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
My article yesterday explained how to patch the file uxtheme.dll in Windows to be able to add custom themes to Windows. Today I'm going to introduce popular TV Themes for Windows XP that you can use if you have patched the file. You will see some wonderful creative themes centering around a tv show or character, wonderful if you are a fan and would like to use a theme that brings you closer to the show or the character.
I bought a Toshiba notebook back last year that had Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium installed. Unfortunately though I only received a recovery CD and not a retail Windows Vista DVD. You might wonder why this matters; let me tell you. The original retail Windows Vista DVD comes with recovery tools that can be used in various situations to analyze and fix a broken system.
The latest trends in the United States of America seem to be to create TV Channel portals offering streams of tv shows for authorized users. The other trend seems to be to push pay per bandwidth Internet which does not really match that well if you ask me. So, this time it's HBO with the announcement that a service called HBO on Broadband will go live tomorrow for subscribers living in the Wisconsin area with plans to expand the services later this year.
Autopatcher was the perfect solution to update your Windows operating system while it lasted. You could download all patches to your local computer and execute them there. This made it possible to download patches once and update several computers locally without download the patches several times from Microsoft servers.
The file uxtheme.dll is a digitally signed file that validates themes during boot and theme installation. It is restricted and usually means that you can only install a handful of Microsoft certified themes. If you want to add and use custom themes in Windows XP or Windows Vista you have to update the file uxtheme.dll. Once the file is patched you can install and use custom themes.
It seems that a script is currently sold that powers websites like Seekmp3, MP3zy and others. Those websites are mp3 search engines that all use the same Seeqpod database to provide users with mp3 findings. The question however is why someone would want to use a copycat website instead of the original one especially if the original one offers way more options and functions ?
It is possible to create ringtones from any song you like with free tools. Yes, that's right, you don't have to pay a dime for software, the music or the ringtone. All you need is some time and patience. You do need several utilities to create the ringtones: Audacity, the Lame Encoder if you do not have it installed already, FLV Extract, a browser and a video downloader. I suggest using Firefox and the excellent Download Helper extension. Install everything, look at the Download Helper article that I wrote a few weeks ago if you have troubles installing the Firefox add-on.
Turkey has once again banned access to the video portal Youtube. Access to the website Youtube was blocked in Turkey after a court oder on Thursday. Turkish users seem to receive a message explaining the ban of Youtube. The reason for the third ban are once again videos that make fun of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey.
I have never seen that many shutdown options in my life. That was my first thought when I saw a screenshot of Dshutdown, a software created by the Italian programmer Dimio. It offers normal shutdown options like shutting down at a specific time or when a program is closed. These are normal shutdown options that many programs offer but here are some that you might have never heard of before.
I received an email after publishing the article about YPOPS that made it possible with all email clients to retrieve and send Yahoo Mail emails. If you are a Thunderbird user you might find the Webmail extension for Thunderbird a better choice. It adds support for more than just one webmailer. You get support for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Lycos, Mail.com, Aol and Libero. By default the webmail extension and at least one additional component has to be installed to add webmailer support.
The free Yahoo Mail service is not offering Pop3 access to your mails. Pop3 access means that you can use a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird to access your Yahoo Mail account instead of having to use the Yahoo website. Only Yahoo Mail Plus, which costs $19.99 a year is offering Pop3 access. There are however other ways and I'm going to show you how you can access your Yahoo Mail account with desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird without having to upgrade or pay for a software.
I'd like to point out three websites offering varied stuff to the professional as well as amateur web-designer and summarize their purpose and properties.
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.
