocked In Real Time Using Pi-hole And Logstalgia

The only thing better than blocking advertisements is visualizing them in real time. There are a few different visualization tools like glTail.rb [http://www.fudgie.org/] or goaccess [http://goaccess.prosoftcorp.com/], but my personal favorite is Logstalgia [http://logstalgia.io/], which is the perfect supplement to the ad-blocking

If You Like The Pi-hole, You Will Like Rolling-your-own DNSthingy (Netbender)

Yes, a DNSthingy [http://www.dnsthingy.com/r/37870001] (the consumer-facing name is Netbender). It’s an (ASUS) router running some custom firmware (based on asuswrt-merlin [https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/]) that does cool stuff using DNS, such as: * blocking ads * blocking malware, phishing, and tracking * virtual relocation for viewing

How I Went Paperless And Clutter-free For $32

How I Went Paperless And Clutter-free For $32

Ever since I discovered Dropbox, I felt weighed down by the clutter of physical documents. I use it for all of my digital documents. After a while, physical documents and pieces of paper began to get on my nerves. It was much easier to have searchable PDFs that I could

Need Help With Your Pi-hole?

Since the comments have been getting pretty difficult to track when trying to help people, I have created a FAQ section on pi-hole.net [http://pi-hole.net/help] where you can find answers to common questions and even create your own. I’m happy to answer any questions you have

Make Animated GIFs In OS X With A Right-click

Make Animated GIFs In OS X With A Right-click

UPDATE 2020-05-23: I updated the post with instructions and screenshots for newer versions of macOS. The biggest thing to note is to remove the "Get selected Finder items" task. Create animated GIFs from the OS X Finder in just seconds. It only takes a few minutes to set up and

New Pi-hole Installation Method And Sneak Peak At Front End Feature

New Pi-hole Installation Method And Sneak Peak At Front End Feature

In an effort the make it easier to install the Pi-hole, I have revamped the automated install command (in a separate branch [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole/blob/installation/automated%20install/basic-install.sh] of the project). It’s not official yet as I am hoping some of you will be

Create A Website On Your Mac Without A Webserver

Do you need a Website set up right meow? Using netcat (nc), you can use your Mac to instantly set up a Webpage without configuring a Web server. This could be used to quickly share files via a Web browser (by creating a hyperlink with file:///some/filepath/), or it

Pi-hole Mentioned On Security Now! Podcast

It was fun to see that the Pi-hole was mentioned [http://youtube.com/watch?v=p7-osq_y8i8&t=100m26s] on the Security Now podcast [https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm]. It made me smile that he grasped the “black hole” concept of sending advertisements to “nowhere.” And despite his understanding,

Upcoming Features For The Ad-blocking Pi-hole: Back-end

The Pi-hole blocks ads for your entire network and it does so without any attention from you. I get comments and emails every day of people saying that they like how well it works. This is nice because since I know that it is operational, I can work on fun,

How To Install The Pi-hole Web Interface

Currently, those of you who are running the Pi-hole from the DietPi image [http://sourceforge.net/projects/dietpi/files/Automated%20Installation%20Images/] have the added benefit of the Web interface, which shows how your advertisement black hole is performing. Due to an issue [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole/issues/31]

Custom El Capitan Login Window (No Longer Blurred)

Custom El Capitan Login Window (No Longer Blurred)

I have shown you how to modify the login window for Mavericks [https://jacobsalmela.com/os-x-mavericks-change-login-window-logo-wallpaper/] and Yosemite [https://jacobsalmela.com/customize-os-x-yosemite-login-screen/]. The Yosemite trick still works in El Capitan with one added benefit: there is no longer a blurred overlaid on your image. Just save your image as (it

A New, Easy Installation Method For The Ad-blocking Pi-hole

The Pi-hole [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole#raspberry-pi-ad-blocker] blocks ads at before they get to your device and can speed [https://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/#comment-2165148952] up [https://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/#comment-2155524064] your [https://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/#performance] network [https://jacobsalmela.c