My 2 favorite applications for Raspberry Pi

I’ve done a fair bit of Raspberry Pi-based projects for the last couple of years, and I would like to highlight two applications for a Raspberry Pi (RPi) that I think are useful for most people.

Get that data up on a screen..

Weather it is for signage, “tweet walls”, calendar  or a business dashboards, the ability to quickly set up a display with data from the web is always useful and the Screenly project makes it super easy to do with the RPi as a platform.

While i do use and love the payed service, I would recommend you to start with the opensource edition, because once you have purchased software as a service, it is often hard to see how easy it is to do without. Especially for a set-and-forget solution such as this..

Speed up by blocking spam

Another project that i can strongly recommend is to use the PI-hole project to set your RPi as adblocking dns-proxy that removes annoying ads from webpages even before they are downloaded, effectively freeing up your internet connection to get the content you care about even faster. The two step procedure takes less than ten minutes start to finish: 1. install the PI-hole software on a RPi, and 2. change a setting on your router to point DNS requests to the RPi.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, it is a series of credit card–sized computers (priced at £5-30) developed to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and developing countries. The universal applicability of this line of affordable small form factor computers has has made it a de facto standard for hacker/tinkerer projects.