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How To: Turn Off Those Annoying Amber Alerts & Emergency Broadcasts on Your Android

To bring things up to code with a new FCC standard, Android recently added an "Emergency broadcasts" feature that will make your smartphone notify you whenever a potential safety threat or AMBER alert is posted in your area. Even if you have your phone set to silent, these emergency alerts will cause your device to emit a loud, piercing sound when a potential threat is nearby.

How To: Disable Amber, Emergency, Public Safety & Other Government Alerts on Your iPhone for Some Peace & Quiet

No, you should probably not turn off Amber, emergency, and public safety alerts on your iPhone. These government notifications are used to warn you about imminent natural disasters, active shooters, and terrorist attacks. More frequently, they ask for your help with child abductions. The alerts save lives, but it's still up to you whether you want to get them or not.

How To: Delete Telegram Messages & Whole Conversations for Everyone in the Chat

If you're looking to keep your conversations private, look no further than Telegram. Its cloud-based chats are secure and its optional end-to-end encrypted chats even more so, but you can't really prevent someone in the conversation from sharing your messages. However, you can lessen that chance by taking back your messages, deleting them for both you and the other end of the discussion.

Coming Soon: Share a Link to Your Instagram Story on Other Platforms

On Instagram, it's all about the sharing, but not all features are equally sharable. Take stories, for example. While an IG staple, stories can't be easily shared outside the Instagram bubble. However, that's about to change. We now know Instagram is hard at work on a feature that lets you share a convenient link to your Instagram story to any other platform — text, email, social app, and so on.

How To: Change the Chat Color in Messenger Threads to Personalize a Conversation

Blue has defined Facebook's color scheme since its inception. Both Facebook's main app and Messenger theme are blue, which means your chat bubbles, like emoji, and menu bar items are also. While certainly a satisfying color for chat, you may get sick of it after a while, especially when it's in every thread. Luckily, Facebook lets you customize the color of individual Messenger chats.

How To: Disable Read Receipts in WhatsApp So Nobody Can See Those Blue Check Marks in Chats

WhatsApp, like other popular messengers on iOS and Android, shows when recipients have read your sent messages with a blue double check mark indicator. On the flip side, for those of you who are bad at replying promptly or don't feel like replying at all, you can disable "read receipts" so the senders won't know when or if you even read their messages.

How To: Enable Dark Mode in Google Maps on iPhone & Android

Dark mode is one of the most requested features these days, but it's even more important with a navigation app. If you're using Google Maps for directions while driving at night, the default white background will shock your eyes and make it harder to see the road in front of you. Thankfully, you can now enable a dark theme to make this whole process a lot safer.

How To: Target Bluetooth Devices with Bettercap

An incredible amount of devices use Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate. These devices rarely have their radios switched off, and in some cases, are deliberately used as trackers for lost items. While Bluetooth devices support MAC address randomization, many manufacturers do not use it, allowing us to use tools like Bettercap to scan for and track Bluetooth devices.

How To: Stop Audio Messages from Self-Destructing in iMessage So You Can Keep Them Forever

Apple has several ways for you to communicate in the Messages app aside from texting — and that includes audio messages. You can send a voice recording via iMessage by long-pressing the microphone icon just right of the input field and speaking. However, by default, these audio messages self-destruct after two minutes, which isn't good if you want them archived.

How To: Sick of Thumbs Up? Here's How to Change the Default Chat Emoji in Individual Messenger Threads

When you can't think of a way to respond in Messenger with words, emojis and stickers will do the trick. Since Facebook is all about the "likes," which use a thumbs-up icon, there's a shortcut to the symbol just to the right of the chat field. It's always there to send a quick like in response to something. But it doesn't have to be the standard Facebook thumbs-up sign — it can be any emoji you want.

How To: Make Texts & iMessages Stand Out on Your iPhone with Bold Subject Lines

The subject line is a crucial part of an email, but you don't see it very often in texts. That's mostly because many people don't even know it can be done, and even if they do, why would they use it? Just like with emails, subject lines can make iMessages and SMS texts seem more important and more professional. Plus, they can help with organization and searching past messages, as well as make text bold.

How To: The Best Way to Uninstall All Types of Bloatware on Any Android

When you get a new phone, the last thing you want to deal with is a ton of preinstalled programs staring back at you. They not only clutter your home screen with apps you'll probably never use, but they're also wasting space on your internal storage and potentially draining battery. To truly uninstall them, you'll need root — but even then, it can be hard to pin down all the apps that should be removed.

How To: A Hacker's Guide to Programming Microcontrollers

While hackers know and love the Raspberry Pi, many don't know of its cheaper cousin, the microcontroller. Unlike a Pi, which can be used more or less like a regular computer, microcontrollers like the Wi-Fi connected ESP8266 require some necessary programming skill to master. In this guide, we'll build an Arduino program from scratch and explain the code structure in a way anyone can understand.

Coming Soon: Delete Personal Data That Google Assistant Uses Without Having to Open a Browser

New features are coming to Google Assistant for Android and iOS. You'll be able to use the assistant right inside Waze, enable Driving Mode to see only relevant activities, get your how-to questions answered faster, and have it better recognize personal references in your life. All of this means consuming more data, but there will be more tools that let you erase data you share with Assistant.

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