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
Idle Time is the time where the computer is just sitting idle using little to no cpu power. This happens on my computer for instance if I leave it on to finish a download and after that download finishes it wastes some power doing nothing. A good way to put your cpu to good use during that time is to start a program once the computer has been idle for some time.
Torrent websites are much like Linux distributions, there are so many out there that it is easy to lose the track. Torrent search engines can be divided into two categories: Site search engines and meta search engines. Site search engines obviously only search the torrents that are hosted on one selected website while meta search engines crawl the databases of several torrent websites which often leads to better results.
Recently I have a need to format some brand new harddrives in .... FAT32 format. Needless to say, Vista doesn't like to do that. Nor does Windows XP. But since these harddrives will be going into an old security surveillance DVR unit, they need to be in FAT32, not NTFS. I'm also taking this opportunity to upgrade the security unit from the old 30 gig harddrives to new 250 gig units.
Users from outside the United States try lots of things to get access to Pandora which streams customized Radio to users with US IPs only. Some succeed with the user of proxies, virtual private networks or services like Global Pandora that come and go. Others point their eyes to France to discover a music service that resembles Pandora in many aspects but is way better.
According to Digital Inspiration that's the case if you are using Windows XP because leaving the password blank makes it impossible to connect to the computer remotely. The link given in the article which points to the Password Strength & Password Security page at Microsoft.com is unfortunately not available at this point.
Microsoft released the first public beta of their upcoming flagship browser Internet Explorer 8 to the public and I would like to use this article - and the comments - to get some opinions about it. I know that a lot of you must have installed the new browser by now and surely must have something to say about this first version.
Radiohead was the first band that used the Internet as their main distribution method for their music and that gave their fans the best price ever for their music by letting the downloaders decide what they would pay. This premiere was not perfect by all means though but it was definitely a step in the right direction.
Booklet Creator is a free online script that turns pdf documents into small books by changing the order of the pages. If you take a look at a book lying next to you you will notice that the first page will be connected with the last of the book, the second with the second last and so on. That's that same system that the Booklet Creator script uses to order pdf document.
Am I the only one that is starting to get confused by all the online services offered by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and others ? Microsoft seems to have jumped fully on the "Live" bandwagon branding every new online product with it. The newest is called Office Live Workspace [link] and is currently in public Beta.
Ever felt the need to start an application during Windows startup every now and then but not all of the time ? Maybe you want to quickly start and play the new game that you recently installed, or just browse through your emails as quickly as possible without having to go the extra mile and start the application manually.
When we read the announcement that higher quality videos would come to Youtube we were delighted that the video quality would finally see an upgrade. Apparently the conversion has started and some videos are already available in different quality versions. It still looks like Youtube is testing settings and stuff and that not everyone can access those higher quality videos yet.
I have been testing an application called Transporter P2P for the last few days which can be described as a elegant way to share files and chat with contacts using P2P connections. A main difference between Transporter P2P and Skype for instance is that the former is server independent which means more privacy and security. The setup on the other hand is a little bit complicated because of the serverless design.
I'm pretty astonished that I never heard about fake gift boxes before, at least not ones that you could purchase in stores. I fell trap to custom ones more than once though but those gift boxes raise it to a whole new level. They look really professional and one could think that they are the real thing.
Windows XP keeps track of how many times an application has been started by a user of the system and displays the most frequently used programs in the start menu. That's a pretty convenient feature for some users but there is no obvious way to control which applications are listed in the start menu.
It sometimes is a good idea to close most processes and programs at once. Could be helpful if you want to run a very resource intensive program or an application asks you to close all programs open before continuing. This happens when you install some programs or run utilities like scandisk or defrag.
Keyboard, Mouse and Gamepads: Those are the standard controls of today's video gamers and I personally did not think that this would change anytime soon. Then came the presentation of the OCZ Actuator which changed my mind. It looks like a high tech headband but it's actually more than that.
I received an email today from a reader who told me of a problem that he encountered lately on his computer. The message Say no to drugs appeared whenever he clicked on a shortcut to the My Documents folder. This sounded clearly like a virus and a quick search revealed that it indeed was the I Love Her virus.
My last True Crypt guide dates way back and the purchase of my new shiny 500 Megabyte Maxtor USB drive made me think about writing a new guide that takes the changes of the software into account. My old Teac USB drive started to behave weirdly every now and then which I saw as a first sign of reaching the end of its life cycle and since I did not want to take any chances I decided to buy a new drive, encrypt it with True Crypt and transfer all the files from the old device to it.
There is no automatic way to adjust the priority of a process in Windows using the default tools supplied by Microsoft. It is possible to adjust the current process priority but this setting is only valid for the current setting. Once the process gets killed, for example by closing the application or rebooting, it reverts the priority back to the default one.
I always thought that free meant that I did not have to do anything to get the free item or service. I had a problem with the Adobe PDF Reader and a huge 35 Megabyte PDF which took ages to load and decided to install all the latest versions of alternative PDF viewers. The Adobe PDF Reader was not rendering the pdf file properly and it took ages to scroll and change settings.
Dante send in this little tip and I thought I would share it with everyone. I have been writing about a program called USB Drive Letter Manager before which made it very easy to assign specific drive letters to USB devices. I mentioned that it is possible to assign drive letters to certain USB devices in Windows using Disk Management as well but did not comment on that further.
Have you ever wondered why the Print key does not do what it's label says - that is print - but copies a screenshot to the clipboard instead? Why is it doing […]
Avedesk was mentioned on one of my favorite websites Donation Coder and it sounded so incredible that I had to give it a try immediately. One could say that Avedesk adds widgets to your desktop, not the kind of useless widgets like the clock in Windows Vista. I'm talking about widgets that look great and provide enough functionality to justify their presence on the desktop.
Did you ever run an application that was designed for a specific resolution on your new shiny 1920x1200 monitor only to find out that it was almost impossible to work with it in that resolution ? I'm not only talking about old DOS games here but also about presentations for instance or applications that have been developed in house. Basically everything that goes full screen automatically could be affected as well.
I did receive another email today asking me about my Facebook user name. I never put much thought into joining Facebook or any other hyped web community. The main reason for this was the question about the why. Why should I join Facebook ? Only to show everyone a list of my friends, to show them what I'm doing ? Will it turn out to be a "I've got more friends than you thing" in the end ?
Flickr hosts an unbelievable amount of images of all sizes on their website. One easy way to search Flickr for Wallpapers is to simply enter the term wallpaper in the search box on the Flickr homepage and browse through the results. Currently more than 260.000 images are found when searching for wallpapers.
It seems to be the tip day of the week because this is actually the third tip I received by email today. Carlos send me the tip, thanks for that. Face in a Hole is a website where you can put your face, or the face of someone else, on well known images. Ever wanted to have the Rock's muscles, Audrey Hepburn's body or Wolverine's claws ?
Max was nice enough to send me an invite for the online application service Aviary, or more precisely the main website and the image editor application which are freely accessible after registration. Users can access their dashboard through the main interface which displays a list of featured images, collaborations and recent images alongside your latest activities.
Make 3D is a wonderful piece of code from the University of Stanford that transforms a normal 2D image into a 3D image. While the results are not true 3D images they […]
Msconfig is a standard system tool in Windows where users can, among other things, disable startup items. It's a great tool if you do not have any other software like Autoruns or Starter in reach that deal with startup programs more efficiently. If you use Msconfig all the time you will notice that deactivated entries will not disappear and that there is no way to delete them permanently from being displayed in the tool.
You are gonna love the PC Fare Meter software if you are paid by the hour and have difficulties keeping track of the time that you spend working for your clients. One could say it's a time tracking application but that would fall a bit short, it's more than that. The most important feature of this software is to keep records of the time each application has been used on a computer.
The year 2008 will see the release of three major versions of the most popular browsers. We will see the release of Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 9.5. All promise new and exciting features for the new browser versions and users were already able to test beta versions of both Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5.
Shadow Copies have been introduced into Windows XP Service Pack 1 and been extended in Windows Vista where it is used in System Restore and backup utility. You might have come upon the problem that a file was in use when trying to copy, move or delete it. Shadow Copies are used to copy every file, basically state of the art read only copies of files on the hard drive. This means that even important system files that are running all the time can be backed up without difficulties.
Many mp3 players support album art, showing it to the user in the display. Several software players support it as well, for instance the Itunes Control plugin that I wrote about earlier this week. I don't know a single application however that can process a entire music library automatically and add album art to it.
The creator of the well acclaimed Display Fusion has created a new application called Clipboard Fusion which monitors the clipboard and removes formatting from copied text automatically if enabled. When you normally copy text from a website to an email or Rich Text Editor all the formatting will be still visible at the destination. I always copied the text to Notepad first and then to the destination if I wanted to get rid of the formatting because removing it from the destination would simply take to much time.
I read about this tip yesterday at Digital Inspiration and when I woke up today I saw that Lifehacker wrote about it as well. The tip mainly stated that users who signed up for Gmail would not get one but two mail addresses: user@gmail.com and user@googlemail.com. The suggestion was to give on out to friends and use the other for all the other signups and conversations on the Internet.
Duryodhan was so nice to send me a link to Hooeey, a website offering a button and toolbar for Firefox that record your browsing history. It's basically a combination of Del.icio.us (bookmarking, tagging) and your browser history. The main benefit is that everything is recorded automatically and that you can add tags and comments to the links if you like. The recording feature can be disabled so that some websites do not get recorded.
Stage6 is shutting down. That's the announcement on the main page of the video portal that was posted today. Let me fill you in if you are amongst the many that have never heard of that video portal before. Stage6 is directly connected to the developers of the Divx codec, a high definition video portal.
Once again the leaders of a country decided to ban a website because of (pick one: religious beliefs, political beliefs, constitution, local laws, medieval mindsets) which reminds me a lot of the kid that goes crying to their mama if another kid is mean to them. The other kid being Youtube in this case and the crying baby Pakistan, or more precisely the leaders of Pakistan.
I discovered an interesting video at Hack a Day from the University of Princeton demonstrating how to break disk encryption using so called RAM Dumps. This basically takes into account that the encryption key is stored in RAM. While most disk encryption mechanisms are vulnerable while the computer is on or in sleep mode some are even vulnerable when powered off.
