El Mano

No, it probably won't work very well. For the coil to work, the current in the wire has to create a magnetic field. If you're trying to create a coil using a magnetized bit of metal, the field produced by the current will be fighting the field from the magnet.

You should be able to. I used to do it all the time on WIndows 7. All you're doing is editing what DNS the system connects to, which is a network/internet thing, not a linux thing. I don't use Ubuntu, and I don't know if the process is exactly the same, but Mint is built off Ubuntu and the process should be pretty similar.

If the router is set to a specific DNS, then everyone else who accesses the router will access that DNS automatically if they have their network connection set on the default (most people do). That's what your computer does unless you tell it to connect to a different, specific DNS like in this tutorial. If you made the router connect to Google's DNS, then everyone using the router would go through Google, rather than just you. I use Google's DNS because the router I use (roommate's) accesses the local DNS and I haven't bothered to look at how to change it.

The main thing is the setting the IPv4 DNS to 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4, the Google DNS domain address. I had to experiment to figure the other settings out, and they might be different for different distros, computers or network/router setups. Let us know if you figure it out.