Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Oh yeah! haha, that was definitely a thing. I remember getting nervous, wondering if I had the date correct, or if the plan would actually be rolling over exactly at midnight :)
You have to reset the router at about 11:45pm to make sure according to telecom/spark.
Source: I’m on one of those horrible plans right now. 60gb limit. Their estimate lags and then we suddenly overshoot and have to pay $5 or $10. It sucks.
I don’t know what you’re paying but it almost seems like getting an unlimited mobile plan and hotspotting your phone would be better. Unlimited plans can be had for about $40 a month, and they tend to allow hotspotting. It seems that the cheapest broadband plans are around this level, but then have you pay for a router which if it’s on Spark is probably connecting to the mobile network anyway.
Of course the down side is you have to have your phone near whatever else you want to connect to the internet, and hotspotting will drain your battery. But then you will also not have to pay for a separate mobile plan. I feel like a spread sheet is in order to work out what’s a good deal.
Interesting suggestion. Unfortunately decisions about shared utilities aren’t mine to make, these days. I’m sure there are better plans out there.
Weird fact about the router though, it’s a very old Vodafone one and when we set it up the one thing it would not let me change was the dns so it still uses Vodafone servers on a Spark plan!
Ah that’s a shame. 60GB these days doesn’t go a long way.
That is weird! I’m starting to remember how locked down routers used to be. These days we have quite a bit of control over what we can do with ISP routers. I can change DNS, do port forwarding of HTTP ports, etc.
Yeah that must be cool! Tech has just got so much better lately and there’s so much cool stuff. I think if I had money and capability I would want to muck around with running stuff through a raspberry pi.
The Pi is cool but if you have a PC/laptop you can probably just run a VM for messing around. If you don’t have a computer then the cost of the Pi is just the beginning, with the need for a keyboard and mouse, HDMI mini adapter, SD card (I just use the TV for the monitor when needed, plugging in with HDMI).
You can get a kit like this but, well, it’s $200.
Honestly it’s probably cheaper to get a VPS when OVH has their VPNs on sale for $2 a month for 12 months. But you’d probably need a PC to SSH to it (you can do it on mobile but it doesn’t sound like fun).
Sorry to be ignorant but do VPS do ad blocking? I was daydreaming about a raspberry pi if I won lotto because a) I used to like trying to build my own computers and b) pi-hole to block ads for non tech savvy people in the house.
With a VPS it gets a bit more complicated, I probably wouldn’t try to do pi-hole on a VPS though I think it would technically be possible. Regardless, I think your major blocker will be that you mentioned your router doesn’t let you change the DNS server. pi-hole is a DNS server from the point of view of your router. You need to be able to change the DNS server for it to work. And if you can change your DNS server, then Adguard free plan might be an easier and cheaper (but less fun) way to get that.
I thought you might be able to pick up a really old Pi for cheap, I have pi-hole running on an original Raspberry Pi model B, but there aren’t that many and even the ones that are there are more than I thought they would be (e.g. I can see a Pi 2 for $40).
People often use old laptops as a server, if you have one of those lying around.