Emergency Internet (tethering from scratch)

I recently had a need for emergency internet connectivity, and by emergency, I actually mean I wanted to browse Reddit on my laptop without paying $10 a day at a hotel room I was staying.

This sounds relatively easy, and it wasn't too hard, but there was some parameters in effect.

• I had a working android jelly bean 4.1 smartphone(touchwiz running on a galaxy note 2). 
• I had t-mobile as my provider with unlimited internet, which offers tethering for $20 a month. Although I can probably easily afford to pay for this as I sometimes drop $20 bills on the ground and am too lazy to pick them up, I am notoriously against being charged to use the same internet access just because its on a larger screen device. 
• There was 0 wifi networks to connect to that offered service without paying. 
• My phone was unrooted, which is typically what makes free tethering easier on android.

Here was my thought process and hurdles. First thing I did was check the play store for tethering apps. After looking through them, most were complaining that they didn't work well on jellybean, or required root access. Seeing as how the play store awesomely allows refunds, I gave a couple a shot.

All the normal wifi tethering apps would bring up the t-mobile hotspot settings for the android phone, which would then allow me to connect from my computer but bring me to a browser window asking me to pay the aforementioned $20. I read a couple of forums(on my phone), and remembered that changing the browser agent should get around this. I think t-mobile got wise to this, because the browser agent didn't do anything and non http services(such as gchat), did not work. I was foiled.

My next idea was to root the phone to try a more robust tethering app, and I had rooted many android phones before, but just hadn't gotten around to doing my Note 2(a mistake I will not make again). However as I already knew, this required software on my mac, ie: odin, clockwork recovery, some zips to install, blah blah. How do I get that software downloaded to my mac when I don't have said internet connection.

Through my quick search on this I realized many people liked the clockworkmod tether USB app. Which required no root, if this worked it would save me some time. Alas this required one piece of additional software on my mac to be the tetheree of the software on my phone, the tetherer.

I downloaded the mac usb tethering app from the clockworkmod website on my phone(which gets stored to the downloads folder). Now I just had to figure out the simple task of getting this stupid 8 meg file to my PC sitting right next to it. I had a USB cable, but to connect the phone through USB, it wanted me to use Samsung's bullshit software(Kies), which of course I didn't have installed.

I was literally sitting there with an 8 meg file on my phone 1 foot away from my computer and couldn't transfer it. Connecting through USB did nothing to let my mac see the phone, connecting through MTP only brought up iPhoto to annoyingly try to download my photos from my phone.

Then I thought wait, maybe I can transfer this stupid file through bluetooth. I synced my phone to my mac and, walla, nothing happened. They synced and I enabled bluetooth sharing on the mac, but nothing popped up. Thats when I found the built in mac app called "Bluetooth file exchange". I opened it like a kid on christmas to watch it do absolutely nothing. Just sat there staring back at me confused as I was with an error message saying the device(my phone), did not have the software to transfer files.

Software huh? So I did ANOTHER search on the play store and found a nifty free app called "Bluetooth file transfer". What wild and crazy imaginative names I was dealing with here. "Bluetooth file transfer" on the mac, and "Bluetooth file exchange" on the phone. After dealing with so many rails gems, this has been a shock to me, I would have thought they would be named like: toothmonkey and filewind or some BS like that. Anyways, I fired up the app and walla for real this time, because "Bluetooth file transfer" actually saw my phone and let me browse it, I found the 8 meg file and "transfered" it at a wopping 60kb/s.

I ran the clockwork mod tether client on my mac. Ran it on my phone, Both went green, and here I am typing to you today. In only a few short hours I successfully worked around paying $10 to $20 for internet access. That $120,000 college education is finally paying off in real bucks.

TL;DR, if you wanna tether your mac for free in an emergency situation with no wifi, heres what I did:

• Turn on bluetooth sharing in your mac system settings.
• Turn on bluetooth on your android device, sync the two together.
• Download "Bluetooth file exchange" from the play store, open it.
• Spotlight and find "Bluetooth file transfer" on your mac, open it.
• You can now transfer files to and fro.
• Download the "clockworkmod tether client for mac" zip file to your phone (I got it here: https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/1Yy1jb9z4TA)
• Transfer that shit with your bluetooth file exchange to your mac.
• Download the "clockwork tether no root" app for android from the play store.
• Connect your phone through USB, start both apps.
• Browse the internets and brag to your friends about how l33t you are.
• Send me a paypal of $20 for the amount you saved.
• ???
• profit.

God speed cheap skates!