Mahdi Hazaveh

Block ads on Samsung Smart TV

So I pulled the trigger and ordered a Samsung SmartTV last month. within the first 24 hours I regretted that I believed TizenOS is better than Android. Apparently TizenOS is not much faster than Android and I had wrong expectations.

Anyway what made it worse was to find out Samsung places ads in their SmartTV home screens! This really pissed me off and was unacceptable. I didn’t want to return the TV cause it would be troublesome to bring it to an Amazon Return Station. So I decided to give it a try to block the ads.

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docker-machine for better Docker on OSX

faster docker on mac A while ago I published a blog post about Dockerizing my php development environment, soon after that I learned about the poor i/o performance of docker-containers on MacOSX.

While that is manageable for small projects where there are not much I/O happening between multiple containers, I was stunned by how bad it could get after starting to work with my new company.

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Fix: Adaway no free space problem on miui/xiaomi.eu roms

If there is one reason for me to root my devices that would be system wide AdBlocking without compromising battery and performance.

That being said Adaway has been my best friend for the past 5-6 years and I’ve had it on every single Android based devices of mine.

a while ago I picked up an Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 for multimedia purposes which immediately after receiving it I attempt to unlock. The process took a good 7 days of my time (thanks to xiaomi). Anyway I flashed xiaomi.eu and magisk afterwards.

When I tried to apply Adblocking on Adaway I got this message that there is not enough disk space left on some system partition, and Adaway was suggesting me to change the target hosts file location to /data/data/hosts and creating a symbolic link. Doing some researches I was not able to find a clean solution (other than creating a symbolic link manually in recovery mode).

So I found that this can be resolved by using systemless hosts feature in magisk.

Point back the target hosts file to /etc/hosts
Open Magisk manager
Click on “Systemless Hosts” in Magisk’s settings
Reboot your device
Launch Adaway and re-apply Adblocking!

Thats all, that should do it, I hope it helps some of you folks out there.

a week with Macbook Pro 2019

Story

The 13 inch Macbook Pro 2016 was the first of them with the new design & chassis that I owned. Back then when it was still new most of the reviews were around how replacing all those I/O ports with USB-C a headache for the users.

as I remember, I couldn’t care less about any of those issues. All I wanted was to replace a 17 inch brick pro from 2011 with something lighter with a greater battery life, so I pretty much settled on the idea of dongles before even receiving my device.

Setting up dnsmasq on MacOS with Homebrew

So earlier I posted about my decision to Dockerize my entire development environment. In that post I mentioned that you can either manually edit your /etc/hosts file or install a dns server to point domains to your local web server.

Disclaimer: this nothing to do with Docker, this steps are can be used even if you are running your own instance of web server directly on your machine.

dnsmasq is a simple DNS server that does a lot but it is not as complicated and full featured as stuff like BIND. In this article I will be using dnsmasq to spoof all the DNS requests to “.test” domain to my own local machine. Having my web server running (nginx) and listening for domains set on the virtualhost configurations I will then be able to serve my apps locally.