Nobody likes advertisements.

WHAT?!?!

I know, I know, shocking.

It’s ok. Take a minute to gather yourself after such a mind blowing proclamation.

Better? Good.

Advertisements are like that one friend in college who would always remind you of a paper you had due in a couple of hours while you are loading up the third season of Breaking Bad at 2:30 in the morning. You are pretty sure they were just trying to be helpful but you are also pretty sure you regret whatever life choices you made that brought them into your life.

Ads are terrible but they become even more sinister when your kids are old enough to start playing free games on your tablet/phone/whatever. Your kid ends up beginning with a “Let’s learn the alphabet” type game and end up ordering additional supplies for an army they command within an app they purchased via an ad injected into the loading screen between levels.

Not only is this super annoying financially but even if you restrict the purchases they inevitably find themselves on the purchase screen with no idea how to get back to the game.

So, after a friend of mine gave me a raspberry pi kit from canakit for my birthday, I decided to do something about these ads. I installed pi-hole.

What is pi-hole you ask?

The Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content, without installing any client-side software.

I decided to configure my router to use the pi-hole as a static DNS server for all devices on my network. This way, when my kids are playing a game they are no longer faced with the temptation of an ad but rather a blank screen with a small ‘X’ to escape back to their game.

Perfect.