How to Test if Your ISP is Throttling Your Internet Connection

Did You Know? The Secret Service was created on July 5, 1865. Although this was mere months after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the original mission of the Secrete Service was to suppress the production and distribution of counterfeit currency. They would not take on their now very visible role as presidential protection until Congress requested they do so after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. Geek Trivia The Color Changing Structures Found In Chameleons, Squids, And Other Creatures Are Called? Chromatophores → Spectracones → Pigmentation Cysts → Melanocytes → Advertisement Download The Essential Work-Life Balance Cheat Sheet Make sure you're properly prioritizing your schedule between work and your lifestyle. This cheat sheet includes: The impact work-life balance has on your focus, How the balance can improve your cognitive functioning, 7 tips to ensure work-life balance. Improve your time management and reduce your stress by making sure you have the right work-life balance for you.Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. The Best Rhythm Games That Use Your Local Music Collection How to Set Up and Use Google Photos’ New Shared Libraries How to Test if Your ISP is Throttling Your Internet Connection Why Is the Advanced Attributes Button Sometimes Replaced By an Archive Checkbox? How to Mute Tweets with Specific Words on Twitter How to Get iOS' Autocorrect to Work in Multiple Languages Everything Amazon’s Echo Show Can Do That Other Echos Can’t How to Take Photos of Fireworks Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Zero Wait State Zero Wait State refers to a system with high-speed memory (processor) that does not have to wait to perform memory access. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Rural America's Future Is Riding on a Cell Signal Wireless connectivity and good cell service is the lifeblood infusion rural America needs [Wired] A programmer turned Wikipedia into a classic text adventure Developer turned a novel-generation project into an interactive Infocom tribute. [ArsTechnica] Scientists crack mystery of ancient Roman concrete's 2,000-year life span Two thousand years ago, Roman builders constructed vast sea walls and harbor piers. The concrete they used outlasted the empire — and still holds lessons for modern engineers, scientists say. [The Washington Post] The Best Rhythm Games That Use Your Local Music Collection You can’t have video games without music. Well, you can—the earliest games didn’t have music in the strictest sense, just beeps and boops. But it wasn’t long before the two became inseparably linked, and now a 150-year-old saucy Russian folk tune is known as “that song from Tetris.” Today, developers and publishers put huge amounts of time, money, and consideration into the music that foes into their games. But if you’d rather play with your own meticulously-curated local collection, there are plenty of games that are happy to let you do so. Read This Article → How to Set Up and Use Google Photos’ New Shared Libraries Back at Google I/O 2017, Google announced a new feature in Google Photos called “Shared Libraries”. In a nutshell, this allows users to quickly and easily share photos with other, specific users automatically. This feature is now live—here’s everything you need to know about getting it going. Read This Article → How to Test if Your ISP is Throttling Your Internet Connection We’ve all heard the rumors, and even seen occasional evidence. Some Internet service providers slow down certain types of traffic, like BitTorrent traffic. Other ISPs slow down their customers’ connections if they download too much data in a month. Read This Article → Why Is the Advanced Attributes Button Sometimes Replaced By an Archive Checkbox? If you have ever checked the properties of files and folders, you may have noticed that the attributes section sometimes displays an advanced button, but at other times it displays an archive checkbox. Why does it switch back and forth like that? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a curious reader’s question. Read This Article → How to Mute Tweets with Specific Words on Twitter Twitter can be a bit of a shouting match. Some accounts that you follow for their insightful view on tech insist on holding utterly disgusting, ignorant, regressive 16th century views on… Canadian hockey. Read This Article → How to Get iOS' Autocorrect to Work in Multiple Languages Not everyone speaks only one language. Maybe you learned Spanish in school, or your parents are from Germany. Whatever the reason, it's really annoying when you're trying to send a text in a language other than English and autocorrect keeps trying to change "boire" to "Boise". Nobody goes to a bar and orders a small American city. Read This Article → Everything Amazon’s Echo Show Can Do That Other Echos Can’t The Echo Show‘s handy 7″ screen makes it stand apart from all the other Amazon Echo products. While Alexa was designed to do things without any touch input at all, sometimes it’s handy to just tap a screen, rather than listen to a long, drawn-out verbal prompt. The Show gives you a touch screen fall back when you need it, plus it lets you play video in the background. Here are the biggest ways the Echo Show distinguishes itself from other Echo products. Read This Article → How to Take Photos of Fireworks There's nothing like a loud bang and a bright flash of light to really make an occasion feel special. New Year's Eve, Halloween, and of course, the Fourth of July are all celebrated with fireworks. They're a pretty tricky subject to photograph, though, so let's break down what you need to know. Read This Article → Advertisement Download The Essential Work-Life Balance Cheat Sheet Make sure you're properly prioritizing your schedule between work and your lifestyle. This cheat sheet includes: The impact work-life balance has on your focus, How the balance can improve your cognitive functioning, 7 tips to ensure work-life balance. Improve your time management and reduce your stress by making sure you have the right work-life balance for you.Click here to download