Two years after buying mine, I put the pi to a good use only last week! Now I am using it as ad-blocker thanks to http://pi-hole.net/, works like a charm.

I ported the web interface for pi-hole to Go single executable (https://github.com/girishso/pi-hole-web)

Now looking for something interesting to do on my second pi!

Edit: Added pi-hole-web link.

That's great, thanks!!

I have a pi as a media server* connected to a projector via HDMI, that reads media files from a NAS on my home network; very efficient and lightweight.

I will definitely try pi-hole; maybe I can have both running on the same pi.

* via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist...

> * via Raspbmc, which I just found out has apparently ceased to exist...

Try OSMC [1], it's a massive improvement over Raspbmc and is being developed actively. Works like a charm. If I'm correct, the main Raspbmc dev went over to OSMC a while back.

[1] https://osmc.tv

Yes, thanks, but for now raspbmc works really well, I'm not sure I want to go through the whole update now unless there's a big compelling reason.

I might upgrade to a 2B though, it's probably a lot faster (the current setup tends to freeze a little on rapidly changing frames).

You have to overclock to about 900 to get the resposiveness up.

Both of mine are perfectly stable at that speed.

OSMC is actually the successor of Raspbmc (And Crystalbuntu)

http://kodi.wiki/view/OSMC

My frequently asked question: if I want to watch and record DVB-T television, what media centre solution should I be using?

I have been running the Pi since 2012 from the early days of Raspbmc to OSMC and sometime in 2013 starting watching and recording television using it.

I have ATSC (North American Over-The-Air TV) which is similar to DVB-T. I use an HDHomerun Network TV tuner. I watch using my Pi running OSMC and an Add-on for DVBLink, and when I select record, I use DVBLink software which runs on my Synology NAS. DVBLink however is paid software that can run on the Pi, as well as many other platforms (Windows, Linux, Asustor, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, Western Digital).

I tried using TVHeadend but found the interface and support of DVBLink to be better.

My other Pi currently runs Volumio (https://volumio.org) for music streaming.

How does it do performance wise? I can only imagine that DNS + Blocklist checking is already a big task for a PI. I always wanted to have something like this, and am on the search for something like a PI but a bit better since then.

It works pretty well, in fact page loading times have significantly reduced for me, may be because it caches the DNS records locally. I think PI is good enough for this purpose.

How much RAM does it take? I mean if it runs with less than 250 MB of free RAM I can deploy this right away, without using a dedicated RPi (I have 2 RPis on my network, the one is doing some heavy lifting, the other one has many cycles to spare).

Not much, currently it's using 1.6% RAM of 512MB. Even CPU usage seems negligible. After all, it's just acting as a DNS server, only resolving the DNS queries.. not to mention blocking the ad domains!

I just love the idea.I may finally put my Pi for some good use. I am hoping enough people have looked at it to trust this with my network.

looks like a great idea but doesn't it significantly slow down your network? I think I would rather install an ad-blocker on a tomato/dd-wrt/open-wrt router...

What is the difference between this and privoxy with an ad blocker?

Same here. Had them laying around for two years before I dusted them off to port Processing to it (shameless plug: https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki/Raspberry-Pi).

Still haven't done anything truly original, but I learned a lot about the hardware and the kernel writing the scaffolding and plumbing - and hoping that this will make the curve less steep for the ones that do.

Lol...I'm the same. I have four of the sodding things (Pi#1-B, revised Pi#1-B and two of the model 2 B's) complete with PSU's...all sitting in a box. So many plans, so little time.

I wonder if the problem for most of us isn't the money, but just the time. A cheap computer probably doesn't give us any more time/ease than an expensive computer (which we probably already have 1+ of)

Find a local makerspace and pop in every once in a while. A bit of time spent with others doing things rubs off.

I live in rural Scotland, there is no such thing, and sadly I don't have the time available to start one.

Amusing that most people I speak to (including myself) fall into this category.

Great deal nonetheless, especially when considering the bit where he mentioned being much faster that version 1, which is considerably slow if you ask me.

They're cheap enough to be a "cool, I have to play with this" impulse buy...

At last count I've got about 7-8 different devices like this sitting around that I've aspired to play around with at one time or other, all of them have seen way too little use.

I know what you mean.

I have a Tessel here (Nodejs base micro controller) and never used it...

Didn't know about Tessel, the plug and play modules look very tempting!

Yes, everything works out of the box with npm install. It's really nice.

But I have no idea what I should do with it, haha