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
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.
Richard from Windows Observer send me a download link for Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that extends the functionality tremendously. I'm not using Microsoft Outlook anymore since I started using Thunderbird and quit my day job where they forced me to use it. I still think that this an interesting plugin that should be mentioned here at Ghacks.
I'm looking for a software that offers an easy way to write down notes on my desktop. I do not need a fancy tool with lots of options, just something basic that is available immediately. I used to write down notes in text documents but my desktop soon got cluttered with lots of text documents containing notes and it was obviously not the perfect method.
If you want to find out which programs have established an Internet connection on your system you can use the software Procx for that. Procx is a process and module manager much […]
Trend Micro have published another excellent article on their malware blog entitled A Tangled Web ... of Malware. It describes how hackers use popular media websites to spread malware and how their […]
Security Expert Bruce Schneier wrote a commentary on Wired yesterday where he admitted that he was using an Open Wi-Fi and that he could not see what was wrong with doing so. He refused to accept security reasons because he said that the computer had to be secured as well and that an Open Wi-Fi would essentially be the same as using Wi-Fi on airports or Internet cafes.
I would like to write about a subject that I have been investigating lately. I'm talking about links in general and how they should look like and how they should not look like. This is solely from a webmasters point of view so forgive me that I'm not taking the users into account here. Links play a important role in search engine rankings, they are probably the most deciding factor when it comes to search engine rankings.
SAM ? What's that again ? SAM is the Security Account Manager and part of the Windows Registry. Unfortunately though it is not possible to access that part of the Registry directly even if you are logged in as an administrator. It is however possible to analyze the file sam.bak which can be found in the directory system32/config/ of your Windows installation.
Did you know that it is possible to upload pictures from your Nokia N series phone to your Flickr account ? A lot of Nokia N series mobile phones are supported and many have the Flickr application build in. Among the supported phones are the N73 editions, the N80, N93 and the N95.
If you have the intention to get a Flickr Pro account you might find the following deal interesting that gives you three extra months for no additional charge. A one year Flickr pro account costs $24.95 and gives you unlimited storage, uploads, bandwidth, sets, ad free browsing and permanent archiving of high quality images.
Companies release new DVD writers all the time that have new functions and work better with certain type of media. They neglect DVD writers that they have produced before and it is quite common that those DVD writers will have problems with certain blank DVDs that have been newly produced.
It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.
A new version of Revo Uninstaller was released this week and I decided to install it again to check on the progress of the application. Revo Uninstaller is a program uninstaller that has several interesting features that I mentioned only briefly in my last article which was published a while ago. It's main task is a replacement for the Windows uninstaller which is slow and careless when it comes to uninstalling applications.
You might have heard that Mozilla launched a new viral campaign in a fight against boredom and Internet Explorer of course. They did produce a music video, several websites and it seems to be gaining momentum rapidly.
Microsoft is releasing collected security patches each month for their Windows operating systems. I'm not a fan of this approach because I would feel safer and securer if they would release patches as soon as they would be ready to be released which would secure computers and reduce the time that someone could exploit these security vulnerabilities.
Fancast is a service by the cable provider Comcast who streams dozens of popular tv shows from Battlestar Galactica to The Office and The Unit free on their website. The service is available to viewers with a US IP only which means that everyone else will not be able to view the tv shows unless they hide their IP with a service like Hotspot Shield.
Windows has no option to change the large desktop icons to small ones like the option that is available for folder icons. I was searching for a software called SetShellView which a friend recommended and I found out that this software was only working in Windows 2000. It allowed the user to change the large desktop icons to small icons and even to list views.
Finally we are seeing the long awaited progress in the Solid State Drives market. Ridata was the first company to announce three new 2.5" SATA Solid State Drives in 32-, 64-, and 128GB capacities that have read speeds of up to 170 MB / per second and write speeds of up to 105 MB / per second.
I think we can all agree on the fact that multi-monitor support in Windows is not what it could be and that Microsoft does not seem to put lots of efforts into changing this status any time soon. We have to rely on third party tools to add the functions and features that we demand from a multi-monitor environment and Multi-monitor taskbar is one of those applications.
If you do not want to download music from Bittorrent you now have an alternative that might suite you better. You can use the Bitlet Bittorrent Applet to stream the music contained in the torrent to your computer. The applet phrase hints that Java - not Javascript - is required to stream the music from torrent files to your computer.
Notepad is fast and that is probably the only good thing that I can say about the software that ships with Windows. It has a file size limitation and a lot of other limitations as well. Many users prefer to use so called Notepad replacements that do not have the limitations and I would like to introduce one that is called Akelpad.
Microsoft has released a Knowledgebase article that explains how users can disable UAC, that is the User Account Control, for selected applications in Windows Vista. This solution requires an administrator account and the Application Compatibility Toolkit which can be downloaded from Microsoft directly.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one who is experiencing display problems on the Netvibes website using the latest Firefox browser. What's happening is that whenever I hover my mouse over an entry the appearing options like edit and collapse look totally misplaced. It's hard to describe and I did create a screenshot so that you can take a look at it by yourself.
Adblock Plus is probably one of the most popular Firefox extensions of all time. It blocks almost any advertisement on the Internet and is highly effective. Users can add filters to Adblock Plus that whitelist those websites which means that ads on those websites will be shown. This is excellent for webmasters who want to make sure that their websites are displaying the correct ads and visitors who want to give something back to a website that they really like.
Wikia Search is the new project by Jimmy Wales who created Wikipedia. Instead of using an algorithmic approach it combines that approach with user feedback to provide everyone with better search results. The theory sounds nice, let users week out the spam and fake websites like Made for Adsense sites and websites with no content.
Schools, libraries and even colleges like to restrict access to their public computers and some do not even have a link to an Internet browser although they might be connected to the net normally. This is done to get rid of those users who occupy a computer to chat on the Internet while its main purpose is to do something else, e.g. research books.
Did you recently purchase a DVD in store ? If so you must have noticed this wonderful reminder at the beginning that can't be skipped that downloading pirated films is stealing and a crime. I recently bought 24 season 4 on DVD which comes on seven DVDs and contains all the 24 episodes of this season.
The problem that Thunderbird is always selecting the next message in line after deleting or moving the previous one has bothered me for some time. It happened more than once that a spam mail was selected and read that way which I did not want to happen obviously.
Firefox Mastery published a nice article about the Firefox add-on Controle de Scripts which lets the user control Javascript events in Firefox. Instead of just disabling Javascript (default Firefox without add-ons), or enabling it on a per-site basis (NoScript) you can configure and control specific Javascripts events.
I theoretically mentioned the fact that it was possible, and in fact quite easy, to install Wikipedia locally which has several advantages but also one disadvantage. Advantages should be clear; You do not need a net connection to access the Wikipedia contents, you can distribute the solution to as many computers as you want and you can make it available in a local area network.
Richard from Windows Observer was so nice to send me an invitation to the mobile photo blogging community Snapfoo which is currently in beta and invite only. With Snapfoo you can easily send pictures taken with your mobile phone to your Snapfoo profile and integrate it with other web 2.0 sites such as Myspace, Facebook or Twitter as well.
I have been using Digg, the social news portal where users vote on stories submitted by users, for more than two years and I loved it at the beginning. Nowadays when I visit the Technology section of Digg I see what I already read in my feed reader. There is Lifehacker, Mashable, Gizmodo, Torrentfreak and Arstechnica on the frontpage who seem to make the frontpage no matter what they write.
Kurt mentioned in Daniel's PayPal phishing article how he dealt with phishing and that got me thinking about the easiest way to defeat phishing for certain accounts. The answer is virtual mail accounts. I always thought about virtual mail accounts as a way to stop spam and find out which website or service sells your email but it can also be used to defeat phishing.
You might have come upon the term Spicebird if you are following tech blogs or are a regular Digg and Del.icio.us user. Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration, it features an integrated email client, calendar and instant messenger in the first stage but will have additional features that are planned for Spicebird 1.0.
I never understood why there were not more online applications that helped you type faster. Keybr is such an online application that helps you become more productive by training you to type faster. It offers three modes, called lessons in the application, that builds words using a certain amount of keys.
WPanorama is a standalone program and screensaver that is able to display (scrolling) panoramas on your computer screen. The images scroll either horizontally or display several images if orientated vertically. Using the software is not complicated at all. Just download and install it and run it afterwards.
It's only a few more months until I will make the final decision about the PC components that I will place in my new computer. I think I will finalize everything in the second quarter of 2008. But before I do that I list once again the components that I want to use in the new PC and hope to receive feedback if you think anything is missing or misplaced.
I was recently looking for a way to put Wikipedia on my notebook to be able to access it when I have no Internet connection. A research on Wikipedia revealed that there was an up to date German DVD version but no English version which I think is somewhat strange considering that the English section of Wikipedia has more users than the German section.
I could not sleep well yesterday evening because I was thinking about the Music Industry which was directly related to the article I wrote on that day. I was to tired to pen it down but I would like to try and recap my thoughts. We all know that album sales are down and that it will most likely stay that way. I thought about the reasons for this and came up with the following.
