What are my biggest pet peeves?

Image: Google Gemini

(This is the first in a series of essays that I wrote in early 2024 in response to writing prompts from Storyworth. More information)

I often don’t tolerate advertisements, whether they are on websites that I visit, videos that I watch, or commercial “yard” signs by the side of the road (on public property, I might add). If I’m in the market for something, I’ll search for it online, thank you.

My web browser is armed with ad blockers (that I still must disable to get to some websites). That’s an eternal game of Whack-A-Mole.

I pay extra to avoid ads on Netflix. (Amazon has just announced that they are going to start showing ads on Prime Video. I don’t watch Prime Video often enough yet to pay the extra $2.99 per month.) I’ve heard that some people get YouTube pop-up nag messages complaining about ad blockers. I say my first one this week. I often look for ad blockers that content sites cannot detect. Yet.

In the last week, I’ve installed Pi Hole, a program running on a Raspberry Pi that will block sites the serve up ads. I have it configured so that one must opt in and do a little advanced configuration on the PC. I don’t want to configure my network so *everyone* has to use the Pi Hole server. It is something of a pain to configure the PC. Ask me in a couple of weeks whether it’s been worth the trouble.

Sometimes, in the dark of pre-dawn hours, I’ll snatch yard signs from the roadside across the street and put them in the garbage. Real estate signs particularly risk my wrath. But I leave political signs alone until after the election. I’ve noticed that fewer signs appear across the street than they used to.