I’ve had a Raspberry Pi sitting around my office for quite a while. I bought it in a brief moment of enthusiasm for hardware that quickly faded, so it has mostly sat around in the box unused. I think the main reason I neglected it is because I hadn’t come up with a compelling use case. That changed recently when I read about Pi-hole.

Pi-hole is software that you can run on your Pi (or in a Docker container) that will block advertising across your network. While I’m not super militant about avoiding advertising altogether, I think that having Pi-hole on my home network can improve my experience of the web.

It was nice to learn a bit about networking while setting this up. Networking is a bit impenetrable at times, especially to the newcomer. But setting up a Pi-hole was an accessible way for me to try out some things that helped me learn how my home network is working.

Despite going through all of the setup, I haven’t yet deployed the Pi-hole on my network, although I hope to soon. It was a fun learning experience nonetheless! if you don’t want to look at ads, and you’re willing to muck around a bit with your network and some hardware, I recommend this as a weekend project.

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