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
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.
Do you know which audio and video codecs are installed on your operating system ? Did you know that you can easily find that out by using Windows tools ? I think it is nice to know that you can find about all installed codecs without having to use third party applications. I will recommend a third party program at the end which can be used to received additional information.
The regular user thinks that if he searches for a keyword in Google he will receive a listing of ten different websites that are the best matches for the keyword entered. This common believe is wrong. Clever marketers have found ways to make their website appear in all of the search results on that page or at least in many of them.
Delicious is a nice website to discover new interesting websites. I was however never that fond of using it to store my own bookmarks but for the reason to promote my websites to a large audience. If I want a way to store bookmarks I rely on my browser and not a website that does that for me. Call me old fashioned but that's how I think about this.
Calibrating a monitor, be it LCD or CRT monitor, can be a tedious task. I for one have always doubts about the settings that I have chosen when setting up the monitor for the first time. Questions about the monitor's brightness, the colors, contrast are not that easy to answer if you only have to rely on your eyes and have no test patterns that help you determine the correct settings.
Where do you store your usernames and passwords ? In a text document on your computer ? In your wallet ? Storing sensible information like passwords, but also other type of data like information about medication or credit card numbers, unencrypted is a security risk. If someone is after those information he immediately knows how to use them against you.
Is my browser secure ? That's a question that I hear and read day in day out from users throughout the country. It seems that new security vulnerabilities are discovered each day which adds to this uncertainty. They could be vulnerable even if they use the latest version of Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari because those browsers tend to get updated less often than vulnerabilities are discovered.
I sometimes want to copy html tables found on websites into a program that is able to display them properly on my computer so that I can save the data and use it as a reference. Whenever I copy a table in Firefox and paste it into Microsoft Excel, or Open Office, the table structure and formatting is lost. All cells are pasted without the correct formatting which can be quite frustrating if you want to copy a large table.
I discovered a wonderful selection of wallpapers on Del.icio.us today which are definitely worth an article here at Ghacks. The wallpapers on Iunewind are colorful and simply different from most wallpapers that I have seen on typical wallpaper websites. The website currently hosts about 60 wallpapers which are most of the time available in different resolutions and sizes.
I'm using three dedicated servers at the moment with more than a Terabyte of free hard drive space. I thought of some good uses for that space and came up with the idea to use it to store backups from my computers. The plan is to use the backup software Cobian Backup 8 to create scheduled backups and upload those backups straight to my root server using an ftp account I created for that purpose.
What exactly would come to your mind if I would speak about e-books ? Would you think about pdf documents and other text documents ? Most likely yes because e-books are distributed in text documents nowadays. What if there was a more natural way of presentation, an e-book that would have all the functions of a real book (and more) ?
Microsoft released their monthly security bulletin yesterday which listed 11 security bulletins containing a total of 17 patches for operating systems and software like Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Six of the eleven security bulletins are critical while the remaining five are considered important.
I don't like to install a lot of toolbars in Firefox (or Opera) because they tend to decrease the screen size that is available for the website. Sure, there is a way to display and hide the toolbars whenever I need them but this is not that practical and I tend to forget about them pretty fast.
Real Desktop comes in two flavors, a light version which has a reduced functionality but does not cost a dime and a standard version that has all the functionality but sells for $25.95 in the online shop. The concept of Real Desktop is to transform the 2D desktop of Windows in a desktop that resembles your the desktop your monitor is placed on.
You might have noticed the bar at the top of my blog, the one that begins with Grand Effect. I was approached some time ago by Sarah if I wanted to be a co-founder of a new blog network called Grand Effect which would start with a few blogs in February. I liked the idea from the beginning and decided to join the blog network.
A friend of mine called me the other day. He had troubles with a mail in Windows Mail running Windows Vista 32-bit. The mail was sort of stuck in the outbox of Windows Mail. He was not able to delete or send the email which was very unfortunate. He was prompted at every exit of Windows Mail that there was unsent mail and he was getting desperate.
I always disliked resizing multiple images using the image viewers that I have been using throughout the day. It was not a problem if I had to resize one or two images but a folder with dozens or hundreds of images would simply take to long to resize or edit.
Windows loves to use virtual memory. Even if you set the value of virtual memory to zero it is still being used. It's basic use is to provide additional memory if most of the RAM of the computer is already occupied. This virtual memory is taken from the hard drive from so called paging files. Most optimization articles suggest to use between one and three times of the amount of RAM as virtual memory.
Why would anyone want to throttle the bandwidth of Firefox or Internet Explorer ? That was my first thought when I read about two tiny apps for Firefox and Internet Explorer for the first time at Sizlopedia. I mean, it is normally the other way round. You download some large file or use P2P networks and want to use a browser as well which means that there should be a way to assign a minimum amount of bandwidth for the browser instead of throttling it. Everyone should be capable of not download large files or browsing all those rich entertainment websites if he really needs the bandwidth for something else.
The release of my own gaming blog has been delayed for a few months and I decided to post some great games in the meantime here at Ghacks to keep you all entertained. There is actually one flash game called Protector that I'm playing for some time now. It's one of those Tower Defense type games but with some basic RPG elements and more strategy involved.
Windows does not store wireless keys in a format that is readable by the human eye which becomes unfortunate when you have lost your key and want to access your wireless router. Without the key it is only possible to reset the router and create new keys which would mean lots of work.
Whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a file or folder in Windows Explorer or the Desktop you will notice that a tooltip appears that lists some details about the current file or folder. the Information displayed are related to the file extension. If you hover the mouse over a Adobe pdf file the tooltip contains information about the author, title, date modified and size. Executable files however display information like company name and version of the application.
Windows XP is creating a backup of every patch that you install for the operating system. The files are placed in the Windows directory and start with $NtUninstall. Microsoft is creating those backups so that the user can easily uninstall the patch if problems should arise.
Have you ever asked yourself how it is possible that users are tracked over months in P2P networks although their IP address is changing regularly ? We only hear reports about session based user identifications. Session based means that shared files of this session are analyzed and recorded opposed to tracking a user over months.
Icon Any Folder is another great application that I discovered at Donation Coder which is small, lightweight but oh so useful. There are numerous applications out there that let you pick a new icon for a folder that you specify. Most of the time though those icons are not really related and none of these tools offers a way to automatically add related folder icons to your folders.
Only administrators are allowed to format and eject removable hard disks in Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional which could become a problem if you normally use a normal user account in Windows to increase system security or have to work on a system where you only have user access rights.
In a move that can only be described as desperate the RIAA, or better Cary Sherman, its President, suggested at the State of the Net Conference to bundle filters that check for copyrighted data with programs that would benefit the user such as antivirus applications to counter the problem with encryption that they are currently facing. He did not stop there though and suggested that the ISP would monitor, ehm, filter, the user as well through the likes of the modem for instance.
If you want to find out which file type is opened with which application you normally take a look into the File Types tab in Tools > Folder Options. Unfortunately though this menu that is displaying all registered file types is not listing lots of information especially if you consider that you cannot resize the window which means that you can only see several file types there and have to scroll a lot.
HiJackThis is a sophisticated security tool that checks a computer running Windows 2000 or higher for possible signs of hijacked applications. It does check lots of different elements like startup items, Browser Helper Objects, running processes and the like and presents a log of the results at the end. This log is hard to read for beginners because it contains "good" and possible "bad" elements in it and it requires knowledge of those elements to make a distinction between elements that you have to keep and those that are indeed malicious in nature.
Television junkies will love Television Tunes. The website is a huge music archive of songs from known - and unknown - television series. As far as I can tell only the tunes of the original American tv series are available. All songs are listed alphabetically, just pick a letter and you will be presented with a huge list of tv shows beginning with that letter. There have to be way more than 1000 tv themes available on Television Tunes.
The Mozilla team has released a new version of Mozilla Firefox. I did not get an automatic notification that a new version has been released and had to go to Help > Check for Updates manually to find out that a new update for Firefox has been released. It is most likely that the automatic update will kick in later today, for now use the way described above or go directly to the Firefox homepage and download the new version from there.
I'm not very fond of applications that add themselves to the Windows startup because it means that the startup will be delayed. In my opinion only a few applications have the right to be started at system start, included in this list are security programs as well as programs that you would start anyway after Windows is loaded. I'm autostarting Rivatuner for instance to keep the fan of my Nvidia graphics card from spinning to fast in 2D environments to reduce the noise level.
Taking security out of the hands of the average user is a good way of increasing system security. That's my opinion on the matter, the greatest security risk is most of the time the human sitting in front of the computer. The Yoggie Pico is a security device with 13 security applications in USB format that runs Linux and handles all network traffic of the computer.
True Crypt 5 has been released yesterday and I'm very pleased with the new features that the developers have added to this awesome encryption tool. I have been using True Crypt for several years already to encrypt my external hard drives to ensure that no one without the proper password (or backdoor, hehe) would be able to access the data on those hard drives.
My first thought when I heard about the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Memory Card was that no one would be going to need this SD card with build in WiFi but when I read a little bit further my opinion changed from No-one-needs-that to Wow-what-a-great-idea. The Eye-Fi SD cards come in sizes of 1 and 2 Gigabytes, the 2 Gigabyte version sells currently at Amazon for $99.99 which is way more than a SD card without WiFi would cost.
The online auction website eBay plans to overhaul their feedback system later this year by removing the ability for sellers to leave feedback after an auction completes. This means that only buyers will be able to leave feedback about the transaction after it completes. Some might say that this gives the buyer an unfair advantage over an seller while others would say that the move makes perfect sense.
UEFI which is an acronym for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface which will eventually replace the 20+ year old Bios. The new standard is backed by everyone so to speak including Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies and Apple.
