Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News back in 2005. Martin started his career as a tech support representative at a large German financial corporation which he used to finance his college education in English, Information Technology and History.
He quit college and his job when Ghacks began to attract a large enough readership. He made the decision to become a full time blogger and webmaster, and has not looked back since.
Martin is interested in all things tech. His primary focus is on desktop operating systems, web browsers, Internet services, and privacy related topics.
He published the book The Complete Windows 10 Privacy Guide: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version in 2017. Martin writes a weekly column for fellow tech site Betanews as well.
You can reach Martin on Facebook or on Twitter. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to contact the author directly.
Martin has been quoted or mentioned in many major online and print publications, including Forbes, Lifehacker.com, ComputerWorld, LinkedIn, Reddit, Betanews.com, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, PC World, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Register, and more.
Martin's articles on Ghacks
Twitter: Some love it while others would never even think of using the service that lets other people know what you are currently doing. Still it is widely popular and third party applications are beginning to be published that take advantage of this popularity.
You can configure Firefox to download files to one specific folder on your hard drive. If you want to save a file in another location you have to browse your computer and […]
It can be sometimes quite handy to automatically move certain types of files from the Internet Cache to another location on your hard drive. I'm especially thinking of multimedia files like movies, […]
Here is the problem that I'm currently facing. I sometimes download files from the Internet that are packed and placed into different folders of the same hard drive. I normally unpack them […]
A colleague of mine build a static html website a few years ago. He slowly but steadily created hundreds of html pages which was great for him because he could simply use one already finished file as a template for a new one. It did however pose a problem as well. Updating information across all files was very time consuming. Think of extending the copyright notice each year, adding advertisement to the websites or changing the navigation.
Sony is a company that is never shy when it comes to finding questionable ways to making just another buck or to annoy a large part of the Internet community by doing […]
USB devices in Windows can be configured to be optimized for quick removal or performance. If the first option is chosen it is normally no problem to simply unplug the device from the computer without removing it safely. If however the latter is chosen unplugging the device from the computer can lead to data corruption and data loss.
Users who download and install the service pack 1 for Windows Vista are most likely not reverting to the old state their computer was in unless something stopped functioning properly after the […]
Many file hosters require registration before you can use their service which is often sometimes that turns users away from the service. If you are looking for a simple file hoster that lets you upload files with a size of up to five Gigabyte without registration you might want to consider File Dropper.
We all have files on our system that are valuable to us and that we do not want to lose. This can be anything imaginable, from Word documents to images or mp3 […]
If you purchase and sell items regularly on eBay you surely had your share of auctions that did not go as well as intended. Most of the times it's just items that are send with delay or money transfers that go wrong. Sometimes however you run into fraudulent content which can be easily recognized by experienced eBay users while beginners will have a hard time collecting the facts that lead to a conclusion.
I'm not a huge fan of Apple iTunes, think it's just to slow to be a good music player and I have no intention of using the Apple store. That leaves me […]
Many rumors have emerged when it became public that the Opera team created a website that announced something called Opera Dragonfly without revealing what it really was at that time. The page […]
The biggest fear of webmasters - besides being hacked - is the fear that websites becomes unavailable and that all visitors will see the dreaded "Cannot connect" message in the browser. This […]
My old hoster had the habit of providing me with 20 Megabyte log file chunks that I could download to my computer. I did run a great forum back then that had lots of traffic and I always had to download several log files and combine them when they were downloaded on my computer. That's one practical use for the software TxtCollector which combines text documents found in folders and subfolders that the user specifies.
I just wanted to remind you that Joost is running their first big Live test run tomorrow with NCAA March Madness. It begins Thursday at 12:20 p.m. EDT / 4:20 p.m. GMT and ends after the last game which is scheduled for 9:55 PM EDT. 16 games will be streamed live on that day and it will be interesting to see how the Joost client will handle that kind of traffic.
You might remember that I'm not a huge fan of antivirus software and have none installed on my computer. While some call this foolish it does make sense for me. I did use Antivir for some time to check it out and see what it can do and think it is a fine piece of security software. What bothered me a lot were the update windows and daily scheduled scans that would pop up in inappropriate moments.
Google Code University is an excellent resource for Computer Science students and programmers in general. All videos and Powerpoint presentations published at the University are released under Creative Commons. Four different kinds of courses are available right now, they are Ajax Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages.
No one can find out on which websites you have been once you delete the Temporary Internet Files, cookies and history in Internet Explorer, right ? That's unfortunately wrong and should cause some concern by some users. The Internet Explorer is using so called index.dat files to store information even though the information contained in those files are hardly needed. The auto complete feature is using the index.dat file of visited websites.
I'm using my Toshiba Notebook a lot when visiting clients or traveling and one of the things that really bothered me a lot was that I always had to change certain network settings like the IP address, Gateway or proxies. Worth than that was the fact hat I had to remember those settings.
Microsoft has released the standalone versions of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Standalone in this regard means that the update is downloaded […]
It is possible to set the Windows Taskbar to autohide if the mouse is not in the area. It will automatically appear again if you move the mouse in the area of […]
One way to save lots of money is to refill printer cartridges instead of buying new ones. The process itself was rather messy in the past but it has become easier now and there are even shops that refill the ink for you. Some printer cartridges however have a chip build in that prevents that the printer is recognizing the refilled cartridges effectively preventing users from using this low cost method.
The Event Viewer is a great way to diagnose system problems in Windows. You can access the build in Event Viewer by clicking on Computer Management in the Administrative Tools section of […]
HD View is a new technology that is developed by Microsoft Research that aids in the display and interaction with large images with sizes of one or more Gigapixels. I was very […]
Found this useful tip on how to add a ping shortcut to your Firefox address bar over at Lifehacker. I love its simplicity. Pinging servers is a great way of finding out if they are currently up and running. The time it takes to receive a response is measured in milliseconds and a timeout is returned if it takes to long.
Read The Words is a text to speech service that is offering quite an impressive amount of options for a web application. It is not only possible to paste text that is […]
While I was researching one topic I stumbled upon another that is related to CCleaner that might be of interest to everyone who is using that application. CCleaner comes preinstalled with the […]
CCleaner is one of the most popular tools that cleans a lot of "crap" on your system, hence the name Crap Cleaner. Most files that get cleaned are temporary files like those from the browser cache, Windows cache but also information like the browser history or recent documents that have been opened.
Website owners should test their websites with the most common browsers to make sure that the website is displayed as intended in all of them. Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that a website was not displaying properly for users that have been visiting the website with a certain browser.
McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008 retails for $39.99 for a one year license normally but you can get it for free for a limited time. It runs on computers with Windows 2000 or newer Microsoft operating systems including Windows Vista and protects your system from various threats such as spyware, viruses, trojans and phishing.
Tabbed browsing is one of the main improvements that actually has a long history dating back to the year 1997. It first became widely popular when Opera began to use it and […]
The question came up just recently and I thought it would be nice to address it here in case other users are searching for a similar solution. If you want to format an USB device in Windows XP you notice that you can only select the FAT filesystem in the options. NTFS does not seem to be available which is rather strange at first glance but it becomes obvious pretty soon that this was not just another evil Microsoft plot to frustrate users.
Windows is only displaying the current time in hours and minutes in the system tray and detailed information can only be accessed with a double-click on the clock. A double-click opens a detailed view that is showing the seconds and the date as well. If you want to display those information in the system tray you have to use third party software like TClock Light which adds the functionality to Windows (except Windows Vista).
I got the inspiration for this post from the Download Squad article "Is this web site down for everyone or is it just you ?" which mentioned a service that would check if a website was down or if it was more likely to be a problem on the user's side. Some guys mentioned in the comments that the website checking service would display false results from time to time which in turn convinced me to write a post about other methods on how you can check if a website is up, or not.
If you print a website you notice that the urls of the links contained on the website are not added to the printout, only the link anchor text is included obviously. It sometimes makes a lot of sense to print the urls as well and a Greasemonkey script named Annotate Links can do that for you.
Text Stat is a small program for Windows that analyzes text files and html documents displaying a wide variety of statistics about them in the end. It displays figures about the amount […]
The Opera team is constantly adding exciting new features to the beta version of the upcoming version of Opera which other web browsers do not support right now. This could give the […]
The Windows Task Manager is great for a first quick glance at the running processes and applications but it lacks functionality that is needed as well. If you wanted to check why an application or process is running you would have to check the startup settings which are not accessible in the task manager. This would mean to either look in the Windows Registry and open a system tool like msconfig or open a third party application like Autoruns from Sysinternals.
I had my first overclocking experience with a brand new Pentium 75 back then in the days when this was considered a fast cpu. A friend of mine actually introduced me to […]
