So last night my firewall decided to say F you Reann and stopped working for no apparent reason. I called my ISP to see if it was anything on their end but it was a big nope. It was rather late at night and I do not have computers with monitors at my place so I thought I was SOL. I was frustrated that I could not do anything because I had the bright idea of deleting one of my two static IPs out of the router and than reboot it. I thought to calm my frustrations I would play some games on my ipad, and holly poop am I ever not used to all the ads in mobile games. Luckily my youtube ad blocking does not require anything else on my LAN so I put on some videos and went to bed. In the morning I remembered I had a ethernet to USB adapter and a USB A to c adapter so I would be able to fix it that way. Don’t know how many times I needed to fix the firewall because I broke the internet trying to fix my boo boos and a few times the firewall just said F you Reann I am not putting out. But it is now fixed and I can enjoy my moble games and web browsing mostly ad free!

So I had no pihole action on my LAN.

Like seriously how do people hand how many ads are shoved at you when you are using your devices?

I was on DuckDuckGo this morning trying to fix things and wow the ads, really made me miss searXNG.

Luckily I do not get spam, I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
    41·
    4 days ago

    What are these ads you speak of? 😎

    Kidding aside…ya’ll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I’m over here using software that just…doesn’t serve ads. I think the most I’ve had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn’t connect to the net, though media stick does).

    That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just…stopped using them.

    Now, when I visit my folks…yeah…holy shit…but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

    It’s a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.

    • Avoid stupid people.
    • Avoid people doing stupid things.
    • Avoid stupid places.
    • Avoid stupid times.
    • Reannlegge@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I got into self hosting because my place flooded and I was waiting on insurance and the repair people to fix give the go a head and then to actually fix my place I do not really go anywhere so I was fine with being blasted with ads when I was out of my home, until I caught myself watching ads to get extra whatever from a mobile game. I had a pi zero 2 (with a PoE hat) that was not being used for anything so I thought why not use it to host wireguard, I had looked at a few options for VPNs but thought wireguard fit my needs the best. It “worked” I do not know if it was just my copper internet speeds or the silicon in the pi zero 2 which slowed everything down but now that I have a dedicated OpenWRT firewall, fibre, and a static IP (well technically 2 I just do not use the second one because the weekend project of spinning up my own SMTP and IMAP server had me at the point where I wanted to pull out my hair), I have wireguard automatically turn the VPN on when I am away from my LAN. So I would only see the adds if I went on someone elses device.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

      How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicated a hundredfold across the internet.

      • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

        When the simple solution is Lemmy.

        There’s usually a 80/20 solution to these things and it shouldn’t require a burner phone, cryptography and tradecraft.

        • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

          Well, if I were visiting the raw, unfiltered version of Reddit, I’d want a condom for my network. That place is nuts.

          When the simple solution is Lemmy.

          Reddit is a vast repository of data and info not really present in Lemmy.

          As far as plugins for anti fingerprints, et al, I keep them to a minimum. My standalone pfsense firewall does a lot of the heavy lifting so all I really need on my browser is Ublock Origin.

          ETA: I didn’t notice who I was replying to, lol. Good to see you again.

          • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            👋👋

            The reddit analogy may have been bad. What I meant was: there’s usually a side door and it’s usually simpler. You don’t have to walk through the whole building to get to the room you want.

            But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

            https://redlib.catsarch.com/

              • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                Nice! I use Redreader on my phone - and for some reason, it still actually works.

                https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

                There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more…I’m doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It’s probably relevant here too. Urgh…these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.

                I’ve actually got to sit down today and do some coding…I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus…ain’t nobody writing this shit for you.