Pi-Hole lists

I have always touted the great benefits I see with Pi-Hole running on my local network. I recently added the Phishtank list to my block lists on my Pi-Hole cluster. Here are all of my lists:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts

https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt

https://adaway.org/hosts.txt

https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt

https://v.firebog.net/hosts/Admiral.txt

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anudeepND/blacklist/master/adservers.txt

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FadeMind/hosts.extras/master/UncheckyAds/hosts

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bigdargon/hostsVN/master/hosts

https://v.firebog.net/hosts/RPiList-Malware.txt

https://v.firebog.net/hosts/RPiList-Phishing.txt

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Spam404/lists/master/main-blacklist.txt

https://github.com/Zaczero/pihole-phishtank/blob/main/hosts.txt

My household is pretty small, and we are not huge social media users. The block-rate on the main pi-hole runs about 10% most days.

PRTG jumping on the Grafana Bandwagon

Our friends over at Paessler are jumping on the Grafana bandwagon and providing an improved dashboarding solution. The OpsBoard product has proven to be kind of a mess.

https://blog.paessler.com/how-to-create-multi-core-dashboards-with-prtg-data-exporter-and-grafana

Laptop Fairy

I hope to do something similar someday.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/09/nx-s1-5527861/tech-fairy-laptop-free

Windows 11 Local User Creation

Seems that creating a new local user in Windows 11 isn't quite as easy as you'd expect. But PowerShell makes it fairly simple. To create a new local "backup/emergency" user you can issue these commands from an Admin PowerShell. Of course, make sure to use a good solid password. The second command will add the user to the local Administrators group.

PS>New-LocalUser -Name BackupUser -AccountNeverExpires
cmdlet New-LocalUser at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
Password: **********
Name Enabled Description
---- ------- -----------
BackupUser True
PS>Add-LocalGroupMember -Name Administrators -Member BackupUser

It should be noted that is you are looking to utilize Remote Desktop on this machine, it will need to be Windows 11 Pro. You can get that info with this command.

Get-WmiObject win32_operatingsystem | select Caption, Version
Caption Version
------- -------
Microsoft Windows 11 Home 10.0.26100

And, to grab your MAK, there's a command for that too:

(Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey