Easy Adblock
Recently I moved somewhere, to a place that I can’t have my own router in or bring anything from my custom networking setup over. Its not necessarily bad, but it is frustrating especially when I want to curate my experience on the web. The wifi here is a public network too…
If I can’t get into the routers here I can at least setup some things on my devices (laptop, phone, whatever) and go from there, all without needing to do tricks.
I did some research on possible solutions. Ultimately I fell back on nextDNS as it’s not needlessly complicated, its web interface is easy to access when Im on the road, and so forth: more importantly, the pricing is cheap for what it brings to the table.
NextDNS has a variety of options and settings to tweak it to my needs. If I don’t feel like viewing ads when i go to a news site on my phone, I can turn an adblock setting on and watch it work its magic.
Or if I want to block Twitter/X, I type in its domain name and bam, instantly blocked every time I try to access it. (Pretty useful as I’m trying to cut back on social media these days.)
The setup process isn’t very complicated. When you get an account initially, it gets a numerical ID for you on the front page: this ID is required to connect your devices to NextDNS in order for it to do its magic.
There are various ways you can enable NextDNS on the desktop (assuming a Windows machine); however in my opinion using the NextDNS installer is a better experience as it goes through first time setup and asks you for your numerical ID, instead of having to manually configure everything.
It’s possible to enable NextDNS on the phone too, it’s a bit more involved though. For Android:
- Settings -> Network & internet -> Advanced -> Private DNS
- Pick the Private DNS provider hostname option
- Give it the numerical ID
As for iOS: Just go to the Apple NextDNS page, follow the instructions there.
The only con I’ve dealt with so far whilst using NextDNS is very occasionally, the service goes down then I wonder why everything except Telegram is down. (Telegram doesn’t go down as its IP’s are hardcoded, apparently?)
In spite of that it’s well worth the money.
I recommend checking it out if you’re conscious about your web experience and want more control over what you see…