Fun and adventure with the $10 Raspberry Pi

Why Are We Revisiting This?

The Raspberry Pi Zero is very flexible and can provide a lot of capabilities for the low end of the Raspberry Pi range. We’re going to look at adding more capabilities and what you actually get with them. This isn’t a “how to” guide for WiFi penetration testing, but we will look at those capabilities, and how to appropriately leverage the Pi Zero in different scenarios.

The article is informational. Do not break the law.

Requirements and Setup

To get the most out of this setup, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10 at…

Because cron and unattended-upgrades don’t work

WSL is a Great Tool for the Windows Development Environment

The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment — including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications — directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dualboot setup.

I’m a big fan of WSL and Windows Terminal. I have direct access to a Linux shell from my Windows desktop, allowing me to utilize the dev and system tools of Linux without messing with a VM. But sometimes it just simple things. …

I’m leaving the house more and I want to bring my music with me, without ads or tracking.

Why do this?

I actually don’t use Spotify, I have used Apple Music for my streaming music needs. I was an iPhone user, jumped ship, but still subscribed to Apple Music because of all the playlists I had accumulated. This summer as a project I built a Jellyfin server with some spare parts I had (a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a USB 1 GB laptop hard drive) and it was pretty amazing. This is not the ideal setup, the 3B+ lacks Gig ethernet, USB 3.0…

I work with PowerShell a lot so I have a long $Profile

What is a PowerShell Profile?

A PowerShell profile is a script that runs when PowerShell starts. It’s essentially like ~/.bashrc for the PowerShell environment. You can read all about the PowerShell profile here in the official Microsoft documentation.

Do You Have a Profile?

It’s a valid question, so to determine if you do, open a PowerShell session and enter:

$PROFILE | Get-Member -Type NoteProperty

If the response has values for all four values, especially CurrentUserCurrentHost, you have a profile. If not you can create one by using the following command:

if (!(Test-Path -Path $PROFILE)) { New-Item -ItemType File…

In my struggle with migraines, the best tool to fight the pain is focusing on code.

I’ve been a migraineur for the past 30 years. My headaches have ranged from mild to extremely intense, and occurred as frequently as five times a week. There have been times in my life when I only had one or two migraine headaches a month. When I was 12 I was diagnosed with migraine with aura (classic migraine). Over the years I’ve kept headache diaries, found patterns that lead to triggers, and tried different treatments. …

You can configure PiHole many ways, this guide focuses on privacy and performance.

Requirements

PiHole is a popular DNS level ad block that can also protect against tracking and telemetry. It’s fairly light weight, so any Raspberry Pi with an Ethernet port will support it. I would not recommend a Pi Zero. A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is more than sufficient to run PiHole. You’ll also need a Micro SD Card; I’d recommend 16 GB, but 8 GB is enough to install PiHole. I’d recommend a case and power supply as well. You’ll also need an Ethernet cable and a computer to…

TorBox is an anonymizing router based on the Raspberry Pi

Requirements

The hardware requirements are a Raspberry Pi 3B+, a case (I guess this is optional), and a micro SD card. You’ll also need an Ethernet cable and a switch to plug the Pi into, and a computer to configure the Pi from.

Why do this?

TorBox creates a Wifi access point that routes all its traffic over Tor. Instead of using an application like the Tor Browser to encrypt one application and only anonymize that traffic, all traffic that connects to the TorBox is routed over Tor. Now, this is good and bad…

Using Tor to anonymize your traffic with low cost hardware

Why Would You Do This?

By combining the low cost of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the rather high anonymity of Tor, you can evade the pervasive surveillance that exists on the web today. My primary use case is watching YouTube videos; I want to watch whatever I want without the extensive tracking, analytics, and ads that accompany YouTube. With a Tor proxy and some software, I can watch YouTube without a Google account. I’m reasonably sure Google has no clue what videos I chose to watch. …