Camera, code, coffee

There is arguably no better way to protect devices on your local network from unwanted content than Pi-hole. Add a machine running Pi-hole to your network, and it will quietly scrub all incoming traffic from pesky stuff like ads and trackers in the background. As the name suggests, Pi-hole was initially designed to run on a Raspberry Pi. But if you already have a Linux server on your network, you can deploy a Pi-hole container on it instead. That's what I did when I replaced a QNAP NAS appliance with a ThinkPad T410 running Linux Mint. But instead of Docker, I chose to use Podman. Deploying Pi-hole on Linux Mint (and by extension, on any Ubuntu-based Linux distribution) requires a few steps, but it's not beyond the wit of man.

Remember roaming charges? Neither do I. So I wasn't particularly thrilled, when a couple of hours into our weekend trip to Zürich, I hit the roaming ceiling (€60 wasted), and my carrier conveniently disabled mobile data. That caught me completely unprepared, and I would have been royally screwed if it weren't for Organic Maps. Actually, I had the app installed on my Android device for quite a while, but the force of habit kept me using Google Maps.

We've been combining work and travel lately, so measuring internet connection speed has become a part of our check-in ritual.

Speedtest had been my go-to tool for the job, until I stumbled upon LibreSpeed. Written in PHP with a dash of JavaScript, LibreSpeed can run on a local Linux machine, or it can be self-hosted on a remote server.

I didn't need a new keyboard, so of course I bought one. To my defense, the temptation was impossible to resist. I mean, just look at it.

As usual, I decided to check out reviews after I placed an order. To my surprise, there weren't that many. So I thought I'd do humanity a favor and write down my impressions.