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
Dante send in this interesting story and I thought I share it the way he send it to me and ask everyone if they know of a way to install Windows Vista on a SATA Raid with difficulties. Let the story begin:
Global Pandora was a great service while it did last. Users from outside the United States where able to listen to Pandora, the Internet Radio that would create music stations based on artists or songs that you like. The Music Industry made the decision to block access to Pandora for all users from outside the United States although most users reported that they discovered new music that they found interesting and that the majority actually bought music they discovered at Pandora.
Just got word that Yahoo Search has started integrating information from Del.icio.us into their search result pages. Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us some years ago and I was wondering since then when they would start to combine the two online services to offer their visitors additional information.
When I first discovered DSynchronize I could not believe that I never heard of this application before. This is probably the easiest way to synchronize files and folders in Windows. The software has a size of 161 Kilobyte and can be run from any location of your hard drive without having to install it.
Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset can be downloaded from Microsoft as a 30 day evaluation version which is more than sufficient for our cause. It helps administrators identify and repair PCs that have become unusable by offering tools that analyze and solve the problem.
If the process to unlock your Apple iPhone fails you might end with a so called bricked iPhone that is not working properly anymore. That's probably the worst scenario for any iPhone user who tinkered with the phone trying to unlock it.
If you are looking for a Google-like search engine - in terms of simplicity and quality - when it comes to searching for, listening to and downloading mp3 music files from the Internet then mp3zy could be just what you are looking for. The interface is as basic as it can get, just a search mask that waits for user input and a search button.
Easy to use backup and sync utilities are in high demand and I would like to introduce one that's definitely easy to use. Toucan is a portable application which means it can be run from any location on a system. Two of its main functions are the backup and sync function. Backups are done with just a few clicks. Select the source folder(s) and destination file name, the format for the file name (zip or 7z), the backup type (update, incremental, complete and restore), add a password if you like, exclude files or folders and click on Go.
I have explained in the first part of this article how a Windows user could create a list of all unsigned drivers of the system, the second part takes a look at a Windows system tool that verifies those drivers and makes sure that they are working correctly. This is great if you are trying to figure out if a driver is the source of a problem that you are currently experiencing.
I love articles that list educational stuff like classes, videos or podcasts. 200 Free Online Classes to Learn Anything is one of the resources that I really like. It is basically a link list with 200 links and short descriptions of free online classes. The classes are divided into categories like Natural Science, Math and Business & Finance and mainly lead to Universities and schools that are offering those classes on their website.
When I accessed the Internet in the early 90s with my superfast 33,6 Kbps modem I had to sign a contract with a company that made me pay per minute that I was online. This put a lot of pressure on me and my bankroll at that time and many companies later gave in to user demand and offered flatrates instead. Unlimited access to the Internet without having to look at the clock or the amount that I have downloaded have since then become an important part of my life and I would never accept to go back to a time or bandwidth limited account.
Keeping the installed software on your computer up to date can be a time consuming task considering that users tend to have 100+ applications installed on their computers at the same time. To make matters worse there is no general way - like in Linux - to update your applications. Some offer build in update notifications but most do not have this feature.
So the guys at Gizmodo started playing around with the video rentals at iTunes trying to figure out a way how they could prolong the time - 30 days to start watching it, 24 hours to watch after starting it - that they were allowed to watch the movie that they rented. Some tests seemed to reveal that one of the oldest hacks of old time would work, that they could increase the time almost indefinitely by changing their computer's system date to the future and back to the present.
A vulnerability in uTorrent and Bittorrent, which is using uTorrent's core, was discovered today that effects the BitTorrent 6.0 client,
uTorrent 1.7.x, uTorrent 1.6.x and uTorrent 1.8-alpha-7834. The Denial of Service vulnerability is made possible by the way the clients handle user data.
Trend Micro RUBotted is a BETA program that scans your system for bot related activity protecting it effectively from being hijacked and misused for criminal activity. The computer is monitored for activity that is either harmful for the computer it is running on or other computers that are affected by actions from the monitored computer.
There are two types of drivers in Windows XP, signed and unsigned ones. Signed ones have been verified and tested by Microsoft while unsigned ones have not. That does not have to be a bad thing though because the developer tends to test the drivers as well.
Songbeat is a desktop music search, play and download software using Seeqpod technology. It scans the Internet for songs, stores information in its database and provides the user with fast working results once a search is initiated. The program could not be easier to use. Just enter an artist and results are displayed after several seconds.
Tobey send me an email telling me about this days Giveaway of the Day which is Frigate3, a windows file manager that he recommended wholeheartedly. Frigate3 is a commercial program but can be downloaded freely today on the Giveaway of the Day website. The restrictions are that you do not get technical support or updates to upcoming versions.
All digital cameras that I know are using a cryptic naming convention for images taken with them. When you copy the pictures from the digital camera to your computer you will have a bunch of files on your hard drive like CIMG0001.jpg, CIMG0002.jpg and so on and it's quite hard to find out where and when the image was taken and what is shown on it.
Meemix reminds me a lot of Pandora. It's a music recommendation service that finds related artists and tracks from information that you enter. Once the first artist was found that you have entered additional artists and tracks are played once the song finishes or you click the next track button.
If you ever copied hundreds or even thousands of files from one folder to the other with both folders containing files of the same name you might have realized that there is a button missing when transferring those files. Windows asks the user what he would like to do when a duplicate file is found in the folder where he is copying the files into.
RSS Feeds are probably the best option if you want to receive information about website updates. They arrive immediately after the webmaster has published the article on the website. There are two ways to process and view those RSS feeds. The first is to use one of the many online services that display news feeds that you add to your profile. I do use Netvibes but there is also Google Reader for that task and hundreds more.
Windows XP and Windows Vista save username and password information for network resources and services like Windows Live on the hard drive of the operating system. If you want to check if and which usernames and passwords are stored with the option to remove some or all of them you can do the following.
The question on how to keep an icon from a previous application came up in my article about Imagine, a nice fast image viewer and a reader suggested the Nirsoft software Icons Extract to grab the icon from the old program and put it in a place where you can use it for the new application as well.
When you right-click a CD, DVD or removable drive and select Properties from the menu you find a Autoplay tab there that displays applications for certain media that are put into the drive. An action like playing or opening can be selected or that the user will be prompted every time a media of that type is inserted.
I sometimes send and receive money with PayPal because it is very convenient to do that. I do have hard times figuring out the fees that I have to pay when sending someone money using PayPal because the fees depend on the amount of money that you transfer monthly. This is not a problem if the seller pays the PayPal fees but some sellers do not and then I have to calculate what I have to add to the sum that the seller is receiving.
Just when I thought I tried them all I find another promising image viewer called Imagine deeply hidden on the Internet. Imagine is a fast image viewer, it opens and displays images faster than any image viewer that I have tested so far, at least that's my personal opinion on the matter.
I like to convert my DVDs into avi format and put them on my XBOX hard drive or notebook hard drive to store them in a space saving manner. This means as well that I do not have to carry DVDs with me when on the road with my notebook. For that I was searching for a easy and fast method to convert a DVD movie into an avi file using xvid or divx as the codec.
If you thought that the HD war was over with the switch of Warner Studios from supporting both HD formats to just Blu-Ray then you might want to observe the market a little bit longer. The effect that Warner has left the HD DVD supporters will not be visible to consumers later this year when the contract expires (May 2008). From then on Warner will only release movies on DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.
I remember that several tweaking programs that emerged after the release of Windows XP changed the EnablePrefetcher in the Registry which supposedly should speed up application load time. I also read about that tip in many forums and just recently in a computer magazine that published the tip to change the EnablePrefetcher value to 4-6 to speed up the system.
I'm currently still using my old Microsoft Xbox as my media center and it's working fine so far but I do have thoughts about the future. The Xbox will not last forever and the new Xbox 360 cannot be modified to do the same yet. One alternative that I investigated was building a computer for this purpose and I'm almost sure that I would use the Geexbox Linux distribution as the operating system.
Not enough server storage is available to process this command is a message that you can receive when you try to access a shared resource on a network. The Event ID: 2011 may also be written referring to the configuration parameter IRPStackSize. If the IRPStackSize is not present in the Registry the default value which may not be large enough for the server service to administer shared folders on some of the physical drives.
When I first reviewed Miro it was still known as the Democracy Player; a lot has changed since then and I decided to take a second look at Miro. The first question that I was asking myself was how I could classify Miro. Is it a video player, a videocast player, a way to play videos from video portals ? It's actually all of this although I would not use it for everything that I have just mentioned.
Not only are there hundreds of standard and common extensions we've already learned to recognize by heart by seeing them every day, there are also many specific and rare extensions we come across from time to time because as a matter of fact, every programmer can create extensions for his purposes. So how do we handle that?
Giveaways, more giveaways and even more giveaways. Seems we can expect more free software giveaways this year. It's Avira again with a promotion to test the AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for six months with no obligations whatsoever. All you have to do is fill out a small form and they will send you a working serial number that is valid for the next six months.
Would you use a program that would reduce the memory usage of Firefox to 100-200 Kilobyte ? I have no idea how the Firefox Ultimate Optimizer is reducing the memory usage to this amount but the task manager is verifying the reduction. Firefox has been using roughly 40 Megabytes of RAM whenever I started it and one homepage was loaded.
The album Ever Changing Times by Steve Lukather got a 2.2 out of 10 over at Komodo Rock which is one of the lowest scores ever. The reason why the album got that bad rating ? No, it's not the music, the lyrics, the artwork. It's a new form of protection to avoid leaks of the album to the Internet.
In the article entitled Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES Brian Lam describes how they used a device called TV-B-Gone to turn off television screens at this years CES. They even created a video that is available at their website showing what they did. They did turn off televisions during at least one press conference and numerous presentations and did publish the video on their website.
I guess ourTunes is a very popular application in Universities and IT departments. It basically lets you download songs from other peoples iTunes if they are in the same network and share their itunes library. I'm not in a network and don't use iTunes at all so I can't test how effective this method is compared to using ftp, network browsing or local copies but I guess some will like it because it is easy to use.
