About two years ago, I purchased a Raspberry Pi 2 as an experiment. During this time, I managed to set up the Pi as a portable retro gaming console, a VPN, media center, RSS reader, DHCP server, DNS server, and adblocker.

I had hours of fun playing various NES games with the portable retro gaming console. Playing Jackal, Contra, Balloon Fight, Ice Climbers, Zelda, Mega Man, and Super Mario series was a nostalgic experience. Since the Pi was small enough, I was able to take it with me when I travelled to play in my hotel room.

The VPN was an interesting experiment that didn’t last too long. My main usage for the VPN wasn’t to connect back to my home network, but just to ensure I have a secure, stable, and fast connection. I found it better to set up my own VPN instance with a cloud provider than using the Pi.

The media center did not work well due to the not so great wifi dongle I have for the Pi. The Pi itself is also a bit underpowered. It was a short lived experiment.

I currently use my Pi as a RSS reader using TTRSS and as a DHCP+DNS server using dnsmasq. After setting up dnsmasq, I discovered Pi-Hole so now I’m trying out the Pi as an adblocker. I don’t know if I’ll keep Pi-Hole, but I think the TTRSS and dnsmasq set up is a long term plan for my Pi2. So I can continue experimenting with the Pi, I just ordered a Pi3. I look forward to trying more projects with this new Pi.