Colin LeMieux - Hobbyist & Professional

Eliminate ads and improve your network by using PiHole as your DNS server

Colin

3rd March, 2019

Pi-Hole download

Pi-Hole converts a device on your network into a domain name service provider with a built-in blocklist. What this means is that once installed your entire network is filtered to remove trackers and ad's, which not only blocks advertisements but improves your internet speed, and reduces total network traffic (since the ads are no longer downloaded).

I installed Pi-Hole onto a 10 year old laptop i had lying around and followed the steps provided on their website. Total installation took around 20 minutes. Pi-Hole also has a comprehensive admin page to monitor your network (on my network pi-hole blocks around 20% of all queries on average). I highly recommend this software to anyone concerned about the amount of tracking and advertisements being sent over your home network.

Visit the Pi-Hole Website to get started

Create an ultra-fast RAM Disk with ImDisk

Colin

12th Dec, 2018

ImDisk RAM Disk download

There are plenty of high speed disk options available for PC's these days: SSDs, NVmE, PCI, etc. But for those users that have plenty of RAM, turning that RAM into a super-fast disk drive is an attractive FREE option. There are limitations to these drives; you cant use them as boot drives and you must have extra RAM available. When searching for a fast transcoder drive for my PLEX server, I looked at various RAM disk creation software and found Imdisk to be the best option.

ImDisk has no space limitation (you are limited by the amount of physicial RAM) and even has a dynamic allocation option. It was straight-forward and quick to set up a 16 GB RAM disk, assign it a drive letter and it was instantly recognized by Windows. If you have some RAM to spare and are in need of a fast drive, this is your solution. And check out these speeds (measured with Crystal Disk Mark)! RAM Disk read/write speed

Create a RAM Disk with Imdisk

Download Soundcloud songs to mp3

Colin

5th Sept, 2018

Soundcloud download mp3

Soundcloud is a (somewhat) popular music streaming website and a great way for local artists to get exposure.

I always recomend buying music direct from artists but sometimes certain songs are locked behind music stores that don't offer the option to download an mp3 file *Apple, *cough *cough.

Check out this convenient online downloader that enables you to download that sweet remix.

Soundcloud Downloader

Upscaling Photos while preserving quality with LetsEnhance.io

Colin

28th Mar, 2018

LetsEnhance.io Image Upscaling

We've all seen the CSI episodes where the suspect is conveniently spotted by repeatedly zooming in on security footage that magically becomes crisp after someone yells "ENHANCE!". In the real world this isn't the case, zooming in will create a blurry pixelated image that cannot contain more information than the original image.

The team at LetsEnhance.io have created a unique approach and solution: they upscale the photo and then use algorthms from deep convolutional neural networks to fill in missing details based on the content of the image.

And it's free! Check it out!

LetsEnhance.io

Download Full Resolution Instagram Pictures

Colin

27th Mar, 2018

Instagram Photo Downloader, Instagram

Social Media allows us to share memories and photos like never before, but for those of us that maintain a personal archive it can be frustratating when downloading photos that friends and family have posted to social media as these are often low resolution and blurry compared to the full-resolution upload.

Luckily the geeks at loveandmoney.agency have created a tool to easily download the original high-resolution photos from Instagram so you can crop and zoom to your hearts delight.

Simply paste the link of the photo you'd like and select download!

Instagram Photo Downloader