June 2019

There were 11 posts published in June 2019 (this is page 1 of 4).

Pi-hole for Blocking Ads in iOS Apps

I’ve tinkered with it before, but I have to say, Pi-hole is fantastic! Someone on my local dev community Slack mentioned that they noticed it also blocked ads in apps. My daughter likes to play terrible apps that spam you with ads every 30 seconds and don’t let you pay to remove the ads. The ads seem to make the app way more unstable as well since it crashes every few ads.

Since turned on Pi-hole and sending her iPad DNS queries there, she hasn’t had a single full screen video ad at all and the game she was playing runs great now. I normally wouldn’t block these ads since I do want to support developers, but some of these kids apps are just over the top with ads.

I’ve had some trouble with websites working when I use it for my Mac, but for a kid’s iPad, it seems to work perfectly.

Blogging Thoughts

One of the reasons I haven’t tried to blog, or even post to social media, more these days is I can’t figure out how I want to manage all of my accounts. I haven’t used Facebook in a year and a half (or more) at this point and I don’t see myself going back.

I go through periods where I don’t look at Twitter at all, but I still have some friends that I only see on there, so I hate to abandon it altogether. I also have this blog which I’ve had forever – I’ve imported most of my old content from various other blogs into this one.

I think this blog will stay the single repository for anything I make. That keeps it nice & easy, even though it doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as my social media accounts.

I’m still trying to post to Micro.blog as well, but I’m not involved in many discussions there since there are so few people I know using it. Any blog posts on here that are tagged with microblog will also show up on Micro.blog itself. I’m sure I’d have a different feeling about it if most of my friends from Twitter (and some from Facebook) were there, but that’s not the situation today.

I used to have Micro.blog cross-post to Twitter for me and maybe I’ll end up turning that back on, but the catch for me was that I didn’t want to check Twitter for replies. At the same time, if I post something there and I get a comment about it, I’d like to see it. I haven’t found a way to get just Twitter replies sent to me though. If I have the Twitter app (well, Tweetbot) installed, I’m going to mindlessly browse Twitter more than I’d like. Without the app, I only get emails when someone DMs me. It sounds like I should be getting reply emails as well based on Twitter’s setting screen, but I’ve never seen that in emails.

For now, I think I’m going to go back to not using Twitter. I recently signed up for Feedbin and it lets to subscribe to specific Twitter accounts as if they were regular RSS feeds. I think that may be a nice middle ground to keep up with the handful of accounts I like to follow without getting sucked into scrolling Twitter for ages.

I’m going to keep posting my content to this blog and I may look at turning on Twitter cross posting for the microblog category specifically – so those posts go out automatically, but I’ll have to manually cross post any longer content if I want it to go out.