Category Archives: Hacks

Ad blocker for all your devices everywhere with Pi-Hole + WireGuard

PiHole + Unbound + WireGuard on Raspberry Pi

On my previous article I’ve been disabling my ad-blocker to feel like a vanilla user with no experience at all in using a computer and it was a catastrophe experience on a vast majority of websites I was browsing.

Instead of a simple extension on your browser which will use computing resources, slow page rendering, you can go to a more radical way with Pi-Hole.

PiHole powerful DNS server for filtering your network

This will cost you at most 50 € with a Raspberry Pi 3 for a lifetime efficient ad/social/whatever you want blocker!

Pi-Hole is a network wide ad blocking application that filter all the traffic from your network and delivers it through a DNS server. So instead of taking some heavy resources on your computer with a browser ad blocker like uBlock Origin or LuLu as a blocker for computer wise network filtering, you get it on your full network! How handy!

What are the pros:

  • Full network filtering: which means that all your devices at home will be filtered. Even if some friends and family joins
  • Increase Internet speed: yep! True and verified. As you’ll cut all trackers/ads/and other unwanted traffic, your pages will load at least 2 times faster on most cases. You can even do some page loading comparison to check. Make sure you are connected to a 1 Gb/s Ethernet cable for optimum speed
  • Mobile through VPN: you can filter your traffic as well on your other devices that supports VPN’s. This will enable you to move with your filtering rules everywhere you go.

The couple Pi-Hole + WireGuard (VPN) is a great combination to keep battery usage low on your mobile phones while being connected to your PiHole.

Quick list of tutorials about PiHole and WireGuard setup:

Download songs from Spotify with your premium account

Get ready to download some songs with your Premium account

Digging the abyss

As usual, digging on the web bring me on an interesting project called justifyx. This small java application let you do a simple thing:

Download any SpotifyURI link you want in 320kbps OGG format!

How to download playlist/album/song or whatever SpotifyURI?

Simply download the last version of Justifyx: https://code.google.com/p/justifyx/downloads/list

And use it as follow:

Command line:
java -jar justifyx.jar user password SpotifyURI format command

Format:
    ogg_96:  Ogg Vorbis @ 96kbps
    ogg_160: Ogg Vorbis @ 160kbps
    ogg_320: Ogg Vorbis @ 320kbps
    mp3_320: MP3 @ 320kbps

Command:
    download: downloads track/list/album
    download number: downloads an album starting on the specified track number
    cover: downloads album cover