I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong, but after moving my WP blog from Linode to AWS (as an EC2 t2.micro instance + RDS), it’s been a recurring headache. Linode was rock solid, but it seems like I’m having to reboot my EC2 instance once every week or two because it randomly disconnects from the database. I wanted to give this a try due to the AWS free tier, but I’m not sure that is going to pan out.

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.

Testing out cross posting to both Micro.blog and Twitter from my blog.