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
The application iTunes Control is an add-on for Apple's iTunes software. It mainly adds two functions to iTunes, the first is a customizable on screen display of the track that is currently playing and the second are more than 20 hotkeys that make it easier to run iTunes in the background.
I'm not a huge fan of all those tracking scripts and applications that have popped up lately. It does not really matter if they track if an email was read or a link visited, they all invade other peoples privacy. I'm not saying that I can't see their uses, can't count the times that I asked myself if a recipient received and read the email that I have send to him.
The firefox Find as you type search is pretty useful; It's faster than the normal search box and it does not obscure part of the website with a search box. Internet Explorer users can now enhance their browser with a Find as you type add-on for Internet Explorer which adds this functionality to it.
Versioning is a pretty useful concept. It basically means backing up documents and files before changes are made to it so that the user can revert back to a previous version with ease. Versioning is not limited to text documents, it can also be used for images or coding applications.
The South by Southwest festival is one of the biggest festivals of its kind in the United States. Part of it is the Music Conference and Festival showcasing hundreds of artists over the course of several days. Many songs by those artists are offered as free downloads on the festival pages and as torrents.
You might know that I regularly check all running processes as part of a cleanup process. It is also important from a security point of view. I spotted the file vssvc.exe today running on my computer and I was pretty sure that it was not running last time I checked. A quick check reveled that it was related to the Volume Shadow Copy Service in Windows XP.
The original Firefox history lists the recently visited websites in a sidebar displaying only the titles of the websites that the user has visited. The change is high to visit the wrong page if a website uses the same or a similar title for all of it pages. There is also no indication of when that website was visited.
Several applications that connect to the Internet have options to limit the upload and download bandwidth. This is excellent if you need bandwidth for other tasks as well, for instance if you want to watch Internet TV while downloading from P2P networks. But what can you do if an application that connects to the Internet does not have such an option, if it regularly uses all of your bandwidth and slows down other applications because of it ?
I have always asked myself why there is no way to configure a function for double right-clicking. You can configure the left mouse button double-click but not the right mouse button one. Click Zap is a small application that lets the user configure a function for a double-click on the right mouse button.
Shock Desktop is a Windows application to manage the desktop icons. Users can create profiles which save the current icon layout of the desktop. Loading that profile again resets the desktop to that icon layout. It happens for instance that icons get moved if the user changes the screen resolution. This can be undone with the application.
Microsoft thought it would be nice to present a configuration screen to users who have installed or upgraded to Internet Explorer 7. The user can change the default search provider in this initial setup or pick some additional plugins. This runonce page is not really needed in my opinion because all the changes can be made directly in the options as well.
Windows Live SkyDrive, the online storage service of Microsoft, has left beta status today and is now available for users in 38 countries including the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The limit of 500 Megabytes per user account has been raised to a maximum of 5 Gigabytes which comes closer to services like Aol Xdrive and even Google Gmail.
Several video portals on the Internet have restrictions in place that prevent videos about a certain file size or length to be uploaded to their website. The normal limit is 100 Megabyte per file and a maximum length of ten minutes. Video uploaders create several parts of videos that are larger or last longer than the default limits - I came upon videos with ten and more parts on Youtube.
I have not really put much thought into the way podcasts work until now but when I stumbled upon Dir Caster I began to realize that publishing podcasts is different from publishing blog posts. I mean you have a mp3 file and need a way to create an RSS feed out of it.
Wallpapers. Can't get enough of them. I have a folder with dozens of wallpapers on my hard drive and am always happy to find another excellent wallpaper website that I have not known before. This time it's a website called Social Wallpapering which hosts a lot of wallpapers and does offer several unique features not known to any other wallpaper website out there.
Piky Basket is a Windows shell extension that lets you add files and folders from different locations of your hard drive to a virtual basket to perform file operations on all of the files and folders at the end. You basically select as many files and folders as you like from your system and perform a file operation on them afterwards.
A friend of mine recently received an error message whenever he was trying to open iTunes. The error stated that the file scarddlg.dll was missing on the system and that a reinstallation of the application might fix the problem. A reinstall did not help and he asked me if I was able to come up with a solution to his problem.
Computers are really nice for information gathering but nothing beats reading a book or newspaper on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee at a breakfast table. That's probably what the developers of Feed Journal thought as well because they have developed an application that transforms RSS feeds into a newspaper format which can then be printed and read offline.
I have been in contact with the creator of the excellent DefenseWall HIPS application for some time now and he was so nice to give away ten copies of his software to Ghacks readers. Let me first explain what the software does. DefenseWall HIPS is a Host Intrusion Prevention System that uses sandboxing and virtualization to protect the computer from dangers that are not stopped by anti-virus applications.
Newspond is a web news aggregator that scans the Internet for news and publishes them automatically on their website. That's actually a major difference to Digg where users contribute the articles. The benefit of the Newspond system is that it is less likely to be gamed as much as you are used from Digg even with their latest algorithm change.
I'm normally very cautious when I read about free offers on the Internet. It is often the case that free does not really mean free. This time however it seems to be the real deal, that is if you are a student from one of the following elven countries: US, UK, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium.
What do you do if you want to send a friend ten links ? Paste all the ten links in an email or Instant Messenger and let him sort through the mess ? Or use a service like Linkbunch which bundles all your links into one and makes them available on a website ? You might say that it does not change a thing and probably even complicates matters because he actually has to make an additional click but it could still be useful for some.
A program called Viewpoint Media Player was suddenly installed on my friend's computer and he was so surprised that he had to call me and ask me if I knew why this program was installed on his computer. I have never heard of Viewpoint before but did a quick search for viewmgr.exe and Viewpoint Media Player to find out that it can be automatically installed with several programs from AOL and other vendors.
I'm sometimes astonished as to what people sell at eBay. I always thought those video game collections that filled rooms where impressive but this music collection must be one of the largest sales ever on eBay. A collector is apparently selling his entire music collection on eBay which consists of more than 3 million records and 300000 CDs currently stored in a 16,000 square foot climate controlled warehouse.
The glorious idea to kick file sharers off the Internet, effectively banning them from accessing the Internet, seems to be in consideration in Australia in an effort to fight Internet piracy. It does not happen very often that I'm left totally speechless but this proposal succeeded. I really don't know how to reply to such an idiotic proposal.
I have been encountering a warning in Firefox lately which told the that a script on the current website was unresponsive asking me if I wanted to stop or continue. That's a pretty vague warning and I was puzzled at first about the cause of it. The strange thing was that the website seemed to have loaded completely and that the warning was displayed despite of this.
A visitor was asking me a while ago if there were really download managers for websites like Rapidshare and I simply told him at that time that they would exist. JDownloader is a Rapidshare Download Manager that comes with a lot of functions to make downloading files from Rapidshare and dozens other file hosting websites a breeze.
The Windows clipboard function is not really practicable. It stores only the last text string that you have copied and once you copy another one the previous one is not longer available. It happened more than once that I lost a text phrase that I still needed because I accidentally copied another item to the clipboard.
I must be one of the few users on earth that does not have a Facebook account yet and who does not have any plans of creating one in the near future. Still, Facebook is extremely popular and this following Facebook application could be useful - I think it definitely will find lots of users who like it - for some users of Facebook.
If you perform a search for the major torrent website The Pirate Bay you expect it to be the number one search result for its main keyword due to its popularity. If you search for The Pirate Bay (the Piratebay, Piratebay) on Google you will witness that it is indeed number 1 but if you perform the same search at Yahoo you will not find the domain in the results list at all.
Locate is one of the fastest ways to search for files and content in files in Windows. It uses a file database which is created once at first run and then updated […]
HD Tune is a hard disk analyzer that offers a wealth of information about the internal hard drives that are connected to the computer. It does display general information like the type of the hard drive, the serial number, capacity, firmware version and buffer size which are nice to know because it allows you to check if that hard drive is the correct one. I remember more than one instance where a friend of mine bought a hard drive only to find out that the clerk handed him one that had a lower capacity and different model number.
Twitter. Some love it, some can't see a reason to use it at all. Although I belong to the second group I know a lot of users who use Twitter regularly and this users might find the following Firefox add-on useful enough to give it a try. TwitterFox, formerly known as Twitter Notifier is a Firefox add-on that adds a icon to the Firefox statusbar.
I regularly have to create pdf invoices which some companies seem to prefer over other forms of documents and I have been using doc to pdf online converters until now that would convert the Microsoft .doc file into the Adobe .pdf file. I have two major problems with this procedure however.
Search Engine Optimization is important, probably the most important aspect to make your blog grow beyond it's initial reach. The reason is pretty simply. If you rank high for certain popular keywords in search engines you will receive visitors, the higher you rank the more visitors you get.
If you save your usernames and passwords in Firefox you accumulate a huge list after time. That's the case for me and I sometimes have to lookup a password because I can't remember it correctly. The default Firefox Password Manager however offers such a rudimentary interface that it takes ages to find the website that I'm looking for.
Some applications that are running in the background are displaying an icon in the Windows System Tray to give the user faster access to the program's options. While this option is useful for some applications it does look kinda ugly especially if a lot of icons are visible in the system tray.
Another month has passed quickly and I'm almost ready to buy the components for the new computer that I want to build. This article explains the changes that I made to the setup during the last month and all the components that I intend to purchase. I hope that this pc build could be inspiration for some of my readers who would like to build a PC as well but are not that sure about the right choice of pc components.
Mails are sorted chronologically in Thunderbird by default but they are not grouped. Grouped means special folders for mails that arrived today, yesterday, last week, two weeks ago and old mail. This way of sorting mails is incredibly helpful for a better overview in my opinion.
I never understood why Windows only offered a Send To entry when right-clicking files and not a Copy To entry. The funny thing is that this Copy To function actually exists but is disabled by default. Not sure who had the glorious idea to disable it but it definitely does not make sense to me.
