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.

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.