I hope that readers understand you don't need a RPi or dnsmasq to accomplish ad blocking. That said, this in my opinion an excellent use of a small form factor

I hope that readers understand you don't need a RPi or dnsmasq to accomplish ad blocking. That said, this in my opinion an excellent use of a small form factor computer: as a gateway. As a side note, what would happen if we put our own private address space "web apps" on our gateway? Voila, the added "web app" functionality that our devices expect, without the need to use third party servers on the public internet that collect personal info. In any event, if you do not have a Pi, you could just as well use any old i386 computer and any old DNS server software. I use a gateway like this not to block ads but to detect and, if necessary, stop mobile apps that phone home (and send out payloads of private data). You would be amazed at what some of these apps want to send over the internet for no good reason. And, rather than use a HOSTS file as a blacklist, I use it as a whitelist by populating it with all the sites I might visit. For example, using a localhost recursive DNS server, I pre-fetch all IP addresses for all the sites appearing on HN and put them in /etc/hosts. This makes reading articles posted on HN much, much faster than if using an ISP's DNS cache or some public, open resolvers like OpenDNS or Google. Again, my compliments to the author for a great use of a small form factor general purpose computer.