GoKawiilAdrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
A cheap $7 board can turn its hand to ad blocking.
It works as a DNS sinkhole, stripping out ads before download.
Other options include using a Raspberry Pi and buying hardware.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the skyrocketing prices of Raspberry Pi boards have definitely been the kick in the pants that I've needed to look at cheaper, perhaps also better-suited, alternatives. I mean, the Pi is a great board, but for a lot of applications I've used it for over the almost 15 years that they've been around, it's also been overkill.
The other day, I needed to put together an ad-block solution, not because I dislike ads, but simply because I was working with quite a limited bandwidth. I reflexively reached for a Raspberry Pi board, but stopped when I remembered how much they cost nowadays and put it back.
Also: I tested a Bluetooth tracker that leverages LoRa mesh networks to find things - and it's so accurate
I was going to use PiHole on the Pi, but then I remembered coming across an ad-block project that worked on an ESP32 board. And the good news is that you can pick up one of those boards for under $10.
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