If you often work with a laptop on the go, you may enjoy the laptop to be a bit cooler when it is in your lap.
One simple way to achieve this is by limiting the maximum frequency of the CPU, and for this to happen, you do not have to go into the BIOS or to search for some advanced settings, it’s very easy. And there’s no need to reboot the machine — you can change the setting at any time!
Let’s face it, ads — pop-ups, pop-unders, blinking GIFs, flashing, with loud sound, stealing our network bandwidth, etc. — are super-annoying!
⏩ Note: You may skip to the end of my short article if you just want to see what you can try at home and what is likely to work (hopefully).
Ad blockers for browsers (most of them, at least) still work as of today, although some of them may occasionally display “glitches” when companies pushing ads into all of our screens try to overcome the ad protections we use. Ad Block Plus for Firefox, for example, as well as Ghostery for Firefox, worked almost flawlessly until recently, when YouTube started implementing even heavier counter-ad-block protections and started refusing to display the YouTube videos unless you disable your ad-blocker browser extensions! This was the moment when I had to try uBlock Origin for Firefox add-on and luckily it worked, no ads in YouTube — for now…
But ad block extensions for browsers have one major drawback — they can’t filter ads in mobile apps. Basically, your anti-ad protection is “locked” to your browser where the specific ad extension is installed and runs. Once you are outside of the browser, you have no protection anymore.
So I started looking for a better solution. I tried a few things and after a couple of days of research and trying various options, seems that for our local home network, a pretty good option is to set a custom DNS server that can filter popular advertising servers. One such server is AdGuard’s DNS (dns.adguard.com) which is considered generally to be safe and pretty reliable.
“AdGuard DNS (dns.adguard.com) is generally considered to be safe for Android devices. AdGuard DNS is a free service that provides an additional layer of security by blocking ads, tracking, and malicious websites at the DNS level. By using AdGuard DNS, you can potentially reduce the risk of malware infections, phishing attacks, and other security threats while browsing the internet. […]”
— “Is DNS AdGuard.com safe for Android?“
I first saw a mention of dns.adguard.com in the XDA Developers article “How to block ads on Android, with root and without root“, tested it, and it worked on our Android phones. Then for some reason, the next day the Android phones complained that they cannot access the DNS server anymore — no idea, why.
The DNS server can be added normally to your Android phone if you are with Android 9.0 or later. Open Settings → PrivateDNS → enter a custom DNS hostname → Save. Initially this worked for a day (we haven’t seen a single annoying ad on our phones during this time!) but then something happened and this DNS server stopped providing the DNS service.
This setting worked for one day on our Android phones, then stopped.
After that, I tried a few other options, and finally — what worked — was to add the AdGuard DNS to our home router’s settings. The same DNS server which stopped working on Android, was working when we tried to set it as a “Static DNS” in the router’s settings web page.
I will test this setup during the next few days and if needed, I will update my blog post. But for now, it works — we see no ads on any of the devices (computers, laptops, phones) that are connected to our home network.
Steps:
1. Open the home router’s configuration page IP address. Quite often it is 192.168.1.1 — if it is not, search online for your router maker/model, or ask your ISP provider (if the router was configured by their IT people).
2. Somewhere in Connectivity → Local Network → try adding the IP address of the dns.adguard.com DNS server — currently it is 94.140.15.15. Enter the IP address, press Apply, and wait for the router to accept the setting. (Note: Here you can enter any DNS server IP address that you know will work and will filter ads.)
Set a custom static DNS in your router’s config page.
Note: To make things more bulletproof, you can also add a “Static DNS 2” on this page. Thus, if for some reason the first DNS server is not working at any given moment, the second DNS will act as a backup DNS. As a backup second DNS, I can suggest using the Cloudflare DNS server — one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1).
3. To test if everything works, try opening a few websites on the computer or laptop — if they open normally, then great, this is a good start! After that, in a browser (or a browser profile) which does not have an ad-blocking extension installed, try accessing a website which you know for sure is displaying ads and see if they show up — if you see no ads (or you do see some ads, but in a much lesser quantity than usual), then the ad filtering is working as well! After that, on your phone (again, connected to your home network), try accessing a mobile app or a game that usually shows ads and if you see no ads there either — perfect!
Starter is a startup manager, that allows you to view and manage all the programs that are starting automatically whenever Windows boots. It lists all the hidden registry entries, as well as the common Startup Folder items as well.
I discovered that this little program is very useful to me:)
You can get it here.
PDFCreator is a small, free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Microsoft Windows application.
www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
(Download directly from here)
Your other option is, of course, Adobe Acrobat, but the first is free and the second is paid, so you can decide for yourself;-)
Everybody is talking about the new Microsoft Windows Vista OS.
Meanwhile, I didn’t write about a lot of interesting things which happened lately – the light show in Sofia on New Year’s Eve, when Bulgaria became officially a member of the European Union; the climb to Vitosha mountain with friends, to Cherni Vryh (2290 m), a few weeks ago – January 13th, to be precise (and the unpublished photos from this climb, too); the concert of the Dublin City Workingman’s Band in Sofia (on January 26th, in NDK, Hall #2); and I didn’t even write a post, explaining what is the real Yahoo! logo, and what is the one that I have drawn myself.
Shame on me!:-)
Instead of writing, I was ill for some time, because a nasty flu coming from France (or so they said) caught me; and I was working, working a lot. This is what happened and I hope that I’ll have again some time to update my blog; meanwhile, let’s return to the subject of this post:
Windows Vista or MacOS X? I don’t know, frankly.
But here’s a nice picture on the subject (click to enlarge):
:-)
PS Some say The WOW starts now! and some say that it already started; for my part, I don’t believe something so revolutionary happened; time will show:)
Or A Story about How my Intel Pentium-D Computer Became Ultra-Fast… again* :-)
…So here I am, sitting in the office yesterday, sipping at my coffee peacefully and thinking about doing some boring PC optimisation work – defragmentation, disk cleanup, etc.
Lately I noticed, that my computer is acting strange from time to time – slows down, opens applications with much more delay than usual; the whole Windows was feeling somehow slowish, but not in the way it slows down after too much work performed since first install (besides, I installed this Windows XP Professional SP2 myself not a long ago, and that wasn’t an option).