#computing things

[inimitablereel]

Pi-Hole debug log

I'm thinking about writing up a nice guide so let me know if that would be useful to anyone but in the meantime, some notes about difficulties I ran into setting up a pi-hole

First off, I do want to say that this is actually pretty technically complicated? Like it's been floating around tumblr for a while, lots of people have done it, you can too, but when OP on that viral post said they took 2 hours and don't know anything, I think they mean they don't know anything in the same way I do (I have a whole degree in computers I have used a terminal before, but I hadn't used a raspberry pi before)

Rest below the cut

Gathering Materials Good news: there's lots of viable options for a raspberry pi that works with pihole! The minimal requirements are really very minimal. You need some computer that you're willing to devote to blocking your internet. (Theoretically you could do this on a computer also used for different stuff but that would suck and make you have no ram.) In practice, unless you've got a spare working laptop floating around for some reason, you are going to want that to be a raspberry pi. Bad news: now you have to make decisions. The "official" pihole kit has been sold out for ages, so that's not an option. I said fuck it and bought kit for the raspberry pi 4 off of one of the licensed distributors linked from raspberrypi.com (because it had all the requirements) but that was ~$100 with shipping and there ARE cheaper options. It looks like the raspberry pi zero barely hits the RAM requirements and is $15 at a licensed distributor so that's likely as low as you can go. And if you're not just buying a kit you'll need at a minimum a power supply, a microsd card (the pihole requirement is 4GB but everything I was seeing was way bigger anyways), and a way to read a microsd card (either a USB microsd reader or if your laptop already has an sd card reader you'll need one of those microsd to normal sd card converters which idk where you get but a USB microsd reader is very cheap). You don't need but may want an hdmi cable that will connect to the pi

Setting Up and Using a Raspberry Pi You may notice for notes that aren't a guide (yet) this is going into Great Detail about the early parts of the setup. As someone who hadn't used a raspberry pi before, I found all the pihole guides I was looking at skipped the basics I needed and most of my setup time was trying to figure out what was going on with my raspberry pi, not actually doing the pi-hole thing. The raspberry pi getting started page actually had all the information I needed in conjunction with their pihole setup guide if I'd read it thoroughly enough but since I didn't a general overview: first you plug the sd card into your personal computer to image it; then once it's imaged you take it out and put it in your raspberry pi; then after it's blinked at you a bit you ssh to your raspberry pi while on the same wifi network you just set up in the imaging step. This is running your raspberry pi "headless" which means you don't need a monitor/hdmi cable but does make it harder to debug if you can't ssh. Also if you're on windows apparently you NEED to download a different terminal because windows command prompt for all that it's gotten better over time cannot connect to unix operating systems (which raspbian is).

AT&T hates internet configuration Now we're getting to the part that's specific to me. My internet is on AT&T, which has overall been pretty okay (and they've had great technicians for setup and repair), but AT&T fiber does not let you set your own DNS. The non-annoying backup is to make the pi-hole your DHCP server instead of your DNS server, which IS in every setup guide but is NOT very detailed. (Possibly if I wasn't on AT&T this whole paragraph would be complaining about the level of detail of guides about making your pi-hole your DNS.) To get DHCP working, I found a different, slightly outdated guide from someone else on AT&T fiber which was pretty useful but had some pitfalls because it is a bit out of date: https://otter-security.com/how-to/ht_post/28/

Key points for setting up a pihole as DHCP server:

Set up your pihole normally/following the raspberry pi guide for the prompts

You still need to allocate a static IP for your pihole. For AT&T, this is on the IP allocation of the Home Network tab of the advanced settings page. That static IP should be the same as whatever the IP the IPv4 one the pihole install configured.

Disable DHCP on the subnets & DHCP tab. THIS IS THE STEP THAT BREAKS YOUR INTERNET: without DHCP available only some sites will work. This will be fixed by enabling DHCP on the pi-hole

Disable IPv6 (more about this later)

Enable DHCP on the pi-hole admin page: this is just a checkbox under settings->DHCP. The router ip address should be the one listed on the back of your router/the one used to get to the advanced settings (probably already correct)

Let all devices connect to the pi-hole under Settings->DNS on the pi-hole admin page (this is the step that was outdated or possibly just different because it was wired on the guide)

Don't You Forget About Mesh More details about my particular internet setup: we extend our internet with a mesh network. This kept getting in my way as I was doing the setup because I treat them largely interchangeably but it's important to put the raspberry pi and your computer on the SAME internet to do a local ssh, where the mesh vs the router are different here. I wanted to put the raspberry pi ssh on the router not the mesh because my initial setup attempt did break the mesh, but I'm not sure that that matters? Also I don't think anything connected to the mesh is getting the pihole filtering right now? Possible fixes required are either changing the mesh DNS to the pi-hole IP or seeing if the mesh has DHCP enabled.

IPv6: Still Broken So in the DHCP setup step I disabled IPv6. I couldn't get my DHCP to be forced to the pi-hole on IPv6 and I'm not sure why. I did set up my pi-hole to be IPv6 enabled and try disabling just IPv6 DHCP on my router, but it didn't seem to be hitting the pihole. Reading a help thread on this has convinced me that my best option is to leave it disabled until such a time as I want to learn things about networking again (a class I liked but also worked very hard to get a B in)

Why is my computer sad?? So I've declared pihole "working" in that our internet isn't broken and it's blocking at least some ads from some computers... but my mac is now giving ominous no internet connection warnings.

This would be a Big Problem except that I definitely can in fact reach the internet just fine. I'm on the internet right now! I don't know why my mac is sad and I am struggling to google it because it's specifically a false warning and I'm only getting results about the real problem. My hazy guess is it's ipv6 related? I could test this by disabling pihole/re-enabling DHCP on my router while keeping ipv6 off... but not in the middle of the day on a Friday

Adguard vs Pi-Hole: A Mystery Pi-Hole is no longer new technology and in the ~12 hours that it's been set up here hasn't made a dramatic difference in my life, mostly because I already had adblockers on my laptop. You can add more blocked sites and I've been looking at finding more adlists, but one alternate option is instead of running pi-hole on your raspberry pi, you run a commercial network level adblocker called AdGuard Home. I haven't tried the AdGuard option but it might do more comprehensive blocking? On the downside, it's commercial, not open source, so I do worry about them switching to break your internet if you don't give them money...

[paintedcrows]

Whenever Bill sees KingOfNJ's fics through Stan's eyes he just thinks they have the same taste in fanfiction (disgusting. unthinkable) continued

[artsymeeshee]

Here's the mini comic of Dipper's nightmare! I know the idea of Mabel being the one to have the nightmare about pushing the button has been played with before, but I wanted to explore that with Dipper. (Also sort of a way to include some bonding time with Stan). Plus I think they both benefit having a more serious talk like this.

[count-pudding]

Wizard Installer🧙✨

[inimitablereel]

Oh queues just like in Homestuck

Just discovered the queue, this thing is amazing

[meoware]

Website would like the patch I just finished painting.

[bananonbinary]

for ages i thought i didnt like drag because of internalized homophobia but it turned out i just don't like bright lights and loud music and really visually complicated things

spd is homophobic i guess is what im saying

[morganbritton132]

Steve is unknowingly popular in teacher spaces online despite not having social media because his students keep posting videos of him on Tiktok.

Every now and again, a video will break containment and reach a wider audience - like the time one of his students used ‘girl math’ to justify their wrong answer and Steve responded with an exhausted ‘math is non-binary’ - but it’s always a flash-in-the-pan kinda thing. The lasting power isn’t there.

Or well, it wasn’t before famed rockstar Eddie Munson started randomly quoting some of the dorky shit ‘Teacher Steve’ says in those videos.

Someone puts together a compilation of Eddie quoting videos that have less than one hundred views. Now Eddie has to admit that he’s kinda obsessed with the guy and suddenly Steve is famous everywhere online (still doesn’t know about it though).

Things may have died down but then one of his students post a video of them asking Steve if he knows Eddie, and Steve is just like, “Munson? Eddie Munson from high school?”

They’re married btw.

[just-a-joey]

My two favourite AIs that hate eachother

[freshbeeth]

two queens maximizing their joint slay

[inimitablereel]

nothing like the early days of advent of code to make me say wow I'm actually pretty good at writing code

[bluegiragi]

I really don’t care if I’m considered an annoying luddite forever, I will genuinely always hate AI and I’ll think less of you if you use it. ChatGPT, Generative AI, those AI chatbots - all of these things do nothing but rot your brain and make you pathetic in my eyes. In 2025? You’re completely reliant on a product owned by tech billionaires to think for you, write for you, inspire you, in 2025????

“Oh but I only use ___ for ideas/spellcheck/inspiration!!” I kinda don’t care? oh, you’re “only” outsourcing a major part of the creative process that would’ve made your craft unique to you. Writing and creating art has been one of the most intrinsically human activities since the dawn of time, as natural and central to our existence as the creation of the goddamn wheel, and sheer laziness and a culture of instant gratification and entitlement is making swathes of people feel not only justified in outsourcing it but ahead of the curve!!

And genuinely, what is the point of talking to an AI chatbot, since people looove to use my art for it and endlessly make excuses for it. RP exists. Fucking daydreaming exists. You want your favourite blorbo to sext you, there’s literally thousands of xreader fic out there. And if it isn’t, write it yourself! What does a computer’s best approximation of a fictional character do that a human author couldn’t do a thousand times better. Be at your beck and call, probably, but what kind of creative fulfilment is that? What scratch is that itching? What is it but an entirely cyclical ourobouros feeding into your own validation?

I mean, for Christ sakes there are people using ChatGPT as therapists now, lauding it for how it’s better than any human therapist out there because it “empathises”, and no one ever likes to bring up how ChatGPT very notably isn’t an accurate source of information, and often just one that lives for your approval. Bad habits? Eh, what are you talking about, ChatGPT told me it’s fine, because it’s entire existence is to keep you using it longer and facing any hard truths or encountering any real life hard times when it comes to your mental health journey would stop that!

I just don’t get it. Every single one of these people who use these shitty AIs have a favourite book or movie or song, and they are doing nothing by feeding into this hype but ensuring human originality and sincere passion will never be rewarded again. How cute! You turned that photo of you and your boyfriend into ghibli style. I bet Hayao Miyazaki, famously anti-war and pro-environmentalist who instills in all his movies a lifelong dedication to the idea that humanity’s strongest ally is always itself, is so happy that your request and millions of others probably dried up a small ocean’s worth of water, and is only stamping out opportunities for artists everywhere, who could’ve all grown up to be another Miyazaki. Thanks, guys. Great job all round.

[damianito]

Gorgus dangerous woman ♡

|COMMISSIONS OPEN!!|

[horygory]

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

[beejwatch]

MASH s03e07 - Check-up