I’ve posted it repeatedly but I’d like to add the (paid extension) Vinegar extension as a recommendation for iOS Safari.
Enable extension, add YT to home screen and stop seeing ads.
Combined with Banish for Safari - stopping the “open in app” popups on websites, my online experience is golden.
Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.
I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.
I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt
It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.
If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.
I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.
After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.
As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.
Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.
I use it to access any websites that I want to that Virgin Media block due to court orders issued by the UK high court.
Just set this up on my Unraid server and it’s amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.
I hate where the internet is right now.
Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.
Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:
The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.
I’ve got 2 pihole instances in my home, one on my Unraid server in a Debian VM as a backup in case the main one goes down.
The main one is running from a cheap Igel M340c thin client I bought off eBay for around £20 ($25) running Ubuntu Server.
Cheaper than a Raspberry Pi at the moment and perfect for running a Pihole on.
If you want something cheap, consider a used thin client machine.
I bought a £20 thin client off of eBay to use as a simple file/Emby/pihole and Pivpn server running Ubuntu Server LTS for my home lab
Works great.
These are all I use:
Edge on desktop:
Safari on iOS:
I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.
I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.
It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.
Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.