To block ads on the web, we need to catch requests to a particular ad server and send them to our local server. We do this by adding an entry to the hosts file. The hosts file on a computer system gives the system information about where to find a computer on the network by mapping hostnames to IP addresses. For our purposes, we will be taking advantage of this by routing requests to ad servers from webpages to our personal system.

These steps will require that you have Apache HTTP server (or IIS with ISAPI_rewrite, something that can rewrite URLs) running on your local machine (or on a system with low latency, possibly on your network).

I'd been meaning to write for my blog, since I'm now posting more regularly on Twitter, and am fairly active in a few Discord chats. Most of what I've been doing lately has been centered around fantasy consoles.

Fantasy Consoles?

While there are differing opinions on exactly what constitutes a fantasy console, the basic idea is that it's a game development platform for hardware that doesn't exist. In some cases, there are entire systems dedicated to maintaining the illusion that somewhere in an alternative universe, these video game consoles could have existed.

To save anybody from a fruitless internet search, the default message for ArgumentException is the phrase "Value does not fall within the expected range". This error may be returned from various sources, but in my case it was an explicit throw:

if (someInvalidValue)
{
    throw new ArgumentException();
}

So if this error is bubbling up, it's an ArgumentException.