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Pi-hole

I don’t know why I didn’t deploy this before, but this is another case where Docker lowers the bar of entry and makes running this less of an ordeal.

10% of internet traffic at home is ads & trackers (well 10% of DNS queries but let’s not split hair).

This number is obviously higher in reality considering all the ads and trackers which DNS alone can’t tackle. Ublock Origin is still really busy after all.

There are 2 main drivers of these 10%. Unsurprisingly a 13 year old’s windows machine, he just wants to game but gaming now means being online and bundling in greedy vectors to your eyeballs. The other unsurprising culprit is an iPhone tied to social media. Without these 2 devices, we hover around 2% with 10+ various connected devices. With them we immediately jump to 10% of all home internet traffic being ads.

The real beauty of Pi-hole, is in being able to neuter various household “smart” devices. The printer which calls home and requires extra buttons presses to annoy us into a firmware update we don’t want. Screw you Epson. The connected TV which should have never been connected but the kids wanted Netflix, and oh surprise ads are now everywhere. Screw you Roku. Both are gone now. Pi-hole makes it very easy to see what clients are contacting and neuter it along with the millions, yes millions of worthless domains your home network will never see.

A few years back, I tried a more drastic approach doing a full network proxy with whitelist only. But that proved too cumbersome to setup and maintain. Specifically, the interconnectedness of everything. You can’t just allow one website through, it requires too many dependencies to be functional. I wish they had a concept degrees past whitelisted websites one can get to, but they didn’t. Say you whitelist wikipedia, and that lets anything it refers to through as well. I never found something that did, and I didn’t have time for another project. Pi-hole isn’t a panacea, but it strikes a great balance of effectiveness Vs ease of deployment.

I have no polite words for people wasting human potential on marketing. Nothing in the world was ever made better with marketing, its impact on society is strictly negative with no redeeming quality. It is a nefarious endeavor amplified by recent advances in technology. One of the most salient point I heard against it (I wish I remembered where) went like this: chess grand master Kasparov was overtaken by a computer in 1997. 27 years of exponential technological progress later, we now allow thousands of super computers to be pointed at our kids’ brains for persuasion. Do you really think they stand a chance?

Ads should be illegal. I understand we historically accepted them into society at a time when they were innocuous, but their dial was cranked so far up they are unjustifiable in their current form. There is no justification for using psychological trickery on children. People should risk prison for being so ill intended as to devise such machinations. And let’s not even get into how bad it’s been for public conversation to use them as a funding model for everything. There is a direct line between flailing western democracies and the outrage engines ad funding inevitably creates. Maybe it’s not the only line, but it’s definitely one of them. It’s a moral imperative to avoid ads.

Vermont has a road billboard ban. You don’t quite know why things feel better here until it’s pointed out to you. It was done so as not to stain the beauty of the state, thus preserving tourism. But a side effect is that it also removes an ambient layer of aggression and you can feel yourself relax driving into the state. Life is demonstrably better without ads.

Warning! We have detected that we need to monetize absolutely everything with ads. Lower the draw bridge, drop your shields, and let us aim an army of poorly vouched 3rd party marketing dickweeds at your family.

I love seeing these anti-ad-blockers popups for they show how they lost the arm’s race, and all they have left is making an inarguable case. What a pathetic position to find oneself into, all they can do is ask “pretty please let us keep harassing”. I have no doubt they’ll find more insidious ways soon enough.

All the respect in the world to ad blockers, and sites taking risks with principled funding models.

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Quiet Airtags

I didn’t post several years ago about the GPSes I installed on our farm vehicles. It felt like painting a target on my back. It took quite a bit of figuring out to set up Particle.io‘s early asset trackers. They’ve since created a dedicated preprogrammed and well polished device, seeing an opportunity in the success of the early hobbyist version I suppose. I never posted my setup, code, or experience but let’s just say it worked well for a few years, for very cheap. Unfortunately, the 2G network they relied on was eventually retired, and that forced me reconsider options.

And well, an obvious contender these days are Airtags. I bought a few for testing, and they quickly became the obvious choice. I replaced bulky cellular GPSes with them and folded them into home monitoring. Watching for geofences, battery status, and last contact.

While I can’t wire them directly to the vehicle’s battery, their battery does seem to last a good year (Vermont winters wear them down faster). And they come with several huge advantages over GPSes.

  • A mesh network of people’s iPhones has a lot better coverage than cellular in a rural area. Cell phones will report them when they finally get to a tower or some wifi.
  • They aren’t subject to tree or cloud cover.
  • They are tiny! I went through great lengths to paint and find a place for bulky GPS boxes. Airtags on the other hand will live anywhere.
  • They are cheap, and have no recurring cost (except the cell battery once a year).

These advantages led me to significantly lower the bar to what I stick them on. It’s no longer reserved for the expensive vehicles. If it costs money and isn’t fastened to the ground, it gets an Airtag.

Of course when used as theft tracking, their chirping is problematic. And so I finally bit the bullet and gave them the surgery they need to make them quiet. And it was very very trivial, I should have done this much earlier.

Open them up, I used a stronger blade than the exacto for prying. Note the 3 sharpie dots to point tabs.

I simply snipped the 2 wires going to the speaker

Still works!

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Beefed up Sensoring

A friend bought a couple of Sensirion SEN54s and I helped him get one working, and ended up buying the extra from him. It had been a few years since I researched what sensors were out there that worked well with Raspberry Pis, and were more on the industrial side than the hobbyist side. I was immediately enthused by Sensirion’s documentation, and their sensor looked top notch. My friend did all the homework on reading specs and comparing with others, it was really a no brainer.

With this SEN54 we’ve gained:

  • accurate humidity (the previous sensor was worthless)
  • VOC
  • PM1.0
  • PM2.5
  • PM4.0
  • PM10.0

It’ll be interesting to see the patterns. I’m honestly a little worried about what the particles will reveal seeing as we’re running 2 wood stoves in the house for half of the year. Reassuringly, the first few readings show we’re in the green, but then Nicole opened the stove to let out a bunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and the readings skyrocketed well above WHO guidelines for particles.

But those are only delicious cheese particles finding their way into your nostrils, surely that can’t have and adverse health effect. Jokes aside it’s interesting to see how much of a tail this benign event has. I’ll be really curious to discover more, I really have no idea what I’m looking at yet.

I am very glad to see the Pis become established as industry capable devices. It’s honestly remarkable what I’ve thrown at them over the years while they kept serving their purpose.