Synology

The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online, but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read more on my e-reader instead of constantly staring at my phone. Put the phone down First, a brief detour into my browsing and reading habits. I subscribe to a lot of feeds (check out my blogroll!) and going through my RSS reader gives me a similar dopamine hit to scrolling on social media - except I’m mostly learning something new rather than just being entertained. But it also means I spend a lot of time staring at my phone and reading articles on it, which is definitely not a good way to read anything, and it does not feel great either. Besides, you’re one notification away from being pulled out of your reading. ...

Intro As part of my journey towards higher privacy while using internet, I decided to set up Pi-hole on my Synology NAS DS218play. If you are reading this article, you probably don’t need the following explanation, but just in case: Pi-hole is perhaps the most popular DNS sinkhole, which aims to block ads, trackers and malicious sites for all devices on your local network. Now, your NAS is one of the best candidates for running Pi-hole since it is typically on 24/7 and connected via high-speed wired connection to your router. Since I already was an owner of Synology NAS, I started googling how to set up Pi-hole on my device. There are plenty of howto’s which describe the process, but they have one fatal flaw: they rely on the Docker (or Container Manager, as it was later renamed to) Synology package to be installed and used for the setup. And this is where it starts to get interesting: Docker is not officially supported on ARM-based Synology NASes (such as the j and play models), supposedly due to insufficient performance of their CPUs. This means you will not find the packages in the Package Manager and will not be able to install it the usual way. ...