Fix WiFi HP Elitebook 745G2 under Linux

If you are trying to install Linux on HP EliteBook 745G2 and your WiFi is not working you could try to edit /etc/default/grub file and add intremap=off after quiet splash like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash intremap=off"

Reboot and your WiFi should be working between reboots.

Add command line arguments to portable apps

You can do this for any app from PortableApps.com for example if you want to pass command line argument to GoogleChromePortable, go to [X]:\PortableApps\GoogleChromePortable to folder Other\Source and copy the file GoogleChromePortable.ini to your
[X]:\PortableApps\GoogleChromePortable folder.

Where [X] represents your drive letter where PortableApps directory is found.

Open the file in text editor and find:

AdditionalParameters=""

and change it to any value you want to pass to main app, for example proxy definition:

AdditionalParameters="--proxy-server=127.0.0.1:3128"

Save the file and run the portable application again.

Speed-up page loading time with pi-hole

Even though you are using pi-hole to stop showing ads which should speed-up page loading since it does not need to featch unwanted ad material.
But sometimes slow down your page loading, since many ads are delivered via HTTPS port 443.

Pi-hole only knows about domain being requested and it is blocking the ad domains on DNS level. It is not aware about the specific protocols used for ad delivery. Slowdown can occur waiting for HTTPS request to timeout to unreachable domain because you have blocked it on DNS level.

To speed things up you could use these three simple iptables rules:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 192.168.1.0/24 --destination-port 443 -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -s 192.168.1.0/24 --destination-port 80 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -s 192.168.1.0/24 --destination-port 443 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable

In this case my home network is 192.168.1.0 and all request coming from your local clients to pihole on ports 80,443 are rejected which should hopefully result in speedy page loading.

Save the rules in your local boot script or use iptables-save.