I’ve been using an adblocker for a while, and I’m not getting into the ethics of it but a) I don’t click on ads b) I honestly don’t care about the ethics of it, if I can improve my online experience I will.

So I decided, having just reconfigured my home network in advance of finally getting fibre, to add a pi to remove as many ads as possible for everyone on the network.

The process is very simply – put an iso of Raspian on an SD card (or Micro SD for me as I’m using a pi 2.0) – I used Raspian Jesse light from here with no issues. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/.

Ssh into your pi -ssh pi@your-ip , password raspberry – I like to use fing (available on iphone and android) if I can’t find it immediately on the network.

Literally cut and paste

curl -L install.pi-hole.net | bash

into the terminal and you’ll be walked through the process. Use the down button to also block ipV6 ads (new option), wait for it all to run and install – 10 minutes or so, then you are done. You can check your PiHole webserver at http://xx.xx.xx.xx/admin/index.php

You can either change the DNS server of each device in your home to the 2 dns servers Pi-Hole suggests you use – or dig into your router to block everything at router level. I did the latter, so its now all automatic.

I also downloaded this hosts file – https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts following a tip on reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/41hj82/pihole_has_only_blocked_2_ads_today_is_something.

This host files is nicely maintained by Steven and kills some trackers as well as ads – and who wants to be tracked..

I didn’t think instructions to get this into Pi-Hole were clear so here you go –

I downloaded the hosts file and cleaned up the header then searched and replaced to remove the 0,0,0,0 entries. Uploaded it to my server.

I ssh’d into the pi again and used wget to pull the file down then

mv newhostsfile.txt /etc/pihole/blacklist.txt

then

/usr/local/bin/gravity.sh

Pi-Hole then runs and adds another 27,000 adserver and trakers to your blocklist. Nice.

So almost 10% of my traffic is ads – and so I’m saving a good chunk of my bandwidth by doing this. Cost = Raspberry Pi, and less than an hour. Donate if you use it – its useful software and the stats are cool. Its under active development, so definitely worth a try. https://pi-hole.net/

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Add auto bot pricing to your xml feed and the risk is inherently greater. Add automated fulfilment and all should be well but ouch. Computer Snafus Happen. When you are shifting a wholesalers stock on 30 day terms with bot auto pricing to gain competitive advantage in huge quantities with low margins and no webstore or other channel to market as a backup and you are not a limited company , then there is a risk.  Shift 10k in a week using Amazon Fulfilment, no way to stop the shipment and the risk is significant, if it all goes wrong with the pricing.

I agree it should not all go wrong, but the due diligence is all too easy to overlook when you are are 100k of stock deep and its all drop shipping for you via amazon.

Add these terms and conditions (and I’m no lawyer, so add every disclaimer in the book)  but I wouldn’t be expecting Amazon to step in with ex-gratia payments.

No fault is implied by pointing out the T&C’s

RepricerExpress T&C’s

5. LIABILITY

5.1. Nothing in this Licence shall exclude or in any way limit either party’s liability for fraud, or for death and personal injury resulting from negligence, or any other liability to the extent that it cannot be excluded or limited as a matter of law.

5.2. Subject to condition 5.1 the Licensor shall not be liable under or in connection with this Licence for: (a) loss of income; (b) loss of business profits or contracts; (c) business interruption; (d) loss of the use of money or anticipated savings; (e) loss of information; (f) loss of opportunity, goodwill or reputation; (g) loss of, damage to or corruption of data; or (h) any indirect or consequential loss or damage of any kind howsoever arising and whether caused by tort (including negligence), breach of contract or otherwise.

5.3. Subject to condition 5.1 and condition 5.2, the Licensor’s maximum aggregate liability under or in connection with this Licence, or any collateral contract, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise (including any liability for the acts or omissions of its employees or agents), shall be limited to a sum equal to the total Licence Fees paid to the Licensor in the period of 12 months considered retrospectively from the date the cause of action arose.

So fair enough, but the court case will be interesting.

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wget ‘http://s3.amazonaws.com/sendtokindle/SendToKindleForMac-installer.pkg’
pkgutil –expand SendToKindleForMac-installer.pkg SendToKindleForMac-installer
LC_CTYPE=C sed -i ” ‘s/10.6.0/0/’ SendToKindleForMac-installer/buildroot.pkg/Scripts/preinstall
pkgutil –flatten SendToKindleForMac-installer SendToKindleForMac-installer-fixed.pkg
open SendToKindleForMac-installer-fixed.pkg
echo ‘done’

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buttonfinal

Rename it to button.py and run it using python button.py. Check this post for the build details.

The post Volumio next button update appeared first on iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant.

So I wanted a skip to the next song button. Entirely possible with the Pi, and I found a guy who had done it – but his code wasn’t complete. Here are the full instructions:

Connect a switch to two spare gpio pins. I used GPIO 4 to ground.  This was useful.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip
sudo pip install –upgrade distribute
sudo pip install ipython
sudo pip install –upgrade RPi.GPIO

Then make a file – mine is called button py

nano button.py

This is the code

[code language=”python”]

TEST_MPD_HOST = “localhost”
TEST_MPD_PORT = “6600”
TEST_MPD_PASSWORD = “volumio” # password for Volumio / MPD

# Connect with MPD
client = mpd.MPDClient()
connected = False
while connected == False:
connected = True
try:
client.connect(TEST_MPD_HOST, TEST_MPD_PORT)
except SocketError as e:
connected = False
if connected == False:
print “Couldn’t connect. Retrying”
time.sleep(5)
print(“Connected”)

while True:
if (GPIO.input(buttonPinNext)): # Play the next song in this play list.
print “Next track in play list”
client.next()
time.sleep(1)

[/code]

Ctrl x to save

Download it here and change the extentio from txt to py

Test the code:

python button.py

Make it run at boot – you need to edit /etc/rc.local (as root since this is the owner).

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

At the bottom, just above exit 0 we’ll add a call to our script.

python /root/python.py

Ctrl x to save

Here is a rubbish picture of the finished article. 

Disclaimer. This may not be the worlds best Python. Please let me know if I can improve it!

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