When I decided to do a fun project with my old Raspberry Pi 3B+, I purchased the 4GB model of Raspberry Pi 4 to have as a replacement (update: now they have an 8GB model that would be nice to have). Since I am working from home due to COVID-19, my main PC is completely utilized for work during the weekdays via a VPN connection. I thought it would be convenient if I had a second computer at my desk so that I can listen to background music from my Plex Media Server or use it for personal things such as banking, shopping, paying bills, and browsing the web during lunch.
When my family is spending time in our backyard especially when weather is nice, there have several times we brought a small Bluetooth speaker outside with us so we can have a little bit of music while the kids are playing. We also have birthday parties which we play some background music during the party. The Bluetooth speaker was stored in our walkout basement when it was not being used so we had relatively easy access to it.
Pi-hole is open source software which provides ad blocking (and more) for your entire home network. It does this by blocking known ad serving domains. Pi-hole even has the ability to block network requests to malicious domains if the domain name is contained in one of the block lists.
The high level statistics compiled by Pi-hole provides a much greater insight to what is going on in your home network.
Now that you have Pi-hole and Portainer setup within Docker (perhaps on a Raspberry Pi (affiliate link)?) and you notice that an update is available for Pi-hole, you may be wondering, “How do I update Pi-hole”? Sure, you can pull a new image and restart it via the command line. However, you have a nice graphical interface setup and you may enjoy looking at it rather than a console window (sacrilege for the command line folks, I know).
Those who use or own Ubiquiti UniFi products mostly are familiar with the UniFi Controller. It is software used to manage all of your UniFi gear in a single, beautiful web-based dashboard. Ubiquiti sells their UniFi Cloud Key (affiliate link) if you wish to have a dedicated device, but you can also install it on your own hardware such as a Raspberry Pi (affiliate link). You can save a little bit of money by using a Raspberry Pi (around $50-60 versus $90-100 depending on the accessories purchased for the RPi), and you also have the flexibility to run additional software on the same device.
