The World Cup has been playing the last few weeks and I’ve been loving every minute of it. When I say every minute of it, I mean every minute of it.
Why? Well, soccer doesn’t have timeouts and they don’t have ad breaks. It’s 45 minutes of competing, half time, followed by 45 more minutes of pure competition.
Don’t get me wrong, soccer still has advertisers. Qatar Airways probably pays millions of dollars to get a little patch on some jerseys and have their logo brandished around the outside of the field.
But guess what? The ads aren’t intrusive. I’d put them in the same category as previews at the movies or a billboard when you’re driving down the expressway.
I didn’t want to let go of that peace, so I decided to get rid of as many ads as I could.
Enter Pi-Hole
The Pi-Hole is a way to block ads from your local network! Unlike adblock plus, or a browser extension, it works on apps, tvs, games, and my favorite… chess.com.
You only need a few things to get this running — a raspberry pi, ethernet cable, power supply, and micro SD card.
How to Set Up Pi-hole
Download Raspberry Pi Imager and flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit to a microSD card.
In the imager settings, create a username/password, set the hostname to
pihole, and enable SSH.Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect it to your router with Ethernet, and power it on.
SSH into the Pi:
Update the system:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -yReserve the Pi’s IP address in your router settings so it does not change.
Install Pi-hole:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bashFollow the installer prompts. Select your network interface, choose an upstream DNS provider, and enable the web dashboard.
Set the dashboard password:
sudo pihole setpasswordOpen the dashboard:
http://pihole.local/adminIn your router’s LAN or DHCP settings, set the primary DNS server to the Raspberry Pi’s reserved IP address. Here’s what mine looks like. Most routers user 192.168.100.1 as their address. You can probably find the password on your router.
Reconnect your devices and check the Pi-hole Query Log to confirm requests are being blocked.
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Pi-hole works well for many website, app, tracking, and smart-TV ads.
But I’m still seeing ads?
While the pi-hole is amazing, it won’t work on every ad. You may notice Facebook, Youtube, X, Instagram, and Hulu still have ads.
That’s because these ads are server from the same place as the content. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about this besides upgrading to an ads-free or premium version.
There are other steps you can take to reduce your daily ads, but I’d start here.
Next time we’ll talk about setting up your own personal media center. It’s a lot of work but it has a huge payoff.