Today, many of us rely on browser extensions to block annoying ads and tracking while browsing on our computers. They work well for desktop browsers, but what about our mobiles, tablets, smart TVs, and game consoles? They’re left vulnerable to ads because these extensions don’t work on them. We’ve come to accept ads as a necessary evil, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With a simple setup using a Raspberry Pi and a tool called Pi-hole, you can block ads and tracking across all devices on your home network.

If you are using AWS Lambda to serve real-time traffic and your Lambda initialization times are high, minimizing response time becomes crucial. One option to achieve this is by utilizing provisioned concurrency. Provisioned Concurrency refers to the number of pre-initialized execution environments allocated to your Lambda function. Maintaining a constant provisioned concurrency capacity of 200 for a 512 MB Lambda for a month can cost approximately $1,116 USD! This cost is in addition to the pricing for requests and duration.

Sherlock is a CLI tool that can be used to find usernames across many social networks. In this post, I share how Sherlock was able to overcome a couple of hurdles in reliably finding if a username existed on Facebook. Sherlock works by having a JSON file as the source where a large collection of sites are listed with a few attributes. A sample entry from the file looks like this: