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 

Passkeys - an explanation

I have been struggling with passkeys lately for a couple of reasons. 

I have been working fully remotely for many years now and enjoy the flexibility of being about to do this work from just about anywhere I have access to a computer with high speed access to the internet. This means that I can almost sit down in any location with any computer and do the majority of my work without any additional software or hardware aside from my cell phone. 

As long as I have access to a web browser, I can do 75% of my daily workload. That means email, Teams, Outlook, and access to a support portal. As you can guess, this requires secure authentication to these services. Secure authentication has changed a LOT over the years and lately it has taken a turn towards "Passkeys". 

Now I don't mind depending on a hardware device such as a phone, FIDO key, or other Authenticator service (app) that exchanges anonymous (random) data to allow access to a system (two factor auth). I do have a problem with a service that holds that data along with other data about me and has control over how that data is shared and who has control over that data (myself or the vendor).

Here is a good explanation of the benfits and pitalls of using these Passkeys along with some alternatives.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/2/passkeys/