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
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 […]
Fair Use Wizard [link, via Download Squad] is an easy to use DVD ripper that is provided as a free and commercial version. The free version has some limitations like a maximum […]
I have a subscription for a startup magazine who upload articles from old issues to their server on the Internet. The documents are in pdf format with each article having its own pdf document. This gets a little bit messy with twenty plus articles per issue as you can guess.
Virus Total is one of the many services that let you upload files to their server which are then scanned for viruses and malware. One major advantage of Virus Total over a single antivirus solution installed on the user's pc is the fact that it uses almost every known antivirus engine to scan the files which could not be done on a single system because those applications would surely interfere with each other.
Many Firefox settings can only be changed in the about:config dialog that appears when you type the phrase in the Firefox address bar. The settings in there however have rather cryptic names and it can sometimes be quite hard to figure out what they do, actually not that hard because every setting is explained on the Mozilla website. Still, it takes some time to look them up.
Faceted Browsing can be very helpful if you do not precisely know what you are looking for. It gives you choices which narrow down the search results. Seek is a Thunderbird extension that brings that concept to the email client. It displays mails by a variety of variables like recency, tags and from and offers a sophisticated search that narrows done the search results.
Manage PC Shutdown is a small application for Windows that, as the name already suggests, manages several ways to shutdown the computer. The main purpose of the software is to define the […]
When you click on a file Firefox determines if there is a plugin that can handle the file type or if there is a so called download action defined. Download actions are user defined actions that come into effect when the box "Do this automatically for files like this from now on" is checked in Firefox during a file download.
Did you ever loose track of all the password protected files on your system ? This happened to me just a few days ago when I was looking for a zip file that a friend send me which was password protected. I could not remember the name and location where I saved it to and since I tend to clear the history at each reboot I was not able to take a look at the software protocol of the transfer anymore.
Internet Explorer with an installed version of Real Player beware. A vulnerability has been discovered recently which could allow remote code execution. According to Zdnet users should either switch browsers for the […]
Update: The giveaway is not available any longer. You may however download Data Recovery Wizard Free from the EaseUS website instead. The program is limited in terms of data that you can […]
It's sometimes the small things that make a difference. I was always wondering if there was a way to lock or unlock my notebook with another device that I was carrying around […]
When you make changes in the Windows Registry you normally can only make them for all users or the user account that is currently logged in. But what if you want to make them in another user account ? There is an easy way to do that by loading the Registry hive of the user into the Registry.
Microsoft released their monthly Security Bulletin yesterday which consisted of four critical issues all affecting various editions of Microsoft Office. All four patches fix remote code execution vulnerabilities and it is recommended that they are installed as soon as possible if Microsoft Office is installed on the computer.
According to New Tee Vee Joost is going to start a public live streaming test today. A new client will be released for that purpose becoming available today as well. The first public live stream will be a video chat with the Joost technical team, a first test so to say to see if everything runs smoothly.
Hulu has left private beta and is now publically available to US-consumers which is definitely a good thing. Users can just go and visit the official Hulu website and browse the contents […]
Update: Windows Hidie is no longer available. The developer website has been abandoned and downloads are nowhere to be found on the Internet. We suggest you check out an alternative such as […]
I have not done any tests lately that would reveal the speed of each of the new upcoming browsers. The latest official builds have been tested, they are at the time of the test: Opera 9.5 build 9815/1834, Firefox 3 Gran Paradiso beta 4 and Internet Explorer 8 beta 1. I have been using the Webwait application for this test which monitors page loading times of pages that you select.
Two of the new features that were introduced in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 were so called Webslices and Activities. The first introduced a way to keep track of little pieces of […]
What would you do if you had purchased a software that would archive your Gmail mails and found out that this software send your username and password to the Gmail account of the author of the software ? That's apparently what has happened to users who purchased the program G-Archiver by someone named John Terry.
Don't jump to conclusions just yet. Some blogs (Tech Today) are reporting that a first pre release alpha of Firefox 4 has been added to the official Mozilla ftp website and I would like to use this article to clarify a few points made. Tech Today claims that this is actually an official Firefox 4 alpha release while it is actually a pre-alpha build, also known as a trunk build.
We are coming closer to the finish line. I'm thinking of making the purchase of the new PC components in the next month or the month thereafter. I would like to thank everyone for their great and valuable comments which pointed me into the right directions concerning some components.
If you are using Internet Explorer and Firefox you might have noticed that scrolling websites in Firefox is not as smooth as it is in Internet Explorer. Now I do not know why this is the case but I found a solution for it. As you might know I also have a notebook that I use when traveling and I rely heavily on the touchpad. As you can image scrolling with that function is a pain if the scrolling is not smoothly.
There are not many Firefox add-ons left that I have never heard about but this one caught me by surprise. Snap Links is an excellent Firefox add-on that I have immediately added […]
Seems to really be a special time in that we are living, free good software popping up every week that is good for at least one year. Raymond seems to be especially good at finding those gems because this new one is coming right from his blog. A-squared Anti-Malware is, as the name suggests, an anti-malware scanner, which retails for $39.95.
I like the Windows Vista Games menu that display a list of installed games on your system, games that Windows Vista recognizes as games that is. Boxart is displayed for some games while only the icon is displayed for others which somewhat makes the menu look ugly and out of shape. The difference between supported and unsupported games is visible and it would be much nicer if there would be an standard display for all entries.
I'm keeping track of every change to Ghacks for about a year now which means that I write down the time of the change and what I did change, e.g. advertising position or links. This is invaluable to be able to reconstruct a previous state if something goes terribly wrong. If advertisement revenue goes down I can check the log and see if I made any changes to the positions in that time.
Did you ever feel that some of the right-click and menu options are completely useless ? I know of several that I'm never using, want some examples ? Work Offline in the File menu, Send Link in the right-click menu or For Internet Explorer Users in the Help menu. Removing entries increases the usability because it makes it easier to locate the right options putting them more into focus.
I read today that Windows Update would not work with the beta version of Internet Explorer 8. I did want to check it out for myself before writing about it and went to the Windows Update website which greeted me with the error message "The site cannot continue because one or more of these Windows services is not running". The services mentioned were Automatic Updates, Event Log and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).
When I was working back then for a big company I had to use a computer that they provided with no options to install new software on that computer. I still did update my websites frequently in my spare time but always struggled when I had to install new scripts or upload files to the website because I did not have access to an ftp client nor something like WinSCP.
I recently came upon a .lit file and was puzzled at first because I did not have any application installed on my system that could read and display the .lit file properly. A web search told me that it was a format for the Microsoft Reader, an e-book reader for Mobile PCs with another edition available for notebooks and desktop PCs.
