Raspberry Pi anyone?

[lassieface]

After months of waiting I got mine in the mail yesterday. Now I have to figure out what to do with it. MAME? HTPC? Anybody else get one, and what are you going to do with it?

[MartyS (Gromit)]

That is very cool, I might actually have a use for one of those at work.  I've been trying to think of a way to replace our Geochron but since it is hanging on the wall in a hallway near the observatory it can't be something too expensive in case it gets stolen or vandalized.  One of these and a really cheap monitor might do the trick.

FYI: Geochron: http://www.geochron.com/

[lassieface]

You work at an observatory? That's freaking awesome! I just visited the one in Denver.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

It's one of my jobs, taking care of all the various stuff in the Biology, Chemistry, and Physics departments.  In '05 they doubled the size of the building and put an observatory on top of the new wing.

FYI:  http://www.science.widener.edu/observatory/

[lassieface]

That's awesome. I don't live anywhere near one, so anytime I go on vacation I check out the local one.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

That's awesome. I don't live anywhere near one, so anytime I go on vacation I check out the local one.

If you are ever in Flagstaff, AZ, be sure to go to Lowell.  I've been out there twice.  They have loads of great educational stuff, you can tour most of the place in the daytime, visit the telescope/camera that discovered Pluto and Lowell's big refractor.  At night you can look through Lowell's scope but the line is usually at least a hundred people when the weather is nice.  There's also a very cool walkway where they have the solar system to scale, you start at the Sun and within a few steps pass the Earth, then it's a very long walk out to Pluto.

[lassieface]

Reminds me of that Bill Nye episode where he does the scale of the solar system.

[lassieface]

Finally have it all together.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Wow, I remembered this thread, didn't think it would be this far back...

 Was watching random tech videos on YouTube and came across one for setting up PiHole, since I have a Pi running 24/7 for my ADSB radar server I thought I'd give it a try.

 Basically it's a DNS for your home network, with blacklists and whitelists, so requests for ads and malware get a dummy address returned to them.  It could be set up to replace the DNS on your router but I chose to leave it separate, so I have to change the internet settings on any device I want using PiHole to use it as DNS instead of my router.

 The advantage over ad blocking browser plug-ins is that it covers any app or device, not just browsers.  So far I've only set up my PC but you could set up your phone or smart TV and get ads on them blocked.

 So far it works as well as adblock+ that I've been using for years, with the advantage of being able to turn off adblock+ for those sites that ask you to, and they now think I'm getting ads even though I'm not.  I've read there are sites that have come up with detection that you are not getting their ads but haven't run into any of them yet.

Here's where to get info on PiHole (It's free):

https://pi-hole.net/

Setting it up isn't that hard, there are some good tutorials out there if you get stuck, by default it gets installed to only work on the Pi so you have to change some settings to allow all devices on your home network to use it.  You do need to know a little about setting up networking on your devices, specifically how to change the DNS settings.