How to Use Android’s Built-In Tethering When Your Carrier Blocks It

Did You Know? Violets have long been described as having an ephemeral and almost magical scent, and with good scientific reason. The scent of violets comes from a compound called ionone which, aside from smelling very sweet, also has the peculiar property of overwhelming our scent receptors and temporarily shutting them off. This side effect means that over the course of smelling a violet several times in a row, our ability to smell it comes and goes in waves, creating the illusion that we’re smelling it anew again and again. Geek Trivia The Best Selling Debut Album In History Belongs To Which Of These Musical Acts? Hootie & The Blowfish → Boston → The Beatles → Guns N' Roses → Advertisement Unblock Content the Easy Way with StrongVPN You're just trying to check out a website and they've locked you out because it's blocked in your country. It's ridiculous, but luckily you can get around the restrictions with StrongVPN.— and unlock any website you want. Of course, they also have a money-back guarantee if it doesn't work for you. Download StrongVPN to Unlock Content Today 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. How To Adjust Mouse Settings in Windows How to Fix the "Screen Overlay Detected" Error on Android How to Post Panoramas to Instagram How to Use Android's Built-In Tethering When Your Carrier Blocks It iOS 11’s Control Center Doesn’t Truly Disable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth: Here’s What to Do Instead How to Temporarily Disable Touch ID and Require a Passcode in iOS 11 How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad by Offloading Unused Apps Safari Now Disables Auto-Playing Videos. Here’s How to Allow Them for Certain Sites How to Stop iPhone and iPad Apps From Asking for Ratings How to Revoke Third-Party App Access From Soundcloud How to Customize Your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center How to Delete Your Instagram Search History Are My Amazon Echo and Google Home Spying on Everything I Say? Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Intrusion Signature An Intrusion Signature is the evidence/footprint left behind in a system’s logs when a malicious attack has been launched against a computer system or network. Examples of evidence left behind include: failed logins, improper use of administrative privileges, unauthorized software executions, unauthorized file/directory access, etc. 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. Nest adds new cameras and a wireless alarm system to its product suite The Nest Cam IQ Outdoor and Nest Hello add outdoor facial-recognition features. [ArsTechnica] How Primitive Electronics and Expensive Video Games Turned Toys'R'Us Into a Consumer Juggernaut Toys'R'Us, which just filed for bankruptcy, was once essential to the fortunes of the toy industry. But the secret to its rise was that it sold a whole lot of electronics—whether cheap gadgets, hot toys, or (of course) video games. [Motherboard] How Air-Conditioning Invented the Modern World A new book by the economist Tim Harford on history's greatest breakthroughs explains why barbed wire was a revolution, paper money was an accident, and HVACs were a productivity booster. [The Atlantic] How To Adjust Mouse Settings in Windows The old Windows properties window has been around for a long time. In Windows 8 and 10, it probably would have been a good idea to move some of those settings into the new Settings app, but of course that didn’t happen. To get anything useful done, you’ll need to dive into the good old-fashioned Control Panel. Read This Article → How to Fix the "Screen Overlay Detected" Error on Android Starting with Android Marshmallow, there's a curious error that sometimes shows its face, but it can be hard to decipher what's causing it. The "screen overlay detected" error won't allow certain apps to launch, which makes it a real nuisance. Read This Article → How to Post Panoramas to Instagram Now that you can post multiple photos at once to Instagram, people are starting to take advantage of the feature. If you crop a large panorama seamlessly, you can post the different segments as multiple photos and get a swipeable panorama. Read This Article → How to Use Android's Built-In Tethering When Your Carrier Blocks It Tethering your phone's internet connection, which allows users to share their phone's data connection with other devices, is really useful if you're out and about with no Wi-Fi, but some carriers block the feature from your phone. If you get an error message when you try to tether—something like "Account not set up for tethering"—here's a fix. Read This Article → iOS 11’s Control Center Doesn’t Truly Disable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth: Here’s What to Do Instead That shiny new Control Center in iOS 11 doesn’t actually let you disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth anymore. You can toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off from the Control Center, but the hardware radios will still be running and they’ll turn back on completely at 5 a.m. Yes, this is really weird. Read This Article → How to Temporarily Disable Touch ID and Require a Passcode in iOS 11 iOS 11 has a new feature that allows you to discreetly disable the Touch ID unlock functionality, requiring the PIN code for access to the device. Here’s why that’s important (and how to use the new locking feature). Read This Article → How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad by Offloading Unused Apps Apps can consume a lot of space on an iPhone or iPad. In iOS 11, a new feature allows you to remove an app from your device without removing the app’s data. In other words, you can remove the app and free up space without losing anything—when you redownload the app in the future, you can immediately  pick up right where you left off. Read This Article → Safari Now Disables Auto-Playing Videos. Here’s How to Allow Them for Certain Sites You’re trying to do some reading when you hear it: a video playing somewhere off-screen. You curse under your breath, scroll down to find the offending media, then try to find back your place in the article. Read This Article → How to Stop iPhone and iPad Apps From Asking for Ratings Lots of iPhone and iPad apps ask for ratings, and they often don’t stop. Even if you do leave a review just to stop seeing the review requests, new apps you install will pester you for reviews, too. iOS 11 fixes this problem, limiting how often apps can ask for ratings and allowing you to stop these requests entirely. Read This Article → How to Revoke Third-Party App Access From Soundcloud SoundCloud, an alternative platform for posting and selling music and other audio-only content, offers an API that lets other websites and applications access its data for cool connections. But it’s always possible to be too connected, and if you’d rather be a little more secure with your SoundCloud account, you’ll want to restrict and cancel some of those connections. Here’s how. Read This Article → How to Customize Your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center Starting with iOS 11, you can now customize the Control Center you see when you swipe up from the bottom of your iPhone or iPad’s screen. You can remove shortcuts you never use, add new shortcuts, and rearrange the shortcuts to make the Control Center your own. Read This Article → How to Delete Your Instagram Search History Search histories can be somewhat incriminating, and there's often very little reason to keep them around. Your Instagram search history is no exception. Here's how to clear it. Read This Article → Are My Amazon Echo and Google Home Spying on Everything I Say? In-home voice assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are convenient, but are they also a secret back door for the government and corporations to spy on everything you say? No. Of course not. Reports of the Echo and Google Home’s ability to spy on you have been greatly exaggerated. Read This Article → Advertisement Unblock Content the Easy Way with StrongVPN You're just trying to check out a website and they've locked you out because it's blocked in your country. It's ridiculous, but luckily you can get around the restrictions with StrongVPN.— and unlock any website you want. Of course, they also have a money-back guarantee if it doesn't work for you. Download StrongVPN to Unlock Content Today